Volume 10, 2022
Ethics, Politics, and the Idea of Nature
Divya Dwivedi

Pages 43-60
https://doi.org/10.5840/ecoethica202342652
The Hypophysics of Philosophical Nationalism
Derrida, Fichte
Is there a philosophical nationalism? Reading Fichte¡¯s Addresses to the German Nation and its use by the Nazis, Derrida concluded that all nationalisms are philosophical and onto-theological as they are posited beyond race, biology, and nature. However, Fichte¡¯s text reveals a specific form of racism that insists on biology and nature. Fichte¡¯s racism is a species of ¡°hypophysics,¡± a consecration of nature as value. His theory of language is simultaneously biological and spiritual, these two aspects flowing from a single geistige Naturgesetz (spiritual-natural-law) and determining the hypophysical unity of language, community and ¡°philosophy¡± (as he defined it). The logic of such a hypophysics is misrecognized and left unaddressed in the conventional categories of ¡°naturalism¡± and ¡°biologism.¡± Further, hypophysical-logic is not onto-theo-logic (in Heidegger¡¯s definition). This imposes new questions for the history and future of philosophy: how does hypophysics enter philosophy; can there be philosophy without hypophysics and its attendant racisms?