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 signifi cant 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 neovitalist 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 infl uence 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,