7

Geography, Biology, and Politics

To what extent are those forms of contemporary thinking that adopt a holistic or ecological conception of the relation between human being and the environing world associated, even if only implicitly, with a conservative and reactionary politics? That there is such an association is often claimed in relation to a number of thinkers, but most notably perhaps in relation to Heidegger.¹ Sometimes the claim is extended to encompass broader movements in contemporary thought, with environmental thinking being the most common, but by no means the only target here.² Seldom, however, is much consideration given to the way such a claim relates, in any detailed way, to twentieth-century intellectual history in general, nor, indeed, is much account taken of the possible differences that might obtain between different forms of holistic or ecological thinking as such. Moreover, the same holds even more strongly for those particular forms of holistic or ecological thinking that give a special role to notions of place or topos. Although such place-oriented approaches have a special prominence in contemporary thinking across a number of disciplines, including both geography and history, there is a tendency to argue (sometimes simply to assume) that such approaches do indeed bring problematic political associations along with, and yet also to neglect any real consideration of the details of those approaches.

I want to pursue these issues here by considering the way they emerge in connection to Heidegger, especially as he may be positioned in relation to the geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Paul Vidal de la Blache, as well as the ethologist Jakob von Uexküll. The contrast between Heidegger and von Uexküll is particularly important, as I argue that although they both adopt a holistic or ecological conception of the relation between human being and the world (in von Uexküll’s case, this is part of a broader account of the relation between the animal and environment), the place-oriented character of the Heideggerian approach, which also unites Heidegger with Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache, marks a crucial point of difference with the subjectivist and biologically oriented approach evident in von Uexküll. As it turns out, this difference is itself crucial to the political issues that might also be thought to be at stake. Moreover, getting clear on these differences is important not only for our understanding of Heidegger or the other thinkers at issue here, or for our understanding of certain aspects of intellectual history, but also for our understanding of a set of place-oriented ideas that have become important and influential in much contemporary thinking concerning the world and our relation to it—whether that be in philosophy, environmentalism, geography, or history.

From the Historical to the Geographical

Heidegger is often thought of as a philosopher—perhaps the philosopher—of temporality and historicality. His best-known and most influential work is, after all, Being and Time, in which temporality plays a central role, and in which human being is understood as fundamentally determined by its temporal and historical character. Yet, although it is undoubtedly true that Being and Time prioritizes time and history, the way it does so is also quite problematic, and is undoubtedly one of the factors that underlies Heidegger’s failure to complete the work as originally projected.³ A large part of the difficulty here is that Being and Time is essentially a work that operates within a topological framework that cannot adequately be articulated with respect to temporality alone (although that is precisely what Heidegger attempts). Both the temporal and the spatial have to be theorized together, and in a way that does not reduce one to the other. One somewhat provocative way to put this is to say that such a topology must do justice to the “geographical” alongside the “historical,” since it must be attentive to the way in which human being is always spatially situated on the earth (geo-), and not merely temporally located in relation to a past and a future. Indeed, if we look to Heidegger’s later thinking, the idea of the Fourfold that appears there—and that incorporates Mortals, Gods, Sky, and Earth—appears, almost explicitly, to give recognition to this sense of the geographical, alongside the historical, within a single account of the place, the topos, of being.⁴

Additionally to its focus on topos as such, the place-oriented mode of thinking that is to be found in Heidegger (and which is present in problematic form in Being and Time) is characterized by a particular mode of analysis—one that looks to a single integrated conception of the phenomenon at issue as it stands in relation to the larger context in which that phenomenon appears.⁵ This aspect of the approach, which reflects the character of topos itself, is clearly evident, in Being and Time, in Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of human being, Dasein, as being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein)—human being is thereby understood in terms of its prior and necessary relatedness to the world within which it appears⁶—and it is also evident, in his later thinking, in the idea of the Fourfold as that within which not only human being, but any being, can come to appearance. The integrative aspect of Heidegger’s topological approach can be seen to be mirrored in holistic and relational analyses of human being, as these arise in twentieth-century thought in particular, that look to understand the human in close interconnection with its worldly surroundings, and to understand the world itself in similarly interconnected fashion. Such analyses often give particular emphasis to the interconnection of spatial and temporal elements, in terms of the interconnection of condition with process, of the environmental with the developmental, of the geographic with the historical.

The rise of this sort of integrative spatiotemporal analysis, one that seems inevitably to draw upon and to move towards place or topos as a key concept (even if this is not always acknowledged or made explicit), is especially evident within twentieth-century historiography. Although Marxism and Weberian sociology have both played important roles in shaping historical thinking over the last hundred years or more, that period has also seen the rise in what might be termed a more geographically inflected mode of historiography that has explicitly thematized the interconnection between climatic, geological, and topographical factors and human action, society, and culture—between, in the words of Lucien Febvre, “the earth and history”⁷—and that also thinks these issues in an explicitly relational, holistic, or “ecological” fashion. The engagement of the historical with the geographical, as well as with philosophical ideas derived from Heidegger (and originating with Husserl), has also been evident in the rise of a form of “humanistic geography” that is itself attentive to the interplay between the human and the environmental.⁸ Significantly, the thinkers who have been foundational in the rise of such “humanistic geography,” most notably Paul Vidal de la Blache, also played a key role in the rise of geographically oriented history. Thus, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the founders of the influential Annales school of French historiography, were both heavily influenced by Vidal de la Blache, as well as by Friedrich Ratzel, himself an influence on Vidal.

The impulse toward a focus on something like place or topos, and so also toward more integrated or “holistic” modes of understanding, can be seen not only in geography or in geographically inflected historiography, but also, particularly in early twentieth-century Germany, in the psychological and biological sciences.⁹ In biology, the most significant exponent of such a holistic approach was Jakob von Uexküll, the founder of modern ecology and ethology. Heidegger himself compared his own position with that of von Uexküll in an important series of lectures from 1929, published in English as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. In those lectures Heidegger is specifically concerned with rethinking the problem of world and the relation of human being to it, and it is in just that context that he takes up the work of von Uexküll, but also draws on the work of other holistically inclined thinkers of the time such as the experimental embryologist Wilhelm Roux, the Czech biologist Emmanuel Radl, and the neo-vitalist biologist Hans Driesch.

A Problem of Politics

At this point, however, a problem arises—a problem that concerns the implication of the general approach that is at issue here, no matter where it appears, whether in philosophy, geography or biology, with the sort of reactionary politics that, in twentieth-century Germany, is paradigmatically exemplified by Nazism. It is, moreover, a problem that comes to a particular focus around Heidegger and von Uexküll.

In his essay, The Open, Giorgio Agamben discusses von Uexküll’s work, in particular, with specific reference to Heidegger, but, significantly, he also connects that work, both that of von Uexküll and Heidegger, with the work of the geographers Paul Vidal de la Blanche and Friedrich Ratzel. Agamben writes:

The studies by the founder of ecology follow a few years after those by Paul Vidal de la Blanche on the relationship between populations and their environment (the Tableau de la géographie de la France is from 1903), and those of Friedrich Ratzel on the Lebensraum, the “vital space” of peoples (the Politische Geographie is from 1897), which would profoundly revolutionize human geography of the twentieth century. And it is not impossible that the central thesis of Sein und Zeit on being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) as the fundamental human structure can be read in some ways as a response to this problematic field, which at the beginning of the century essentially modified the traditional relationship between the living being and its environment-world. As is well-known, Ratzel’s theses, according to which all peoples are intimately linked to their vital space as their essential dimension, had a notable influence on Nazi geopolitics. This proximity is marked in a curious episode in Uexküll’s intellectual biography. In 1928, five years before the advent of Nazism, this very sober scientist writes a preface to Houston Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts [Foundations of the Nineteenth Century], today considered one of the precursors of Nazism.¹⁰

Agamben refrains from making it explicit, but the clear implication of his comments is that the shared commitment to a holistic or ecological conception that is such a key element in place-oriented thinking is also associated with a shared political tendency. This tendency is taken to be explicit in the case of Ratzel and von Uexküll, and also Heidegger (although Agamben does not draw attention to it), through the way their ideas are themselves implicated with Nazism.

There can be little doubt that Agamben intends such an implication, but whether and to what extent the implication can be restricted to just the thinkers Agamben mentions is not so clear. If the mode of thinking that is to be found in von Uexküll, Heidegger, Ratzel, and Vidal de la Blache is indeed politically problematic in a way that is connected with its holistic or ecological, and so also its place-oriented, commitments, then surely this should also hold for the broader intellectual trends and movements of which their thought is a part. In that case, the geographical tradition that derives from Ratzel and Vidal, as well as the developments in historiography that are influenced by them, and the line of philosophical thinking that comes through Heidegger (though it can be seen as beginning in Husserl) would have to be viewed as having the same potentially problematic political tendencies.

Agamben is not alone, of course, in drawing these sorts of connections between Heidegger’s philosophy and the ideology of Nazism. Heidegger’s preoccupation with ideas of rootedness and belonging, his apparent preference for the world of peasant and farmer, and his frequent appeal to notions of origin and home have all been seen as tied to a conservative and even reactionary politics of a sort evident not only in Heidegger’s personal entanglement with Nazism in the 1930s, but also in his admission late in his life, in the interview with Der Spiegel magazine in the 1960s, of his lack of faith in democratic politics (although exactly how this admission should be interpreted is by no means obvious). With such ideas clearly in the background, the historian Troy Paddock draws connections that are similar to those to be found in Agamben, but that focus directly on Heidegger in connection with Ratzel, and specifically on the place-oriented aspects of their thinking. Arguing that Heidegger distinguished between two concepts of space, the mathematical or geometric and the “geographic,” Paddock claims that, taken in this latter sense, Heidegger

does not consider space as an abstract entity but as part of a larger environment. Borders help give space a specific location, and consequently a specific function, creating a space that is grounded in the specific building, bridge, or jug. . . . Heidegger’s conception of space bears striking parallels to views expressed in the late nineteenth century by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who suggested that there was a connection between the physical space that a people inhabited and their culture.¹¹

Although Paddock seems to equivocate on the connection between such views and fascism,¹² he nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s adoption of such a view of space reveals “a continued ideological affinity with basic tenets of Nazi ideology.”¹³ Moreover, Paddock makes quite clear that part of his interest in Heidegger’s “geographic” conception of space derives from the way in which Heidegger’s thinking has been taken up outside of philosophy, especially within contemporary environmentalism.

The clear implication here is that such “geographic” or place-oriented thinking has dangerous affinities with key elements of Nazi ideology, and should, therefore, be treated with extreme caution, if not shunned altogether. Once again, as was also the case with Agamben, it is hard to see how this argument could be restricted to Heidegger and Ratzel—or to contemporary environmentalism—alone. If Heidegger’s geographic conception of space is deemed politically problematic, then so too must the “geographic” conception of space that surely also appears in the geographically inflected historiography of such as Bloch, Febvre, or, indeed, in the work of their immediate successors such as Fernand Braudel, as well as of the many historians, geographers, and social theorists who have been influenced by the tradition stemming from Ratzel as well as Vidal de la Blache (a tradition, it should be said, that might well be said to include thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault¹⁴).

The question to be addressed here is whether and to what extent Agamben and Padock are correct in seeing Heidegger, von Uexküll, Ratzel, and Vidal de la Blache as sharing a similar mode of thinking that leads them into proximity with Nazism. I shall argue that the arguments advanced by Agamben and Paddock (arguments that reflect assumptions and ideas that are quite prevalent if not always clearly articulated in the wider literature) considerably oversimplify the matter at issue, while also omitting important and relevant facts, and that, more to the point, there are differences between the positions that Heidegger, Ratzel, and Vidal de la Blache hold on the one hand, and von Uexküll holds on the other, that are crucial to the political affiliations to which each may be thought to be prone.

Whereas Heidegger can be seen as sharing with Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache a similar place-oriented or “geographical” conception of the relation between human being and the world that is inconsistent with key elements in Nazi ideology, this is not so for von Uexküll. A large part of what connects von Uexküll with Nazism, or at least with certain elements in the thinking to which Nazism as a movement was committed, is actually a form of subjectivism that gives priority to the racially determined “mind” or “soul” over the environment or world in which it is located. In contrast, Heidegger, Ratzel, and Vidal de la Blache, in accord with the topological character of their approach, view human being as standing in a relation of necessary interdependence and interconnection with the environing world, and as articulated in terms of the complex interplay of both environment and action as that occurs in and through place.

Heidegger and von Uexküll

Leaving aside, at least for the moment, some of the broader issues that are at stake here, it is worth recalling that in the case of Heidegger himself the simple fact of his connection with Nazi politics is straightforward and indisputable—Heidegger was a paid-up member of the Nazi Party from 1933 onward, and was appointed by the Nazis as Rector of Freiburg University in that same year, resigning one year later. What remains open to dispute is exactly how that connection should be interpreted, what significance should be given to it, and, more particularly, how deeply it can be connected with Heidegger’s philosophical thought.¹⁵ In the early 1930s, Heidegger certainly seemed prepared to use ideas and images of autochthony and rootedness that appeared to bring his thought into close alignment with Nazi ideology and rhetoric.¹⁶ Yet in terms of the specific claims advanced by such as Paddock, it is notable that although a “geographic” conception of space is indeed present in Heidegger’s work up to and including the early 1930s (though usually expressed in terms of notions like that of “rootedness”), it is actually in the works after his resignation from the Rectorate in 1934, and so at a time after his attempt to establish himself as the intellectual leader of a National Socialist Germany had clearly failed, that such a conception, as developed explicitly in terms of place, seems to become much more important.¹⁷

There is undoubtedly a clear shift in Heidegger’s thinking that first occurs in the 1930s, and intensifies around the late 1940s, toward an explicit concern with place and related concepts—concepts that include those of “dwelling” (already present in Being and Time), the “Fourfold” and the Event, das Ereignis (itself a concept that connects with the idea of topos¹⁸)—and this shift toward the “geographic” or “topological” is itself closely tied to the so-called Turning in Heidegger’s thought¹⁹). There is good reason to suppose that this change in thinking is itself connected to Heidegger’s own failed engagement with Nazism, not in the sense that it derives from Nazi ideology, but that it is instead formed in reaction to it.²⁰ Significantly, it is in his engagement with Hölderlin in 1934–1935, immediately after his resignation of the Rectorate, that ideas of place and dwelling that lie at the heart of the “geographic” conception of space that concerns Paddock begin to emerge more explicitly (though still in a relatively undeveloped form) as a focus for Heidegger’s thinking. Thus, one finds, at the same time as Heidegger’s thought orients itself more toward more clearly “place-oriented” or “geographic” conceptions, a shift away from, and sometimes direct criticism of, key elements of associated with Nazi ideology. One might argue, of course, that this shift is simply a result of the failure in Heidegger’s own political ambitions, and so treat it as a kind of “sour grapes” response; while there may be some truth in this from a biographical perspective, it should not be allowed to obscure the philosophical issues that are nevertheless also involved. Indeed, as I have already indicated above, and as we shall see in more detail below, there is a deep tension between “geographic” modes of thinking and the type of thinking that is characteristic of Nazi ideology, and this tension becomes apparent not only in Heidegger’s thinking, but also in relation to the work of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache.

Just as a closer examination of Heidegger’s own involvement with Nazism complicates the attempt to discern a simple line of connection between Heidegger’s fascist politics and his thinking of space and place, so too a closer examination of the intellectual history that implicates Heidegger, along with figures such as Ratzel, Vidal de la Blache, and von Uexküll, leads to a more complex picture than that which Agamben or even Paddock suggests. Agamben takes Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world” to be a close correlate to von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt—literally the environing world—according to which the organism is understood as always enclosed with, almost as a part of, its environment. To what extent Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world” is actually indebted to or influenced by von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt seems debatable—there does not appear to be any evidence that would demonstrate a direct influence from one to the other as opposed to some convergence of what were otherwise independent lines of thought. Heidegger was certainly familiar with von Uexküll’s work at the time he wrote his 1929 lectures, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and, as Harrington points out, von Uexküll himself drew attention to apparent similarities between his thought and that of Heidegger in a 1937 paper.²¹ Yet even though the exact nature and extent of any influence of von Uexküll on Heidegger may be uncertain,²² there can be no doubt of the connection between von Uexküll and Chamberlain. Indeed, what Agamben omits to tell us, somewhat surprisingly, is that not only did von Uexküll write a preface to Chamberlain’s book, but he was himself a close and long-time friend of Chamberlain, holding similar anti-Semitic and racist views (views that were not usually apparent, however, in von Uexküll’s academic writing).²³

Heidegger directly cites von Uexküll’s work in 1929, but he does so, as I noted earlier, along with a number of other prominent biologists and zoologists with similar holistic commitments. Significantly, the discussion of these thinkers is part of Heidegger’s own attempt, following Being and Time, to rethink the idea of world, and the relation between the world and human being, that is so central to Heidegger’s magnum opus (Heidegger claimed, in fact, that his discovery, or rediscovery, of the problem of world was one of the unique achievements of his thinking in the 1920s²⁴), and can thus be seen as already on the way toward the more radical reorientation of Heidegger’s thought that would occur in the 1930s. Heidegger’s interest in von Uexküll is in the context of this attempt to reinvestigate the concept of world. Moreover, it arises not so much because of the possibility of a convergence between von Uexküll’s view of the relation between animal and environment and Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world, but rather because von Uexküll’s approach may be thought to provide a scientific counter to Heidegger’s claim, also evident in Being and Time, as to the uniqueness of the human relatedness to world. What von Uexküll’s work may be taken to show is that the animal does indeed have a world, contrary to Heidegger, albeit a different world from the human. While Heidegger is generous in his estimation of the significance of von Uexküll’s work, as of that of the other biologists he discusses (and that generosity may well derive from Heidegger’s own sympathies toward their holistic and antimechanistic approach), he also concludes that there remains “a fundamental question whether we should talk of the world of the animal—of an environing world or even of an inner world—or whether we do not have to determine that which the animal stands in relation to in another way.”²⁵

Although part of a rethinking that began almost immediately following the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger’s discussion of von Uexküll in 1929 nevertheless stands within the essentially Kantian frame that determines much of Heidegger’s thinking from the 1920s, especially as it is worked out in Being and Time, but also as evident in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (published in 1929). One of the problems that leads Heidegger away from that Kantian frame is what he comes to regard as its incipient tendency, in spite of Heidegger’s own efforts to counter that tendency, toward a form of subjectivism or idealism. Thus, in commenting on a passage from the 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger writes that “Here lies concealed the relationship of being to human being. This relationship is inadequately thought even in this presentation—a distressing difficulty that has been clear to me since Being and Time, and has since come under discussion in many presentations.”²⁶ The inadequacy of the presentation seems to lie in the possibility that the relationship at issue might be construed as one in which being is somehow grounded or based in human being—as Heidegger writes elsewhere concerning the way Dasein appears in Being and Time, the presentation “still stands in the shadow of the ‘anthropological,’ the ‘subjectivistic,’ and the ‘individualist,’ etc.”²⁷ In Being and Time, this problem can be seen in the emphasis given to existentiality (the character of Dasein’s being as grounded in its own projection of possibilities) over facticity or thrownness (the already determined actuality of Dasein’s being) in the structure of Dasein, and so also to the priority given to the future over the past within the structure of temporality.²⁸ One might add, of course, that this is also tied to Heidegger’s prioritization of temporality.

Heidegger does not himself formulate any criticism of von Uexküll, in 1929, as standing “in the shadow of the ‘anthropological,’ the ‘subjectivistic,’ and the ‘individualist’” (and at that stage, he was only on the verge of formulating such a criticism of elements of his own work). Von Uexküll is nevertheless clearly situated within exactly the sort of Kantian, or better, neo-Kantian frame that Heidegger came increasingly to view as problematic precisely because of what he saw as its subjectivist and related tendencies. One can certainly view von Uexküll’s concept of the organism in its world as moving toward a more integrated understanding of the relation between organism and environment, but that concept nevertheless stands in clear distinction from the more fully “ecological” conception of the relation between mortals and their world that appears in later Heidegger, and may even be viewed as already standing somewhat apart from early Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world. Indeed, for all that Heidegger comes to regard Being and Time as hampered by certain problematic Kantian or neo-Kantian tendencies, it should be quite clear that part of his intention in thinking of Dasein as being-in-the-world is to avoid any idea of the world either as standing apart from Dasein (as some pregiven realm of “objectivity”) or as being constituted or constructed by Dasein (as a function of a pregiven “subjectivity”). Von Uexküll’s account of the animal in its environment, however, stands in significant contrast here, since it gives priority to the animal as determinative of its world, treating each such world as a self-enclosed domain that is strictly speaking inaccessible from the outside, and so von Uexküll’s account remains, as we have seen, essentially subjectivist or phenomenalist.

Harrington draws explicit attention to the subjectivist character of von Uexküll’s work, citing von Uexküll’s account of his sudden recognition, on seeing a beech tree in the Heidelberg woods, that “this is not a beech tree, but rather my beech tree, something that I, with my sensations, have constructed in all its details. Everything [about the beech] that I see, hear, smell or feel are not qualities that exclusively belong to the beech, but rather are characteristics of my sense organs that I project outside of myself.”²⁹ As we saw previously in chapter 6, the same subjectivism is also clearly evident in von Uexküll’s published work. Moreover, inasmuch as this subjectivism gives priority to the subject as biological organism, so it understands each surrounding world, each Umwelt, as itself a function of the organism’s own biological nature, and so each world is understood to be determined biologically, one might say, rather than geographically.

This determination of the world by the organism is an important idea that undoubtedly fed into von Uexküll’s racism and anti-Semitism: different races form the world in different ways, and the world of the Jew is therefore a different world from the world of the Nordic Aryan, just as the Nordic Aryan landscape is also different from that of the Slav. Indeed, in the 1940s, similar ideas underpinned attempts on the part of Nazi planners to reshape the conquered landscapes of Poland in ways that would accord with German identity and the German soul.³⁰ It is thus not merely the idea of a connection between the organism and its space, between the human being and the world, that is at issue here, but the exact nature of that connection. The emphasis in von Uexküll, and in many racial theorists from the same period,³¹ on the determining role of the organism in its species nature—which, in the case of human beings, also means its racial nature—stands in sharp contrast to those positions that see the organism as determined by its environment, and those positions that see organism and environment as mutually determining or interdependent.

Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache

It has been common to assimilate racialist thinking of the sort exemplified by von Uexküll, with its emphasis on the difference between the racial types associated with different regions or “spaces,” to Ratzelian geographic “determinism.” In fact, Ratzel stands quite apart from writers such as von Uexküll, and other racial theorists in general, simply on the basis of his very different understanding of the nature of the connection at issue here. It is indeed as an environmental or geographic determinist—one who puts the emphasis on the human as determined by the environment or geography—that Ratzel has been most commonly read, if not entirely accurately, within English-speaking circles; and it is notable that Ratzel also placed himself in clear opposition to the racialist doctrines that were common in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he seems to have viewed racial differences as having little relevance to geographical or ethnographic inquiry, writing that “The task of ethnography is . . . to indicate, not in the first instances the distinctions, but the points of transition, and the intimate affinities which exist; for mankind is one though very variously cultured.”³²

Ratzel’s notion of Lebensraum, “living space,” was an expression of his commitment to the idea that the forms of human organization were always bound to their own geographic space, and could not be understood in separation from that space. As Robert Dickinson writes:

Ratzel . . . thought of the anthropogeographic unit as an areal complex whose spatial connections were needed for the functioning and organisation of a particular kind of human group, be it the village, town or state. The concept of lebensraum deals with the relations between human society as a spatial (geographic) organisation and its physical setting. Community area, trade area, milk-shed and labour-shed, historical province, commercial entity, the web of trade between neighbouring industrial areas across state boundaries—these area all subsequent variations of the concept of the “living area.”³³

Ratzel believed that the development of states would imply an increase in the state’s Lebensraum, but he did not take the idea of Lebensraum as providing any justification of territorial expansion as such. It was the later deployment of the term within the geopolitics of Rudolf Kjellen and Karl Haushofer that led to its instrumentalist use within Nazi ideology. Moreover, Ratzel’s opposition to racialist theory can be seen, in fact, as a direct consequence of his emphasis on the role of the environment and on geographic space—something that presented problems for those, like Haushofer, who wished to assimilate his ideas to the ideology of Nazism³⁴—although Ratzel also held, quite independently, it seems, that ethnic mixing itself contributed to the vigor of a society (a view that he may have developed during his early experiences in the “new” societies of Mexico and the United States).

Ratzel’s emphasis on the importance of geographic space in social, cultural, and ethnographic analysis can be seen as an important precursor to the ideas of many more recent writers, including such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,³⁵ concerning the spatialized character of social, economic, and cultural formations. Within French geographic thought, Ratzel was especially influential, and the work of the founder of French “regionalism,” Paul Vidal de la Blache, can be seen to arise out of Ratzel’s geographical approach to human history and ethnography, and as a continuation of the Ratzelian idea of “human geography” or anthropogeography. Like Ratzel, Vidal de la Blache also rejects biological determinism, but whereas Ratzel tends, not always consistently, to emphasize the role of the physical environment in human history and culture, Vidal de la Blache takes a more explicitly interactive approach (although the differences between them on this point are often overstated). The regional geography that he initiated was based on the study of the interplay between the cultural and the environmental, but the place or region was to be defined in ways that attended to cultural factors, rather than to natural features alone.³⁶ The physical environment is seen as opening a range of possibilities for human interaction rather than as determining that interaction—hence Vidal de la Blache’s oft-cited commitment to a geographical “possibilism” rather than “determinism.” Interestingly, Henri Lefebvre was strongly influenced by Vidal de la Blache, and his early work on the Pyrenees can itself be seen as containing important elements of Vidalian geographic practice.³⁷

In both Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache, the emphasis on a conception on geographic space is crucial not only to the theoretical positions they advance, as well as to their significance within the history of geography, but also to the differentiation of their thought from that of von Uexküll and others like him. It also marks, of course, a key point of differentiation from Nazi ideology, and, in this respect, Heidegger must also be positioned alongside Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache. Moreover, it is not just the emphasis on the role of the “geographic” as opposed to the “biologistic” that is at issue here. What characterizes the work of von Uexküll, as well as Nazi racial theorists, is the tendency to understand the nature of the animal or human “world” as based in certain general forms of species-nature, “racial stock,” or racialized “soul.” Such a tendency is already one that diminishes the significance of geographic space or place—it is the general type that is important in such thinking, in contrast to which the thinking that is oriented toward place typically gives emphasis to the regional and the local.

This latter issue turns out to be a crucial point of difference when one looks to the way Nazi ideology is related to the German “Heimat” tradition. The idea of Heimat—a term usually translated as “Homeland” (though the translation does not capture the richness of the original German)—is connected with ideas of one’s place of origin, the place in which one belongs, not only in the sense of the region from which one comes, and in which one may still dwell, but also in the sense of one’s childhood home (it is the same notion that occurs in the discussion of Young in chapter 3) In its academic form, the focus on Heimat and Heimatskunde was part of the same orientation toward an understanding of human life and culture as it stood in relation to space, and so to region and landscape, as is evident in Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache. Thus Ratzel’s Deutschland: Einführung in die Heimatkunde,³⁸ which was a standard text in German schools in the early part of the twentieth century, essentially consisted in a regional ethnography of Germany.

Elements of the Heimat tradition were themselves appropriated by the Nazis, appearing in Nazi propaganda and rhetoric as well as the work of Nazi ideologues—elements of local and regional tradition and culture could be seen as a reflection of the racial stock associated with that locale or region. Yet the emphasis here is not on the local and regional as such, but rather on the local and the regional as they stand in relation to the racial and the national. The totalizing politics of the Nazi state was not about strengthening local or regional associations and culture, but rather about the creation of a political apparatus geared to the satisfaction of a set of universalizing desires and ambitions, and far from being strengthened, the idea of Heimat took on a much diluted and abstract form during the Nazi period.³⁹ It is thus that Nazism, for all its Romantic antimodernist elements, can also be seen as the instantiation of something essentially modern—the attempt to reshape the world with respect to a single ideal image, and at the same time to impose one’s will upon that world, and to make it one’s own.

In this latter respect, what marks out Nazism as a mode of engagement with the world is its desire for domination and control—its desire to subject the world to its own will. It is thus that Heidegger, in his Nietzsche lectures from 1936 to 1940, developed his own critique of Nazism as the contemporary instantiation of what he saw as the Nietzschean “will to power” (a critique that might also be thought to be relevant to tendencies within his own earlier thinking).⁴⁰ Indeed, one might argue that in Nazism one finds a version of the “subjectivism” that is present in von Uexküll now developed into a determinate political form—the geographical becoming itself subject to the racial and the psychological. Moreover, the subjectivist character of such a development is not accidental, nor does it always remain implicit. Within German geopolitical thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, the geographer Otto Maull embraced just such a subjectivism as a direct response to the problem apparently presented by Ratzelian thinking. Discussing the 1941 edition of Maull’s Das Wesen der Geopolitik (The Essence of Geopolitics), Mark Bassin writes:

Maull now categorically rejected geographical determinism as “materialist,: insisting that true Geopolitik was “idealist” in its inspiration and that it identified the rooted Völkisch “spirit” itself as “the cause of all political developments.” . . . The Volk [People] itself now became the “quintessential agent of activity and determination” to which the natural-geographical milieu was correspondingly subordinated and by which it was instrumentalized as nothing more than “a task, a goal and a purpose.” Far from being constrained by the natural conditions in which it exists, a Volk demonstrates its worthiness through its success in an endless struggle to overcome, and, eventually, to conquer them.⁴¹

As it is the Volk—the People as determined by their racial character—who are given priority here, so too are the geographical, the topological and the spatial correspondingly deemphasized. Moreover, in giving priority to the Volk as the active principle in the formation of the world, so too is a form of subjectivism, and as the later Heidegger would argue, of a modernistic nihilism, also enacted.

The “Uncanniness” of Place

It is often claimed that to take human being as standing in an important relation to place or geographic space is already to presuppose a homogeneity of culture and identity in relation to that place, as well as to exclude others from it. This is the core of the argument that is often used to demonstrate the supposed politically dangerous character of place-oriented or “geographic” thinking (an argument that appears, for instance, in Levinas,⁴² but is also assumed, apparently as self-evident, in many other writers). Yet this claim typically depends on already construing such thinking in a way that assumes its problematic political associations rather than exhibiting or proving them (and seldom delves too deeply into the actual historical and philosophical details that might be relevant here). What the work of thinkers such as Heidegger, as well as of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache, and the broader tradition of humanistic geography, brings to prominence is the very question of place or geographic space as such, and, along with it, the question of our own being that is itself necessarily implicated here.

In Heidegger’s work, the questionability of place is already evident, if indirectly, in Being and Time, in terms of the problematic status accorded to spatiality within the structure of being-in-the-world at the same time as ideas and images of space and place constantly emerge as central elements within the overall analysis (in, for instance, the very idea of “being-in,” as well as the notion of the Da, the “There,” of Dasein).⁴³ As I have repeatedly argued here and elsewhere, much of Heidegger’s later thinking can be seen as a sustained attempt to elucidate the nature of place or topos; hence Heidegger’s own characterization of his thinking as a “topology” of being.⁴⁴ In his thinking of place, Heidegger can also be seen as urging a rethinking of space. Thus, in the very late essay “Art and Space” (written in conjunction with the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, whose contribution was in the form of series of lithographs), Heidegger urges an understanding of space, in terms not of the “physical-technological” space of “Galileo and Newton,” but rather of “clearing away” (Räumen)—the sort of “clearing away” that opens up a region for settlement and dwelling.⁴⁵ While space is that which Galileo and Newton theorize, it is also that clearing away and opening up, that “spacing,” that allows for the possibility of appearance, and that occurs always and only in relation to specific places. It is this sense of space, itself closely associated with geographic rather than purely geometric space (to use Paddock’s contrast), that turns out to be so important in the later Heidegger’s meditative thinking on the happening of the Fourfold.

The space and place at issue here is not, however, a space or place already determined by, nor simply determinative of, human being. Instead, it is that within and on the basis of which human being is itself brought to articulate and meaningful appearance. Thus, in the account of the Fourfold in late essays such as “Building Dwelling Thinking,” place is that which is established in and through the gathering together of Earth and Sky, Gods and Mortals in the thing, while it is also that within and on the basis of which the thing itself appears, as it is also that which allows the appearance of the elements of the Fourfold as such—the Sky is that very sky that arches above us, and the Earth that which lies beneath our feet, here, now, in this place, and it is also here, in “this” place, and only here, that the encounter between Mortals, and between Mortals and Gods (whether in their absence or presence) also occurs. Mortals thus play a role in the coming to be of places, although not exclusively so, and places themselves play a role in the appearing of Mortals. On this basis, place might be viewed in terms somewhat reminiscent of Plato’s conception of the chora (a term sometimes equated with space, but also with place) as the very matrix of becoming—although unlike Plato’s chora,⁴⁶ which remains always indeterminate, place itself comes to appearance, and so appears in a singular and determinate form (as just “this” place) in the happening, the Ereignis, of place that is also the happening of the Fourfold.⁴⁷

Although there has sometimes been a tendency within humanistic geography to treat place in ways that assume a certain “subjectivism” in relation to place—place is thus viewed as a function of human experience (a tendency that is sometimes evident in, for instance, Yi-Fu Tuan’s work,⁴⁸ and one might also worry about the emphasis on mentalités within some French historiography)—there is nevertheless a complexity and indeterminacy that has also merged as a key element in the geographical understanding of place as that has developed over the last century or so, particularly in the line that derives from Ratzel and Vidal de la Blache, and that encompasses thinkers such as Tuan, Relph, and others. J. Nicholas Entrikin, for instance, emphasizes the “betweenness of place”⁴⁹ (an emphasis also present in Heidegger), while Doreen Massey, at the same time as she has been critical of a certain rather caricatured version of the Heideggerian position,⁵⁰ has nevertheless also argued for the centrality of a conception of place articulated through notions of process, interconnection, and diversity.⁵¹ Places are thus understood as dynamic structures that allow for the interaction between the human and the environmental, and as themselves determined in and through such interacting, at the same time as they also participate in it. Such a view is far removed from the conception of place as determined by the racial and the biological that is to be found in the work of thinkers such as von Uexküll, and to which, to reinforce the point, Heidegger must be seen as opposed. The rise of place as a central concept in contemporary thinking within cultural and human geography—a rise to which Heidegger has himself contributed—should thus be seen not as a function of the increasing dominance of a reactionary and deterministic conservatism, but quite the opposite—as the opening up of place as the proper site for the questioning of ourselves, our world, and our locatedness within it.

In the Parmenides lectures from the early 1940s, Heidegger says of the Greek topos that it consists essentially “in holding gathered, as the present ‘where,’ the circumference of what is in its nexus, what pertains to it and is ‘of’ it, of the place.” It is thus that he argues that place is always “a manifold of places [that are] reciprocally related by belonging together, which we call a settlement or a district [Ortschaft].” That “place” in which “the essence of Being comes to presence in an eminent sense” is, Heidegger tells us, a δαιμόνιος τόπος (daimonios topos)—an uncanny place (unheimliche Ortschaft).⁵² That place might appear as uncanny or “unhomely” in this way ought to indicate how far Heidegger is from viewing place, and especially the place that belongs to being, as merely some “given” that is already secure and determined. It is thus that Heidegger comments in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” from 1947, that as he has used it, the term “homeland” (Heimat) is to be understood in “an essential sense, not patriotically or nationalistically, but in terms of the history of being.” And he adds that “the essence of the homeland . . . is also mentioned with the intention of thinking the homelessness of contemporary human beings from the essence of being’s history. . . . Homelessness . . . consists in the abandonment of beings by being. Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of being.”⁵³ The “homeland” that is invoked here is not some place of safety and familiarity. It is the same place that Heidegger refers to in the passage from the Parmenides lectures as that “uncanny district” in which “the essence of Being comes to presence.” And why should it be uncanny?—Because the coming to presence of being is not a matter of the coming to be of some being, but is rather the coming to presence of the questionability that belongs to being essentially. In Heidegger, therefore, homecoming names the turning back to the questionability of being, which is also the questionability of our own being. It is this return to questionability that is also at issue in the turn to place, and it is what marks off, in particular, the topology that is explicit in Heidegger’s later thinking (which encompasses a focus on both the “historical” and the “geographical”) from the deterministic subjectivism and biologism of such as von Uexküll.

Conclusion: Place and the Political

It is not the focus on place that turns out to be politically problematic, nor the emphasis on a holistic or relational conception of human being and the world, but rather the tendency to view the human as completely determined by something that is internal to it and prior to its worldly engagement (whether that be in terms of race, “soul,” or some other notion), to treat the environment in which we find ourselves as essentially formed by the character of human subjectivity, and to take the world as itself subject to the dictates of the human.⁵⁴ In contrast, the “geographical” orientation that is a feature of much twentieth-century as well as twenty-first-century thought is one that can be seen to place human being in the world, and to do so in a way that also draws attention to the mutuality of that “being-in,” thereby also opening up a space in which it can be brought into question.

To a large extent, of course, this opening up of a space for the questioning of human being-in-the-world is just what Heidegger’s Being and Time aims to achieve, and yet that work also presents matters in a way that complicates and obscures what is at issue through its ultimate prioritization of the temporal over the spatial, its understanding of human being as primarily determined by its own projection of its possibilities for being (by what Heidegger calls its “existentiality”), and by its failure adequately to articulate a conception of place as distinct from the space associated with the Cartesian ontology of the world as present-at-hand. Indeed, it might even be argued that it is precisely the inadequacy in Heidegger’s thinking of place and the topological in his early work, rather than his concern with place as such, that contributes (though not in any determining or necessitating fashion) to his own entanglement with Nazism in the 1930s. In this respect, just as Heidegger’s work plays a critical role in the elaboration of a place-oriented mode of philosophizing and thinking, so too does it provide a demonstration of the dangers in thinking of being-in-the-world (or of the topos that this can be seen already to mark out) from the perspective of what he refers to as “the ‘anthropological,’ the ‘subjectivistic,’ and the ‘individualist’”—or, we might also say, from the perspective of an analysis that prioritizes the existential or the temporal.

In A Geographical Introduction to History, Lucien Febvre quotes approvingly from Jules Michelet: “Without a geographical basis, the people, the makers of history, seem to be walking on air, as in those Chinese pictures where the ground is wanting. The soil too must not be looked on only as the scene of action. Its influence appears in a hundred ways, such a food, climate, etc. As the nest, so the bird. As the country, so the men.”⁵⁵ Michelet’s comments here could easily be read in a way that would see them as already predisposed to a politically reactionary position of the sort not too far removed from that of Nazism. Yet to do so would be to fail to attend to the full implications of the sort of geographical approach that Febvre takes Michelet to be propounding. Michelet certainly emphasizes the variety of influences that bear on the events of history, but more fundamentally, he gives voice to a conception of the human as inextricable from the complexity of the world, and as fundamentally constituted through the places of human dwelling. Rather than presenting human being as deterministically constrained, such a conception opens up a view of the human as enmeshed in an essentially reciprocal relation with the world in which it is also situated. The human thus cannot be assumed in advance, nor can it be taken to arise out of only one set of structures or elements alone. Indeed, even the movement of history must be understood as arising out of the interplay of activity and environment, of process and context, of temporality and spatiality.

The geographical orientation—the orientation to place—that can be seen to be illustrated by this brief passage from Michelet, and that is also evident in so much twentieth- and twentieth-first-century thinking concerning the relation between human being and the world, is one that forces our attention on the concrete, one might even say the material, circumstances of human being in the world. It forces our attention onto the complexities of that concreteness and its necessary spatialized character. Even historiography, on this account, must be understood as itself properly geographical—as oriented to the temporal only as the temporal is worked out in and through place. Moreover, if Heidegger’s own preoccupation with the temporal can be seen as enabling, in a contingent fashion, his engagement with Nazism, then perhaps one might, although with some caution, view those conceptions of the historical that similarly give undue priority to the temporal (perhaps through notions of destiny or futurity), and neglect the spatial and the geographical, as being prone to similar dangers.

The sort of geographical orientation that is at issue here can thus be seen not only to be well grounded in the analysis, both conceptual and empirical, of the actuality of human being in the world (a claim that seems amply demonstrated by the vast and growing body of research in the area), but also to operate against the sorts of deterministic, subjectivist, and even nihilistic approaches that are so often claimed to be associated with geographical and holistic (or “ecological”) approaches. One might say that such a geographical (or topological) orientation requires us to recognize, and to contend with, the essentially contingent, multiple, and fragile character of human life and being, and, through its emphasis on the interrelatedness of human being with the world, it also requires us to recognize the limitations of human agency in the world. Such a recognition of limitation, and of contingency, multiplicity, and fragility, is surely fundamental to any properly ethical stance. It certainly runs counter to the politics of domination and control that is characteristic of movements such as Nazism.