Hans-Georg Gadamer

translated by
John W. Stanley
with an introduction by
Dennis J. Schmidt

HEIDEGGER'S WAYS
H e id e g g e r ’s w ays

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Translated by
John W. Stanley

State University of New York Press

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Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900-

[Heideggers Wege. English]
Heidegger’s ways / Hans-Georg Gadamer ; translated by John W
Stanley ; with an introduction by Dennis J. Schmidt.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental
philosophy)
Translation of: Heideggers Wege.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-1737-9 (HC : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-1738-7 (PB :
alk. paper)
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. I. Title. II. Series.
B3279.H49G24613 1993
193—dc20 93-24934
CIP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface vii
Translator’s Preface ix
Introduction by Dennis J. Schmidt xv
Existentialism and the Philosophy of Existence 1
Martin Heidegger—75 Years 15
The Marburg Theology 29
“What Is Metaphysics?” 45
Kant and the Hermeneutical Turn 49
The Thinker Martin Heidegger 61
The Language of Metaphysics 69
Plato 81
The Truth of the Work of Art 95
Martin Heidegger—85 Years 111
The Way in the Turn 121
The Greeks 139
VI CONTENTS

13. The History of Philosophy 153

14. The Religious Dimension 167
15. Being Spirit God 181
Notes 197
Glossary 203
Index 207
 Preface

I he Heidegger Studies presented here are a collection of

essays, lectures, and speeches written in the course of the last twenty-
five years, the majority of which have already been published. The
fact that these are all relatively recent works should not be taken to
mean that my engagement with Heidegger is recent as well. Rather, I
received impetuses for thinking from Heidegger very early on, and I
attempted from the very beginning to follow such impetuses within
the limits of my capabilities and to the extent that I could concur. It
set a standard that I had to learn to meet. However, as is always the
case when one is attempting to find one's own position, some dis­
tance was needed before I was able to present Heidegger's ways of
thinking as his; I first had to distinguish my own search for my ways
and paths from my companionship with Heidegger and his ways.
This process had its beginning with Heidegger's request that
I write the introduction to the Reclam edition of his ‘Artwork” essay.
Basically, this collection of works is only a continuation of what I
first undertook in 1960 with that introduction. I was actually in my
own element, for I took it as encouragement and confirmation of my
own efforts when Heidegger introduced the work of art into his own
thinking in the 1930s. Thus, my relationship to this short introduc­
tion to the “Artwork” essay of 1960 was not so much that of one
“commissioned” to -write it, rather I recognized in Heidegger's thought
some of the very questions I had voiced in Truth and Method. All of

v ii
v iii H A N S -G E O R G G A D A M E R

my later Heidegger essays are an effort—although one framed by my

own assumptions and capabilities—-to offer a view o f the task for
thinking that confronted Heidegger; they attempt to show that espe­
cially the Heidegger who had made this “turn” [Kehre] after Being
and Time was in truth continuing down the same path when he
encountered questions probing the underpinnings of metaphysics
and attempted to think an unknown future.
All of the works assembled here pursue in essence the same
goal-—to introduce the independent, unconventional thought of
Martin Heidegger, thought that renounced all previously existing
ways of thinking and speaking. Above all, these works are intended
to prevent the reader from the error of supposing that a mythology
or poetizing gnosis is to be found in Heidegger’s renunciation of the
customary. The fact that all of my studies are confined to a single task
entails that each one of them contains an occasional element. Varia­
tions on a single theme are what confront the eyewitness who at­
tempts to give an account of the thought of Martin Heidegger. Thus,
I must accept the consequently unavoidable repetitions as a part of
the terrain.
The first essay introduces the situation into which Heidegger
entered. The following articles form a continuum as regards content.
The memorial address that I gave in Freiburg after Heidegger’s death
serves as the conclusion.

HGG
 Translator’s
Preface

I he approach that I have taken in this translation is in es­

sence a compromise between two conflicting interests. On the one
hand, I had a strong interest in rendering a translation that would
allow as much of the “otherness” of the German text as possible to
shimmer through in the English. Yet, on the other hand, I wanted
the translation to mirror the exceptional eloquence of Gadamer’s
prose. That these two interests conflict and the way that they conflict
may not be readily apparent to one who has not previously worked
with translations and, therefore, may warrant a short explanation.
My interest in languages, especially my interest in the German
language, was transformed into a passion when I first encountered
Being and Tune as an undergraduate in 1982. In an effort to better
understand Heidegger’s thought, I spent an inordinate amount of time
trying to work through what I deemed to be key passages in the Ger­
man text. That experience was exceptionally rewarding, not so much
because I was able to gain an understanding of Being and Time, but
because, in facing the otherness of the German text, I was forced to
begin thinking differently; I had to somehow integrate this otherness
into my own thinking, which meant that I myself had to assume some
of these ways of thinking as my own—a part of me became “other.” It
was always with a sense of loss and some frustration that I returned to

IX
X JO H N W. STA N LEY

the translation of Sein und Zeit because the experience of this otherness
was necessarily greatly diluted. The frustration is that which brought
about the transformation of my interest into a passion for language; I
vowed then to try to bring as much of the otherness over into a transla­
tion if I ever had the chance to do one.
I interpret Gadamer’s cautious enthusiasm for Heidegger's
interpretation of the Greeks as a confirmation of my own perspec­
tive, for Gadamer praised these interpretations precisely because they
were able to break through the scholarly overlay and allow one to
sense the otherness of Greek thinking (see Chapter 12 of this book).
Yet, implicit in both the description of my experience of “otherness”
with reference to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and in Gadamer’s motto
“to think the Greeks more Greeklike” is a certain grievance against
translation: The experience of this otherness seems to require that
one be intimately proximate to it. Thus, when translation is neces­
sary, then the rendition with the least translating would be the best;
that is, the most literal translation possible would be the one most
desirable because it remains as close as possible to the original text—■
hence Gadamer’s passing definition of translation as a “word-for-
word rendition of an assigned text” (see the end of Chapter 3).
Here, the conflict is already beginning to show itself A “word-
for-word” translation is really no translation at all, for the text of the
translation would be unintelligible to any reader, probably even to
the translator. The linguistic structures of the original language that
support the words and lend them their meaning cannot be translated
without the target language losing its integrity: Frequently the gram­
matical structures that show gender, case, and number simply cannot
be translated; and the effort to mirror the syntactical order of the
original language in the target language results in babble. Therefore,
the translator is forced to do some interpreting, thereby distancing
the translation from the original text and, hence, from the otherness
embedded in the linguistic structures of the original language. This
is where the freedom of the translator that Gadamer often mentions
comes into play—and yet, if one translates in accord with this first
interest, then the freedom of the translator is exceedingly limited;
one can deviate from the original text only enough to make the
translation intelligible.
My second interest, the one in allowing Gadamer’s eloquence
to show through, is not merely motivated by a sense of aesthetics.
 t r a n s l a t o r ’s preface XI

Much of the power and force of Gadamer’s thinking is lent by his

prose, which often verges on the poetic. N ot only does one not have
to struggle with Gadamer’s text, but, moreover, it works on the reader
like a magnet. To offer a translation of Gadamer’s text that seemed
awkward to the English speaker would be to ignore a fundamental
element of Gadamer’s thought. Gadamer himself is quite aware of
this; he encouraged me in one conversation to take as much freedom
as I wanted, going so far as to say, “Herr Stanley, vergessen Sie den
Text” (Mr. Stanley, forget the text). Yet, to render a translation of
Gadamer’s text that is as eloquent in English as it is in German is to
move it completely away from its home, to erase its otherness. An
eloquent speaker is one who is completely at home in a language,
who inhabits it to the fullest extent possible, who knows all of its
avenues and pathways and can even sometimes cut new ones that
mesh so well with the old that they seem neither strange nor new.
This second interest, then, demands that I make Gadamer’s thought
at home in a foreign country, that I strip it of all strange elements so
that the natives (native speakers) do not even notice that it had at one
time had this character of “otherness.”
Obviously, no single principle or simple guideline could meet
the demands of both interests; the approach to this translation, like
the translation itself, has more of the character of a sheaf of uneasy
compromises. On the one hand, I have endeavored to find a lan­
guage at home in the structures of the English language, a language
the English speaker would find enticing. On the other hand, I have
sometimes strained against the constraints of English and tried, at
least at some sights, to find a language that would “let thinking break
through” (see the end of Chapter 11), to find expressions unusual
enough that they did not always fall squarely into the typical linguis­
tic “tracks” our thinking usually follows. My goal was to find a lan­
guage that stretched over into the German world of Gadamer’s
thought without being distorted, a language that rings of another
culture and way of thinking and yet is devoid of the clashing sounds
of discord.
As Gadamer mentions in his preface, the chapters of this
book consist of essays published over the last twenty-five years. Sub­
sequently, seven of these essays have already been translated into
English. Among those already translated, four have been reprinted
here; they are Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 11 (the acknowledgments appear
x ii JO H N W. STANLEY

on the first page of each chapter). I have made some revisions in

these translations to bring some of the technical terms in line with
the conventions I have been using and to accommodate revisions
Gadamer himself made in the German text of these essays before
they were published in this book. The three chapters that have not
been reprinted are as follows: (1) Chapter 3, "Die Marburger Theotogie”
was translated as “Heidegger and the Marburg Theology” by David
Linge and appears in Philosophical Hermeneutics, which he edited; (2)
Chapter 13, "Die Geschichte der Philosophies was translated by Karen
Cambell as “Heidegger and the History of Philosophy” and pub­
lished in TheMonist (64, no. 4); (3) Chapter 15, "Sein Geist Gott,”was
translated by Steven Davis and appears in Heidegger’s Memorial Lec­
tures, edited by Werner Marx. I have retranslated these three chapters
from the German and all other translations are mine, including quotes
and excerpts from other sources as well as Celan's poem.
I have adopted conventional translations of key words coined
by Gadamer and Heidegger; I was helped in this endeavor by the
aforementioned translations as well as other sources. With reference
to Heidegger's terminology, I have relied to a large extent upon John
MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson's translation of Sein und Zeit as a
eanoMsal source. A glossary of important German terms and their
translations has been included at the end of the text. The footnotes
in this book, with exception of the acknowledgments, are Gadamer's;
the notes, which are explicative comments made by either myself or
other translators (in the case of reprints), are designated with letters.
(In general, the contents of the notes have been restricted to com­
ments intended to explain the meaning of non-English terms; I had
wanted to provide bibliographical notes, but I have been living in
Germany for the last one-and-a-half years and do not have access to
the English translations of Heidegger's works.) To distinguish be­
tween different kinds of explanatory or qualifying remarks within
the texts, I have used a system employing parentheses and two kinds
of brackets. Parentheses are used to mark comments that Gadamer
made and usually that he himself put in parentheses in the German
text. Square brackets are used to give the German, Latin, or Greek
word from which an English word was translated, or to give an
English translation of a word left in a foreign language. Angle brack­
ets, < >, are used to bracket a word or words that I inserted in the
English text that did not exist in the German.
 T R A N S L A T O R 'S P R E F A C E x iii

I am indebted to such a large number of people for their help

with this translation that I cannot thank them all here. However, I
would like to thank Professor Gadamer for our conversations and
Dennis Schmidt for his help in arranging this translation. I would
also like to express my gratitude to Jason Wirth and Andreas Engler
for their frequent help with difficult passages in the text. Finally, I
wish to thank my parents and especially my spouse, Jan Robert, for
their financial and emotional support, without which this translation
would not have come to be.

John Stanley
 I ntroduction
by Dennis J. Schmidt

A m o n g t h e Wa y s
Anyone who has ever attempted it will confirm that writing
about pne’s teacher, while a joy, poses a special difficulty The diffi­
culty is clear: in writing about someone whose lasting influence finds
its roots in one's own formative years—a time that one never quite
leaves—one necessarily writes out of a curious entanglement and a
debt that can never be repaid. In such cases the hermeneutical situa­
tion of the interpreter takes on a peculiar sharpness as one learns that
writing such a text entails, in large measure, a very real, yet thor­
oughly mediated, self-confrontation. When Gadamer writes about
his teacher Heidegger, the stakes of this engagement are raised and
rendered more complex still by virtue of the impact that each has
had upon the direction of thinking—and not only in philosophy-—in
these times. The effective history of Heidegger's work, the often
independent afterlife of his texts, the new directions his questioning
has opened, and the controversies of his life that have intensified
since his death all contribute to the process whereby Heidegger has
come to be rendered larger than life, a figure, an abstraction, a proper
name on the way to some sort of allegorization in history. Whatever
Heidegger is coming to mean for thinking at this historical junc­
ture-—and of course he will mean many and frequently conflicting
things for thinking—one must recognize its distance from the
Heidegger who, in a lecture course on Aristotle, first ignited the
philosophical imagination o f Gadamer during his student years.
XVI D E N N IS J. S C H M ID T

In turning to write about Heidegger, Gadamer not only elu­

cidates some of the paths of Heidegger's thinking, but also, in a quiet
and unthematized manner, Gadamer confronts himself and the evo­
lution in his relationship with Heidegger. Indeed, as one reads these
essays and follows Gadamer's reflections upon Heidegger's texts, one
soon understands that Gadamer is driven by a question that he for­
mulates at the time of his first encounter with Heidegger but asks
only many years later in his autobiography: what is the secret of
Heidegger's enduring presence? The impact and profound impres­
sion of Heidegger upon Gadamer is expressed in Gadamer's sense
that there is some “secret" in Heidegger. N ot a secret kept and jeal­
ously guarded, but the most haunting of secrets, namely an open
secret in which something is found somehow apart from the lan­
guage in which we know how to tell what we know. The remarks
about Heidegger that Gadamer makes in his autobiography (which
bears the revealing and ironic epigram “De nobis ipsis silemus")
provide ample evidence of the force of Heidegger in Gadamer’s life
as the one who introduced him to an experience of philosophizing
that Gadamer likens to “an electric shock." Those remarks also give
some indication of the extent to which his early encounter with
Heidegger drove Gadamer to stretch his own language in an effort to
respond to the challenge that this secret posed. O f course, the secret
and the shock was not about Heidegger the man, but about the body
of questions and texts that signaled a breakthrough to a new philo­
sophic experience. Consequently, while Gadamer speaks about the
personal dimensions of his engagement with Heidegger in his auto­
biography, it is in these essays that he makes a sustained effort to
understand the radicality and originality of the philosophic experience
found in Heidegger. Here Gadamer calls our attention to Heidegger's
place in the history of philosophy by repeatedly emphasizing the shock
and radicality of his approach to thinking and to the remarkable syn­
thesis of conceptual rigor and a wide concern with the questions of
human existence beyond the sphere of consciousness: “in a whirl of
radical questions—questions that Heidegger posed, that posed them­
selves to Heidegger, that he posed to himself—the chasm that had
developed in the course of the last century between academic philoso­
phy and the need for a world-view seemed to close” (19).
It should be noted that Gadamer refrained from writing about
Heidegger for quite some time and the long silence that precedes the
essays in this volume, essays written over the course of some twenty-
 IN T R O D U C T IO N XVII

essays in this volume, essays written over the course of some twenty-
five years, needs to be heard as tire true preface to what is said here.
Gadamer did not write about Heidegger until 1960, almost four dec­
ades after his first, and lasting, encounter with Heidegger. It is a
remarkable period of silence, a period during which Heidegger’s
work became the focus of intense debate and discussion around the
world. But it should be obvious that such a stunning silence is not an
indication that Gadamer had forgotten Heidegger during those years;
it is not a period during which Gadamer neglects Heidegger, as if
such neglect were even an option. Rather, those years proved to be
the time in which Gadamer pursued, with imagination and rigor,
what he describes as the “impulse” he received from Heidegger. Dur­
ing those years Gadamer worked through figures and themes akin to
those animating Heidegger at the time, but he carried out his own
philosophical projects—especially the project of thinking through
Greek and poetic texts, and the formulation of hermeneutics after
the philosophical shock of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity—
with a remarkable independence from Heidegger’s explicit efforts
along similar lines. That independence is most evident in the extent
to which Gadamer, himself a writer of extraordinary philosophical
prose, avoided the seductions of Heidegger’s language and style dur­
ing that period. For those years served as the period in which Gadamer
found the requisite “distance” needed if he was to write “about”
Heidegger. Gadamer describes this situation by saying that “I re­
ceived an impetus for thinking from Heidegger early o n . . . . How­
ever, as is always the case when one is attempting to find one’s own
position, some distance was needed before I was able to present
Heidegger’s ways of thinking as his; I first had to distinguish my
own search for my ways and paths from my companionship with
Heidegger and his ways,.” (vii) It is important to realize what this
“distance,” the distance requisite for these essays, means. O f course it
refers to a certain critical and creative distance from his first encoun­
ter with Heidegger. But it is a distance measured in several manners.
Yet, however its measure is taken, it would be misleading to think
that this distance marks a simple departure in which Gadamer be­
comes remote from Heidegger’s work. Quite the contrary; a funda­
mental empathy with Heidegger prevails in all of Gadamer’s writings.
The last words of the introduction to Truth and Method acknowledge
this debt: there Gadamer announces the standards to which he wants
xvm D E N N IS J. S C H M ID T

to submit his own work by referring first to Husserl, then to Dilthey,

then finally to Heidegger, by speaking of the impulse he found in
H eidegger’s innovative advance o f the phenom enological-
hermeneutical tradition in, his development of the hermeneutics of
facticity. So Gadamer presents his own achievements in Truth and
Method along with an expression of the debt of those achievements to
Heidegger. But it should also not escape notice that Truth and Method
was published in the same year as the first text that Gadamer wrote
on Heidegger, a circumstance indicating that the distance from which
Gadamer writes these studies of Heidegger is the distance found in
the achievements of Gadamer’s own work, in some respects elabora­
tions of possibilities first opened by Heidegger, in other respects
departures from and alternatives to Heidegger. But, however it is
situated with respect to Heidegger, Gadamer’s work always manifests
a deep fidelity to the continuing effort of thinking out of a sense of
the finitude of understanding and the enigmas of factical life.
While this distance is to be understood as the creative dis­
tance which Gadamer needed to travel in order to be able to take up
Heidegger as a theme for his own work, it is also a distance mea­
sured by history, a distance not simply of four decades but one that
might also be designated as a moral distance. When Habermas en­
titles his laudatio of Gadamer on the occasion of Gadamer’s receipt
of the Hegel-Prize “The Urbanization of the Heideggerian Prov­
ince” he makes a gesture toward one way in which this distance
between Heidegger and Gadamer can be conceived: Gadamer’s work
is responsive to the events of the historical present in a manner that
indicates an aspect of the distance taken from Heidegger. From the
time of Jean Beaufret’s question that Heidegger took as the occasion
for his “Letter on Humanism”*—namely, how are we to give a sense
to the word ‘humanism’ after the events of our age?-—-up to the
celebrated Spiegel interview in which Heidegger laments that “only a
god can save us,” there is a conspicuous absence of any overt concern
with the immediate demands of political life on Heidegger’s part.
This devotion to the provinces, this apparent strange provincialism
of such a sweeping and original mind, has infuriated many and frus­
trated some of Heidegger’s most sympathetic readers. Heidegger knew
well that our historical juncture needs to be thought as a period of
profound and protracted crisis, and his commitment to taking up
this crisis as a crisis of the “roots” o f inherited forms o f thinking
 IN T R O D U C T IO N X IX

and cultural practices is unquestionable, But it is precisely the single-

mindedness of the drive to interrogate the roots of contemporary
problems that gives Heidegger's thought a legitimate claim to
radicality and, equally, lets it be criticized for its oblivion to the
dangerous configuration o f those “roots" in the contemporary world.
One could argue that the absence of an overt and immediate con­
cern does not so much signal an oblivion to such concerns on
Heidegger’s part as it does an abiding and overriding sense that a
radical refunctioning of the terms of political discourse is needed
before any amelioration of the injustices of political life could be­
come thinkable. Gadamer himself interprets Heidegger’s work in
just that way when he writes that “what distinguishes his thinking is
the radicality and boldness with which he depicted the progression
of occidental civilization into the technical omniculture of today as
our fate and the necessary consequence of occidental metaphysics.
But this means that all the benign attempts to slow down this gigan­
tic process of calculating, empowering and producing—which we
call cultural life—did not have a place in his thought.’’ (193) That
such seems to be Heidegger’s conviction—wisely or not—becomes
evident w hen one thinks, for instance, o f his 1946 text on
Anaximander, a text that takes up the question of rendering justice in
time by means of an interpretation of what he says is the “oldest text
of the Occident,” a text written in the aftermath of the war and the
revelations of the Holocaust, and while Freiburg lay in ruins. For
Heidegger such events are best understood as the visibility and vio­
lence of the end of metaphysics and those events are to be con­
fronted as such. Gadamer, on the other hand, driven by a deep ethical
and political sensibility, one remarkably akin to that which continu­
ally inspired Kant, never lets his work become so stubbornly remote
from the exigencies of historical life. As one reads these essays one
discovers Gadamer’s deep engagement with his topic and one dis­
covers that his engagement is not just with texts, but with the time of
the texts at hand, so that there emerges a vivid sense of the stakes of
what is thought and said—for philosophy, of course, but also for
history and the life of culture and peoples.
So when reading the essays collected in this volume one is
well advised to remember the distances that Gadamer has crossed
from Heidegger in a time of protracted silence. But, every distance
notwithstanding, there remains a deeper kinship between them and
XX D E N N IS J . S C H M ID T

so these essays are best read as emerging from a shared sense that
thinking that lives up to its name is responsive to the fmitude of
factical life and understanding, to, in other words, the self-renewing
capacity of life to throw itself into darkness. Such a sensibility is well
expressed in a phrase that Gadamer is fond of citing from Heidegger
and that Heidegger himself loved to repeat: “Das Leben ist diesig, es
nebelt sich immer ein.” For both the ambiguity and withdrawal of
the grounds of what can be thought and spoken is a decisive experi­
ence which tinges all that can be thought and said. For both this
means that philosophy always thinks and speaks out of and, when it is
strict in its reflexivity, to limits. For Heidegger this means attentive­
ness to the end of philosophy, an event which is never a simple
cessation but an experience of limits, while for Gadamer this means
attentiveness to the hermeneutic play of finite truth as forging the
openness of traditions. But however they specify this experience of
limits, both regard it as the task of thinking to solicit, even to love,
the limit. Given this kindred sensibility, it is no surprise then that
once Gadamer has found the distance appropriate to such a profound
affinity, once he turns to write about Heidegger, he does so by taking
up a theme that marks perhaps their point of closest contact and,
arguably, a point that Gadamer had explored with more persistence
even than Heidegger, namely, the question of the work of art. Both
Gadamer and Heidegger begin with, and see themselves as going
significantly beyond, “the idealistic aesthetics that had ascribed a spe­
cial significance to the work of art as the organon of a nonconceptual
understanding” (101). So, in 1960, when Gadamer writes the intro­
duction to the Reclam edition of Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of
Art” he is able to conclude by saying that “the thinking that con­
ceives all art as poetry and that discloses that the work of art is
language is itself still on the way to language” (109).
*
Many themes run through the essays collected here—one
reads about the existential and religious dimensions of Heidegger’s
thought, about Heidegger’s efforts to out-Greek the Greeks, about
Heidegger’s relation to metaphysics and its language, as well as about
Kant and the turns in Heidegger’s thought—but among the issues
that simultaneously unite and divide Gadamer and Heidegger, three
can be singled out as forming the most pervasive and significant axes
 IN T R O D U C T IO N XXI

of their relationship and as providing a tension propelling these es­

says forward in a creative manner: the relation of art and truth, the
limits of the claims of language, and the aporias of history and tradi­
tion. But it is the last theme—the question of history at the present
historical juncture—that marks the point of the most severe dispute
between Heidegger and Gadamer, and so a few comments about it
are in order.
Gadamer is one of the few figures in the last two hundred
years of the continental tradition who does not advertise his thought
as the overcoming of metaphysics and the inauguration of a new
beginning. That does not mean that he understands himself as a
metaphysical thinker. Far from it. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not
metaphysics by another name; rather it is a reply to two of the most
prominent concerns—namely the question of the universal claims of
language and the discovery of the force of history and factical life—
that have come forward with the decision that metaphysical assump­
tions have lost their tenability. But, since hermeneutic theory takes to
heart the weight and power of history—as a dual and conflicted
movement of the future and the past—it can make no claims to be
the signal of a new beginning. The claims that have been made in
that direction are well rehearsed: Kant’s claim to be instituting a
Copernican revolution in philosophy begins this tendency, Hegel’s
claim to think out of the exhaustion of his age to the perfection of
the possibilities of history accelerates the question of metaphysics,
and the intentions guiding a wide range of philosophers from Marx
through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche only magnify the project of over­
coming metaphysics, Heidegger’s project of the destruction of meta­
physics belongs to this tradition as its summit. Gadamer takes up the
first formulations of this project in Heidegger in discussing the text
“What is Metaphysics?,” showing that Heidegger’s first attempt at
overcoming metaphysics “was still couched in the language of meta­
physics” (46), In his text Heidegger relies upon the self-interrogating
question that serves as the title of that essay—as Heidegger indicates
“what is it,” “ti estin,” is the preeminent metaphysical question—to
dislodge his own analysis of metaphysics from the empire of meta­
physical representation. But, as Gadamer notes, Heidegger’s own
returns to this text (he wrote an epilogue in 1943 and a preface in
1949) are themselves indicators that his early attempts to ask a ques­
tion completely outside the orbit of metaphysical reflections, the
xxu D E N N IS J. S C H M ID T

question of cthe nothing/ fail because “the question concerning “noth­

ing55was introduced expressly as a metaphysical question55(46). None­
theless, the project of the destruction of metaphysics remains “the
monumental theme55 and “subject of Heidegger's later thought ex­
periments55 (46). To understand Heidegger one needs to understand
how crucial the destruction of metaphysics is. On the other hand, to
understand Gadamer one needs to understand the power of sedi­
mentation that leads him to suggest that such destruction is never
fully realizable.
In this a difference between Heidegger and Gadamer is mani­
fested. Gadamer himself is alert to this difference and so in the
preface to Truth and Method acknowledges that “Heidegger, like many
of my critics, might see in this a lack of ultimate radically in the
drawing of conclusions.55 But Gadamer is undeterred by such criti­
cisms and insists rather that “the finitude of understanding is the
manner in which the reality, resistance, the absurd and the unintelli­
gible find their validation. One who takes this finitude seriously must
take the reality of history seriously.55 In other words, in his notion of
effective historical consciousness, Gadamer understands himself as
maintaining Heidegger's early insights into the finitude of factical
life and as giving history its due. And so Gadamer understands this
apparent difference with Heidegger as more a matter of a difference
of emphasis than as a fundamental dispute. That is part of what he
means when he says that “the break with tradition that took place in
Heidegger's thought represented just as much an incomparable re­
newal of tradition55 (70). Such a comment is not in the least a retreat
from the radically of the criticisms that Heidegger levels against the
tradition he characterizes as ontotheological; rather, it serves as a
reminder of the complications of the ineluctibility of history for
thinking.
The discovery that thinking is never unenvironed and that
history has always already registered itself as a necessary topic for
philosophy entails the radical problematization of the relation of think­
ing and its history. That is why the question of the nature of tradi­
tion—the forces whereby canons and disciplines are formed and
submitted to scrutiny—has emerged with such prominence today.
One might even say that this question of history is among the defin­
ing questions of what has come to be called “continental philosophy"—
a phrase that should not be understood as a geographical designation,
 IN T R O D U C T IO N x x iii

but as naming this readiness to index thinking to the reality of his­

tory. Both Heidegger and Gadamer address this topic o f history and
tradition, and both do so with a keen sense of the crisis and extrem­
ity of the present age. But, in the end, there remains the matter of
this difference of emphasis: while Heidegger prefers to see in the
present historical situation the signals of “another beginning” and the
end of a long, exhausted tradition, Gadamer is inclined to take this
situation as the moment in which the past becomes visible in a dif­
ferent light. Gadamer’s sense then is that there are surprises to be
found in history—in the future, of course, but not only there.
Much more could be said about the relation between Gadamer
and Heidegger. The issues that surface between them are among the
most pressing and difficult questions of this era which their work has
helped define. But there is perhaps no better way to begin to take up
those matters than by reading the essays that follow. In them one
reads Gadamer reading Heidegger. But one finds more than even a
highly original and insightful examination of Heidegger's work: one
witnesses the complex event of a subtle interpreter of philosophic
texts and movements interpreting a set of texts and a movement that
gave shape and impulse to his own beginnings.
Reading these essays one senses that they are also an act of
homage of one philosopher to another, of a student to his teacher.
Written from a distance and after a prolonged silence, these pieces
provide testimony of the abiding affinity of the philosophical projects
animating Heidegger and Gadamer. They are not uncritical of
Heidegger, but the critique here arises out of an uncommon alchemy
of imagination, rigor, and insight and a fidelity so deep that, as
Nietzsche says, it must include some element of treason.
 CHAPTER ONE

Existentialism and
the Philosophy of
Existence (1981)

I^^Iowadays, when existentialism is spoken of in philosophi­

cal circles, its meaning is taken for granted. "Yet, quite a few different
types of things fall under this heading, although they are certainly
neither without a common denominator nor lacking an internal co­
herence. With existentialism one thinks of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, and Gabriel Marcel; of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers;
perhaps also of the theologians, Bultman and Guardini. Actually, the
word existentialism was a French creation. It was introduced by Sartre
in the 1940s—during the very period that Paris was occupied by the
Germans—as he was developing the philosophy that he later pre­
sented in his voluminous book Being and Nothingness. Fie was acting
on the stimulus he had received from his studies in Germany during
the 1930s. One could say that a special constellation led to his new,
productive response—a constellation in which his interest in Hegel,
Husserl, and Heidegger had been awakened in the same way and at
the same time.
But it must be made clear that the German stimulus standing
behind this, which is mainly associated with Pleidegger’s name,
was in essence completely different from that which Sartre himself
had produced from it. At that time one referred to such things in

1
2 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Germany with the expression philosophy of existence, and the word

existential was quite in vogue during the late 1920s. If it was not
“existential/5it simply did not count. It was primarily Heidegger and
Jaspers who were known as the representatives of this movement,
although neither of them met this characterization with real convic­
tion or approval. After the war, Heidegger delivered a thorough and
well-founded rejection of the Sartrean brand of existentialism in the
well-known “Letter on Humanism55; and in the middle of the 1930s,
after observing the devastating consequences of the uncontrolled ex­
istential emotionalism that had strayed into the mass hysteria of the
National Socialist movement, the horrified Jaspers hurriedly moved
the concept of “the existential55 back to its secondary position and
return reason to a position of primacy. Reason and Existence was one of
the most beautiful and effective publications of Jaspers to come out
of the 1930s. In this work he made an appeal to the exceptional cases
of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and sketched out his theory of the
“encompassing,55which incorporated both reason and existence. What
bestowed the word existence with such power then? Certainly not the
usual, normal grade-school use of the word, meaning “to exist,55“ex­
istent,55 or “existence,55 as it would be found in phrases such as the
question of the existence of God or the existence of the external world. No, a
special expression lent the word existence its then-new conceptual
character. This took shape under some specific conditions that need
to be brought into view. The use of the word in this new, emphatic
sense can be traced back to the Danish writer and thinker Soren
Kierkegaard. He wrote in the 1840s, but his effect on the world and
especially on Germany was not felt until the beginning of this cen­
tury. A Swabian minister by the name of Christoph Schrempf ar­
ranged a translation of the complete works of Kierkegaard with
Diederichs. The translation had a somewhat loose style but was ex­
ceptionally ^readable. As this translation became well known, it con­
tributed a great deal to the movement that was later given the name
the philosophy of existence.
Kierkegaard’s own situation in the 1840s was determined by
his critique of Hegelian speculative idealism, a critique motivated by
his Christian faith. It was out of this context that the word existence
gained its specific pathos* Schilling's thought had already brought a
new element to bear on the matter when, in his profound specula­
tions about the relationship of God to his creation, he postulated a
 E X IS T E N T IA L IS M A N D E X IS T E N C E 3

distinction within God himself He spoke of the foundation in God

and of the existence in God, which in turn allowed for the discovery
that freedom was firmly rooted in the Absolute and provided for a
deeper understanding of the nature of human freedom. Kierkegaard
picked up this thought-motif of Schelling’s, and he transplanted it
into the polemical context of his critique of Hegel’s speculative dia­
lectic, a dialectic in which all is mediated and united in syntheses.
But what presented a particular challenge to Christianity—
and especially to the Protestant church—was Hegel’s claim to have
raised the truth of Christianity to the level of an intellectual concept
and to have completely reconciled faith and knowledge to one an­
other. This challenge was taken up on many sides. Feuerbach, Ruge,
Bruno Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss, and finally, Marx come to
mind. But it was Kierkegaard who, driven by his own religious dis­
tress, had the deepest insight into the paradox of faith. His famous
first work had the challenging title jEither!Or It programmatically
expressed what was lacking in Hegel’s speculative dialectic: the deci­
sion between <£either/or,” upon which human existence—and Chris­
tian existence in particular—is actually based. Nowadays one uses
the word existence spontaneously in such contexts—as I just did—
with an emphasis that translocates it completely from its scholastic
origins. This usage can certainly be found in other expressions, such
as in the phrase the strugglefor existence—in which we are all engaged—
or when one says, <£my existence depends on it.” These are phrases
with a special emphasis, yet one that certainly reminds us more of
the religion of hard cash [harte Taler] than the fear and trembling of
the Christian heart. But when someone like Kierkegaard says of Hegel,
the most famous philosopher of his time, that the absolute professor
in Berlin has forgotten ££to exist” [das Existieren], one finds in this
sarcastic polemic a clear and emphatic reference to the basic human
situation of choosing and deciding—one whose Christian and reli­
gious gravity cannot be muddled or played down by reflection and
dialectical mediation.
How is it that this critique of Hegel, which came out of the
first half of the nineteenth century, was instilled with new life in our
century? To grasp this one must visualize the catastrophe of World
War I and what its outbreak and development meant to the cultural
consciousness of European humanity. The bourgeois society, spoiled
by the long period of peace, had developed a belief in progress and a
4 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

cultural optimism that came to characterize the liberal age. All of this
collapsed in the storm of the war, which in the end was completely
different from all those that had preceded it. The course of the war
was not decided by personal courage or military genius but, rather,
by the outcome of the competition between the heavy industries of
all the different countries. The horror of materiel battles [.Material-
schlachten], in which innocent nature, fields and woods, villages and
cities were devastated, in the end left those in the trenches and dug-
outs with no room for any thought except “one day, when everything
is over,” as Carl Zuckmayer had expressed it then.
The extent of this insanity outstripped the youth’s powers of
comprehension. They had come to the struggle with an idealistic
enthusiasm and a willingness to make sacrifices, but it soon became
clear to the youth on all sides that the old forms of chivalrous—if
often cruel and bloody-—-honor had lost their place. What remained
was a nonsensical and unreal event—one that was also founded on
the unreality of the overheated nationalism that had in turn caused
the workers3 movement, the internationale, to explode. It was no
wonder that the intellectual leaders of that time asked, “What has
gone astray with our belief in science, with our belief that the world
was being made a more humane place and that its safety was being
insured by the increasing amount of regulation? What had gone astray
with the presumed development of society towards progress and
freedom?33
It is obvious that the profound cultural crisis that came over
the whole European culture at that time would have to express itself
philosophically, and it is just as obvious that this would be especially
pronounced in Germany, whose radical transformation and collapse
was the most visible and catastrophic expression of the general absur­
dity The critique of the reigning educational idealism [Bildungs-
idealismus]} which was supported primarily by the continuing presence
of Kantian philosophy in academia, pervaded during these years and
stripped academic philosophy as a whole of its credibility A con­
sciousness of this complete lack of orientation filled the spiritual
situation of 1918, a situation into which I myself had begun to peer.
One can imagine how the two men, Jaspers and Heidegger,
first encountered and approached one another when they first met in
Freiburg in 1920. That meeting was occasioned by the sixtieth birth­
day of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. Both viewed
 E X IS T E N T IA L IS M A N D E X IS T E N C E 5

from a critical distance the academic hustle and bustle and the aca­
demic style of affected behavior. A philosophical friendship was
founded then-—or was it an attempt at a friendship that was never a
complete success? It was motivated by a shared resistance to the old
and a common will to new, radical forms of thinking. Jaspers had just
begun to mark out his own philosophical position. In The Ps)?chology
of World Views, he devoted a lot of space to Kierkegaard (among oth­
ers). Heidegger pounced upon Jaspers with his own pecular form of
sinister energy-—-and simultaneously radicalized him. He wrote a long,
critical expose of Jaspers's The Ps)fchology of World Viexvs, in which he
followed Jaspers's thought to its bold and extreme consequences.
This critique remained unpublished at that time, but it has since
been published.
In the aforementioned book Jaspers analyzes the different
world-views of representative figures [Gestalten]. His intention was
to show how the different ways of thinking are played out in the
praxis of life, because even world-views extend beyond the binding
generalities of the scientific orientation to the world. World-views
are dispositions of the will that rest, as we now say, upon “existential
decisions.” Jaspers described what all of the different forms of exist­
ence that can be differentiated in this way have in common with the
concept of boundary situation [Grenzsituation]. By boundary situa­
tions he meant such situations whose boundary character demon­
strated the limits of scientific mastery of the world. One such
boundary situation is the appearance of something that no longer can
be conceived of as just another example of a general rule and, hence,
a case where one can no longer rely on the scientific control of
calculable processes. Some examples of such a situation would be
death, which we all must face; guilt, which everyone must carry; or
the whole formation of a person’s life, in which each of us as an
individual-—-that one and only individual-—must come to realize him­
self or herself It is meaningful to say that it is precisely in these
boundary situations where what one is first really emerges. This
emerging, this stepping out of the controllable, calculable reactions
and ways of behaving of social beings, constitutes the concept of
existence.
Jaspers had stumbled upon the thematization of the bound­
ary situation in his critical appropriation of science and in his recog­
nition of its limits. He had the good fortune of being in the proximity
6 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

of Max Weber, a figure of truly giant scientific stature whom he

admired and followed, although ultimately with critical and self-
critical questions. This great sociologist and polyhistorian represented,
not only for Jaspers but also for my own generation, the grandeur
and complete absurdity of the internal asceticism of the modern
scientist. His incorruptible scientific conscience and his passionate
impetus compelled him to a downright quixotic self-restriction. This
consisted of the fact that he detached completely from the scientific,
objective realm of knowledge the living, acting human beings, the
very human beings who were confronted by these ultimate deci­
sions; but at the same time he gave them the duty to know, that is,
they were to pledge themselves to an “ethics of responsibility.” Max
Weber became the advocate, founder, and harbinger of a value-free
sociology. But this did not mean at all that a colorless and bloodless
scholar pushed his spiel about methodology and objectification but
that this was a man of powerful temperament whose boundless po­
litical and moral passion demanded of himself and others such self-
restriction. In the eyes of this great researcher, to go so far as to make
armchair prophecies was absolutely the worst thing one could do.
However, Max Weber was not only a model for Jaspers; he also
served as a counterexample that led Jaspers to explore more deeply
the limits of the scientific orientation to the world and to develop, if
I might say so, a version of reason that transcends these limits. That
which he presented in his Psychology of World Views and later in his
three-volume magnum opus, Philosophy; was—even if directed by his
personal passions—an impressive philosophical recapitulation and con­
ceptual unfurling of the negative and positive < elements > aroused
by the gigantic figure of Max Weber. He was constantly dogged by
the question of how the incorruptible purity of scientific research,
on the one hand, and the imperturbability of the will and feelings
that he encountered in the existential weight of this man, on the
other hand, could be grasped and gauged within the medium of
thought.
Heidegger started from completely different assumptions.
Unlike Jaspers, he had not been educated in the spirit of the natural
sciences and medicine. Although one would generally not have
guessed it, his genius had allowed him to keep up with academic
developments in the natural sciences as a young man. The minor
subjects that he chose in his examination for his doctorate were
mathematics and physics! But his real focus lay elsewhere—in the
 E X IS T E N T IA L IS M A N D E X IS T E N C E 7

historical world. Above all, the history of theology, which he had

intensively pursued, and philosophy and its history captured his in­
terest. He had been a student of the neo-Kantians Heinrich Rickert
and Emil Lask. Then he found himself under the influence of the
masterful art of phenomenological description, and he took as his
model the superb analytical technique and the concrete, factual ap­
proach [Sachblick] of his master, Edmund Husserl. But beyond this,
he had been schooled by yet another master—Aristotle. He had be­
come familiar with Aristotle quite early on, but as one would expect,
the modern interpretation of Aristode that had served as his intro­
duction quickly began to appear questionable to him. This interpre­
tation had been rendered by Catholic neo-Scholasticism, and on the
basis of his own religious and philosophical questions, it appeared
inappropriate to the subject matter. So, he attended school with
Aristotle once again—this time alone—and gained for himself an
immediate, living understanding of the beginnings of Greek thinking
and questioning, an understanding that transcended all mere erudi­
tion, was immediately evident, and possessed the compelling power
of the simple. In addition, this young man, who at this time was
slowly freeing himself from and extending himself beyond his own
narrow regional environment, found himself confronted by a new
climate: The rages of World War I ushered in a new spirit that de­
manded expression everywhere. The currents of Bergson, Simmel,
Dilthey, maybe not Nietzsche directly but certainly philosophy be­
yond the scientific orientation of neo-Kantianism flowed in on him,
and so, with all of the qualifications of the inherited and acquired
erudition and with an innate, deep passion for questioning, he be­
came the authentic spokesman of the new thinking taking shape in
the field of philosophy.
Certainly Heidegger was not alone. This reaction to the dis­
appearing educational idealism of the era preceding the war revealed
itself in many fields. One thinks of the dialectical theology, which in
Karl Barth raised the talk of God to a new problem and with Franz
Overbeck threw out the calm balance that had been established be­
tween Christian proclamation and historical research—a balance rep­
resented by liberal theology. And one thinks in general of the critique
of idealism connected with the rediscovery of Kierkegaard.
But there were still other crises in the life of science and
culture that could be felt everywhere. I remember that van Gogh’s
correspondence was published at that time and that Heidegger loved
8 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

quotations from him. The appropriation of Dostoyevsky also played

an immense role at this time. The radicality of this portrayal of
human beings, the passionate questioning of society and progress,
the intensive fashioning and suggestive conjuring up of human ob­
sessions and labyrinths of the soul-—one could continue endlessly. It
is easy to see how the philosophical thought that was compressed
into the concept of existence was the expression of a newly released,
very prevalent Dasein-tmotion. One recalls the then-contemporary
poetry, the expressionistic stammering of words, or perhaps the bold
beginnings of modern painting, all of which demanded a response.
One thinks of the virtually revolutionary effect that Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West had on everyone’s souls. So it was in the air
and Heidegger was uttering the word of the hour when he, in a
radicalization of Jaspers’s thought, characterized human existence as
such by way of a reference to the notion of a boundary situation and
brought it newly in view
Actually, they approached the feeling of existence of those
years from two completely different points of departure and with
two completely different thought impulses, when Jaspers, on the one
hand, and Heidegger, on the other, elevated this feeling to the level
of a philosophical concept. Jaspers was a psychiatrist and apparently
an astonishing, wide-ranging reader. When I first came to Heidelberg
as a follower of Jaspers, someone showed me the bench in the
Koestersschen Bookstore where Jaspers sat for exactly three hours
every Friday morning and had all of the new releases laid out before
him. And without exception he ordered a large package of books to
be delivered to his house every week. With the self-confidence of an
important spirit and the posture of a schooled, critical observer, he
was able to find nourishment in any of the diverse areas of scientific
research that had some import for philosophy. He was able to mesh a
conscience or, better, the conscientiousness of his own thought with
the awareness of his own participation in the actual research. This
gave him the insight that scientific research meets up with insur­
mountable boundaries when it encounters the individuality of exist­
ence and the obligatoriness of its decisions.
Thus, in essence Jaspers reestablished in the context of our
time the old Kantian distinction that critically marked the boundaries
of theoretical reason, and he refounded in practical reason and its
implications the actual realm of philosophical and metaphysical truths.
By making an appeal for the grand tradition of occidental history, its
 E X IS T E N T IA L IS M A N D E X IS T E N C E 9

metaphysics, its art and religion, in which human existence became

aware of its own fmitude, its release into boundary situations, and its
surrender to its own existential decisions, Jaspers made metaphysics
possible once again. In the three lengthy volumes of his Philosophy}
the <fWorld Orientation,” “Existential Elucidation,” and “Metaphys­
ics,” he circumscribed the entire area of philosophy in meditations
possessing a uniquely personal tone and stylistic elegance. One of his
chapter headings reads “The Law of the Day and the Passion for the
Night”-—those are sounds that one was not accustomed to hearing
from the philosophical lectern in the era of epistemology. And Jaspers’s
comprehensive picture of the situation in 1930, which was presented
in Die geistige Situation der Zeit [Man in the Modem Age] as the thou­
sandth small volume from the Goschen Press, was also impressive
because of its terseness and powerful observations. In those days,
when I myself was still a student, it was said of Jaspers that he had a
superiority that reigned supreme when it came to leading discus­
sions. By contrast, his style of lecturing sounded like noncommittal
chatter or a casual talk with an anonymous companion. Later, when
he moved to Basel after the war, he constantly followed contempo­
rary events with the attitude of the moralist. He frequently made an
existential appeal to the public consciousness and argued philosophi­
cally for positions on such controversial issues as collective guilt or
the atom bomb. His thinking always seemed to transpose the most
personal experiences into the communicative scene.
The young Heidegger’s appearance and bearing was com­
pletely different: A dramatic entrance, a diction with great force, the
focus with which he lectured-—-he cast a spell over the entire audi­
ence. The intention of this teacher of philosophy was in no way to
make a moralistic appeal to the authenticity of existence. He cer­
tainly took part in such an appeal, and a good deal of his almost
magical effect came from his natural gift to radiate such an appeal
from his very being as well as in his lectures. But his real intention
was a different one. How should I say it? His philosophical question­
ing was undoubtedly motivated by a desire to clarify the deep dis­
quiet that had been aroused by his own religious calling and by his
dissatisfaction with the then-contemporary theology and philosophy.
From early on Heidegger strove toward a completely different, radi­
cal commitment for thinking, a commitment for thinking that refer­
enced existence, and this gave him his revolutionary force. The
question that so moved him and to which he brought the entirety of
10 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

the troubled self-esteem of those years was the oldest and first ques­
tion of metaphysics: the question of Being. He asked how a finite,
frail human Dasein—one whose death is certain—could understand
itself in its Being in spite of its temporality; indeed, how it could
experience Being, not as a privation, as a defect, or as a merely fleeing
pilgrimage of earthlings journeying through this life toward a partici­
pation in the eternity of the divine, but rather as the distinguishing
feature of being human. It is astonishing how this fundamental in­
tention of Heidegger’s questioning, which presupposed a constant
dialogue with metaphysics and with the thinking of the Greeks, as
well as with the thinking of St. Thomas, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel,
was completely missed at first by many contemporaries who shared
Heidegger’s philosophical interest.
The friendship that had begun to form between Heidegger
and Jaspers was certainly based primarily upon their common rejec­
tion of the settled academic teaching, upon the bustle of “idle talk,”
and upon the anonymity of its responsibility. As both began to ar­
ticulate their own thinking more clearly, the tensions between Jaspers’s
personalized manner of thinking and that of Heidegger, who devoted
himself completely to his mission for thinking, to the “matter” for
thinking, began to show themselves in an ever-sharper form. Jaspers
often employed the critical expression encasement [Gehause] in refer­
ence to all didactically hardened thought, and he did not hesitate to
use this against Heidegger’s effort to revive the question of Being. In
spite of this, Jaspers wrestled during his whole life with the challenge
that Heidegger presented to him. This has just recently been impres­
sively documented by the publication of Jaspers’s notes on Heidegger.
However, it is correct that Being and Time, Heidegger’s great
firstborn, presented two very different aspects. What brought about
its revolutionary effect was the temporally critical timber and the
existential engagement, which were expressed in a vocabulary emu­
lating Kierkegaard’s. O n the other hand, Heidegger leaned so heavily
on Husserl’s phenomenological idealism that Jaspers’s resistance is
understandable. But as Heidegger pursued his way of thinking, he
was truly led beyond any dogmatic “encasement.” He had himself
spoken of the “turn” [Kehre] that befell his thinking, and in fact his
thinking shattered all academic standards because he attempted to
find a new language for his thought as he pursued the theme of art,
the Holderlin interpretations, and the extreme thought of Friedrich
 E X IS T E N T IA L IS M A N D E X IS T E N C E 11

Nietzsche. He never claimed to espouse a new doctrine. When the

large edition of his writings, the one that followed his own arrange­
ment, began to appear, he gave it the following epigraph: “Ways, not
works”; and his later works did in fact always present new ways and
new thought experiments.15He began working on these ways years
before his political involvement, and after the short episode of his
political blunder, he continued without a visible break in the direc­
tion he had already begun.
O f course, the most astonishing aspect of Heidegger's great
effect was that in the 1920s and early 1930s, before he fell into politi­
cal disfavor, he was able to generate such an unheard-of enthusiasm
among his auditors and readers and that, after the war, he was able to
regain that effect. This took place after a period of relative seclusion.
He was unable to publish during the war because, after he had fallen
into political disfavor, no one would give him any paper. After the
war he could not teach because he had been suspended due to his
involvement as a former Nazi chancellor. But, in spite of all this, he
developed an almost overpowering presence during the postwar pe­
riod when the German material and spiritual life was being recon­
structed. He did not do this as a teacher; he spoke only rarely before
students. But he entranced an entire generation with his lectures and
publications. It was almost life threatening—-and presented the orga­
nizer with nearly unsolvable problems-—when Heidegger would an­
nounce one of his cryptic lectures. No lecture hall was large enough
during the 1950s. The excitement that emanated from his thinking
was picked up by everyone, even by those who did not understand
him. One could no longer call what he was voicing in the profundity
of his later speculations and in the solemn pathos of his interpreta­
tions of poetry (Holderlin, George, Rilke, Trakl, and so on) philosophy
of existence. The previously mentioned “Letter on Humanism” was a
formal rejection of the irrationalism of the pathos of existence
[Existenzpathos], which had earlier accompanied the dramatic effect
of his thinking but which was never his actual aim. What he saw at
work in French existentialism was very distant from his thinking.
The “Letter on Humanism” addresses that in very clear language. It
was the theme of ethics that the French readers missed in Heidegger—
as did Jaspers as well. Heidegger defended himself against this expec­
tation and demand, not because he underestimated the question of
ethics or the social plight of Dasein, but rather because his mission
12 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

in thinking compelled him to ask more radical questions. “For some

time we have not considered the nature of action decisively enough”
reads the first sentence of the “Letter on Humanism,” and it be­
comes clear what this sentence, written in an age of social utilitarian­
ism and completely “beyond good and evil,” means: The task of
thinking cannot be to run along behind self-dissolving ties and self­
weakening solidarities and hold up the admonishing finger of the
dogmatist. Rather, the task was much more to think about what lies
at the bottom of this disintegration that has been brought about by
the industrial revolution and to call thinking back to itself thinking
that had otherwise been reduced to calculating and producing.
It is the same with the alleged inattention to the social prob­
lems of the “we,” which is known in philosophy as the problem of
intersubjectivity: Heidegger first displayed in his ontological critique
the prejudices contained the concept of the subject, and therewith he
incorporated into his thought the critique of consciousness practiced
by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This means, however, that Dasein
and “Being-with” [Mit-Sein] are equally primordial, and “Being-with”
does not signify the being together of two subjects. Rather, “Being-
with” is a primordial mode of “Being-we”—a mode in which the I is
not supplemented by a you; instead, it encompasses a primary com­
monality that cannot be reached by the Hegelian thought of “Spirit.”
“Only a god can save us.”
We ask in closing, what in the thinking of these men is still
alive and what is dead? This is a question that every present must put
to the voices of its past. It is true that since the 1960s a new mood
has entered the spiritual life. The mood of the younger generations is
characterized by a new feeling of disenchantment, a new inclination
toward technical certainty and control and an avoidance of risks and
uncertainties. The pathos of “existence” sounds as strange to these
people as the pathos of the great poetic gestures of Holderlin and
Rilke, and the figures who presented us with the so-called philoso­
phy of existence are today almost completely dormant. The fine struc­
ture of the movement of Jaspers’s reflection with its intense personal
pathos will scarcely be able to have an effect in the age of mass
existence and emotional solidarity. Heidegger, on the other hand,
remains surprisingly present in spite of all this. Indeed, for the most
part he is rejected with an haughty air—or celebrated in an almost
ritualistic recapitulation. Both responses go to show that one cannot
 EXIST E N T IA LISM AN D E X I S T E N C E 13

easily get around him. It is not so much the pathos of existence

found in his beginnings that allows him to maintain his presence as
it is the unflagging perseverance with which a natural genius in think­
ing pursued his own religious and philosophical questions—his own
expressive gestures often pushed to the point of unintelligibility and
yet maintaining the unmistakable signet of a genuine perplexity in
thinking. One must think in global terms if one wants to properly
grasp Heidegger’s presence. Whether in America or the Far East,
whether in India, Africa, or in Latin America—the impetus for think­
ing that emanated from him is to be found everywhere. The global
destiny that mechanization and industrialization holds has found its
thinker in Heidegger, but at the same time, the multiplicity and
multivocity of the human legacy has won through him a new presence,
one that will be brought into the world conversation of the future.
So one can say in closing, the greatness of spiritual figures
can be measured by their ability to overcome, by virtue of what they
have to say, the stylistic resistance and stylistic distance that separates
them from the present. N ot the philosophy of existence, but the
men who have gone through this phase of existential and philosophi­
cal pathos and then proceeded beyond it belong among the philo­
sophical partners in a philosophical conversation that is not only of
yesterday; it will continue through tomorrow and the days after.
 C hapter Tw o

M a r t in H e id e g g e r
75 YEARS (1964)

the 26 September 1964, Martin Heidegger turned 75.

When a man who achieved world renown so early in his life lives to
such a biblical age, his life serves as a standard against which we
measure the passage of time. Soon it will be a half-century that this
intellect has been having its effect on us. As it tends to be in the
rhythm of time, so too is it in Heidegger’s case; the revolutionary
impetus that emanated from him has receded from the surface of our
consciousness. New tendencies are emerging in our temporal con­
sciousness that resist the power and force of an intellect that once
permeated everything. His prodding gestures are beginning to en­
counter a dulled sensibility, one that has become receptive to another
trend. Words that were once so vibrant now seem manneristic, artifi­
cial, and rigid. Things tend to go that way. The spiritual tends to pass
away, perhaps to return one day and speak its word anew in a changed
world.
The further we enter into the second half of the twentieth
century, the greater our awareness becomes that an epochal break
separates our own age, and what it accepts as valid, from all times
past. A new phase of the industrial revolution, introduced by modern
physics with its promising and yet threatening development of atomic
energy, has enveloped the earth. The rational regulation of the
economy and politics, of our living together with other human

15
16 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

beings, of our living together with other peoples, and of the interac­
tions of the political power groups of today, defines the spirit of our
age. The hopes and expectations of the younger generation are no
longer directed toward the undetermined, the unmeasured, or the
uncanny, but toward a functional, rational administration of the world.
Sober planning, sober calculation, and sober observation exert a con­
stant and coercive force on the forms that our spiritual expressions
now take. The speculative profundities, dark oracles, and prophetic
emotionalism that once held us captive are now shunned. In phi­
losophy this manifests itself in a growing trend toward logical clarity,
exactness, and verifiability of all assertions. Once again science is
adorned with an unconditional faith, be it in the form of Marxist
atheism or a belief in the technical perfectionism of the Western
world; once again an unconditional faith in science demands of phi­
losophy a justification of its very existence.
One must be aware of this if one does not want to under­
stand Heidegger’s work merely from a historical perspective, if one
does not want to view it as a slow movement of thinking from the
recent past that grows ever more strange as it develops. An awareness
of this shift allows for a placement of Heidegger next to the present,
or better, it allows for an understanding his work as a question posed
to the present. The technical perfectionism of our age is not a refuta­
tion of Heidegger’s philosophy; on the contrary, he thought it with a
rigor and radicality that remains unequaled in the academic philoso­
phy of our century.
O f course, a great deal of both the early and later Heidegger
sounds like cultural criticism. This is one of the most peculiar con­
comitants of the technological age; our confidence in technological
progress is called into doubt by the plaintive cries concerning the
uniformity, the leveling and flattening taking hold in every aspect of
our lives. These critiques of contemporary culture accuse the tech­
nological culture of reducing and repressing freedom, and yet their
very existence proves the contrary. Heidegger, on the other hand, is
much more ambiguous. From the beginning his sharp and vehement
critique of the “they,” of “curiosity” and “idle talk,” and therefore of
the “publicness” and “mediocrity” in which the human Dasein “for
the moment and for the most part” remains was only a secondary
motif (although one that could not be ignored). To be sure, at first
this shrill critique drowned out the basic m otif and focus of
Heideggerian thought. Still, the necessary concomitance of authen­
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R — 7 5 Y E A R S 17

ticity with inauthenticity, of the essential [Wesen] with the inessential

[Unwesen], of truth with error [Irre] defined his task. Indeed,
Heidegger is not to be placed in the ranks of the romantic critics of
technology—he attempts to seize the very essence of technology,
even to think in advance of that essence, because he attempts to
think what is.
Whoever knew the young Heidegger could even attest to this
based upon his external appearance: It did not correspond in the least
to our usual image of a philosopher. I remember how I first met him
in the Spring of 1923. I had already heard murmurs in the academic
circles at Marburg of a genius who had surfaced in Freiburg, and
handwritten reports concerning the unconventional diction of a cer­
tain assistant to Husserl were being passed from hand to hand. I
went to visit him in his office at the University of Freiburg. Just as I
turned into the corridor I saw someone coming out of his office who
was accompanied by someone else—a small, dark man. I waited pa­
tiently outside because I assumed there was another person still with
Heidegger. But this other person was Heidegger. O f course, he was
quite different from those whom I had heretofore known as profes­
sors of philosophy. He appeared more like an engineer or a techni­
cian: brief, matter of fact, aloof, full of bound energy and without the
glib cultivation of homo literatus [educated human being].
However, if one wants to stick with the physiognomical, the
first time one caught a glimpse of his eyes one knew who he was and
is: a visionary. A thinker who sees. Indeed, as I see it the basis for
Heidegger’s uniqueness among all of the philosophical teachers of
our time is that the things, which he portrays in a language that is
highly unconventional and that often offends all “cultivated” expec­
tations, are always depicted in a way in which they can be seen
intuitionally. And this “seeing” occurs not only in momentary evoca­
tions in which a striking word is found and an intuition [Anschauung]
flashes for a fleeting moment. The entire conceptual analysis is not
presented as an argued progression from one concept to another;
rather, the analysis is made by approaching the same <thing> from
the most diverse perspectives, thus giving the conceptual description
the character of the plastic arts, that is, the three-dimensionality of
tangible reality.
The fundamental teaching of Husserl’s phenomenology
was that knowledge [Erkenntnis] is first and foremost viewing or
intuition \Ansrhtimtng\;' that is, it is achieved when a thing is seen
18 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

comprehensively with one beholding. Sense perception, which places

the object before the eye in its incarnate givenness, is the model
according to which all conceptual knowledge is to be thought. Ev­
erything hinges upon the intuitional fulfillment of what is intended
[des Gemeinten]. Indeed, we had already learned from Husserl’s hon­
est craft of thinking the art of description, in which one began by
patiently referring to and comparing the most varied and disparate
perspectives and then brought the intended phenomenon to a well-
rounded presentation through masterly stippling. What Husserl’s phe­
nomenological working method opened up seemed to be something
new—something new, because it strove to regain with new means
something of old that had been forgotten (and unlearned). No doubt,
the great ages of philosophizing, for instance that of Athens in the
fourth century or of Jena around the turn of the nineteenth century;
knew how to combine the same fullness of an intuition [Anschauung]
with the use of philosophical concepts so that the fullness of this
intuition would be engendered in the readers and auditors. When
Heidegger took the lectern, his thoughts were always prepared to the
last detail and, in the moment of the lecture, were brought to life in
the greatest detail. During the lecture, he would glance up again and
again and look sideways out of the window; he saw what he was
thinking, and he made us see. When asked about phenomenology,
Husserl was quite right to answer as he used to in the period directly
after World War I: “Phenomenology, that is me and Heidegger.”
I do not believe that Husserl followed the civil custom and
said, ‘Heidegger and me.’ He took his task with too much missionary
seriousness for that. It is quite possible that in the course of the
1920s he got the feeling that his student Heidegger was no collabora­
tor who was going to continue the patient work of his life. His rash
ascent to the top, the incomparable fascination he aroused, and his
stormy temperament surely must have made Husserl, the patient
one, as suspicious of Heidegger as he always had been of Max Scheler’s
volcanic fire. And indeed, the student of this masterly technique of
thinking was different from his master. Heidegger was a person beset
by great questions and final things, a person who was shaken down
to the last fibers of his existence, who was concerned with God and
death, with Being and “nothing,” and who had been called to think­
ing as the mission of his life. These were the burning questions of an
aroused generation whose pride in their cultural and educational
 M A R T IN H E ID E G G E R — 75 Y E A R S 19

tradition had been shaken, the questions that plagued a generation

crippled by the horrors of the materialistic slaughter of World War I,
and these questions were also Heidegger’s questions.
It was precisely at that time that van Gogh’s correspondence
appeared, whose picturesque turbulence mirrored the feeling of life
[Lebensgefiihl] of these years. Excerpts from these letters lay on
Heidegger’s desk under his inkwell and were quoted occasionally in
his lectures. Dostoevski’s novels also stirred us; the red Piper vol­
umes flashed like beacons from every desk. One could sense the
same distress in the lectures given by the young Heidegger, and this
gave him an incomparable power of suggestion. In a whirl of radical
questions—questions that Heidegger posed, that posed themselves
to Heidegger, that he posed to himself—the chasm that had devel­
oped in the course of the last century between academic philosophy
and the need for a world-view seemed to close.
Yet another aspect of Heidegger’s external appearance re­
vealed something most inward: his voice. This voice, which was then
very strong and rich at lower pitches, seemed confined and, without
being too loud, overtaxed when pushed to higher pitches during the
excitement of the lecture. It always seemed to be near the edge,
about to tumble over itself, alarming as it was itself alarmed. Obvi­
ously no deficiency in the voice or breathing techniques used in
speaking pushed him to the outermost edge and final limit of speech.
Rather, precisely the being driven to the outermost edge and the final
limit of thinking seemed to be responsible for the loss of voice and
breath.
People tell me that today this voice and way of giving lec­
tures can be heard on recordings. I can well understand how the
printed word gains a new dimension and becomes easier to compre­
hend when one hears the voice of the author in this way. In spite
of this, I think that a member of the older generation who has
personally experienced the exciting reality of one of Heidegger’s
lectures will excuse me for saying that this kind of technical repro­
duction of his self-disclosing thought experiment comes across like a
mummification. There is no life in a mummy of thought. But
in Heidegger’s thought there was and is life. Life—trials and
temptations, wagers, ways. One of the most peculiar paradoxes con­
cerning the effect of Heidegger’s thinking, so it seems to me, is
that it has elicited a constantly growing stream of interpretations
20 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

dedicated to his thinking but that attempt with the most meticulous
care to order his thinking and systematically reconstruct his “teach­
ings.” This strikes me as paradoxical, regardless of whether it is done
in an honest effort to understand his work or if it is the consequence
of a bitter or perhaps hesitant rejection; to attempt to write a system­
atically developed summary of Heidegger’s thought is not only futile
but even pernicious. After his Being and Time in 1926—in which a
single question is posed and explored—none of Heidegger’s later
works operate on a single, unified plane; they belong to different
planes. They are like a constant ascent, in which all vantage points
and perspectives are continuously shifted, an ascent in which one can
easily lose one’s way and then must retreat to the solid ground of the
phenomenological intuition—only to set off again with a new ascent.
The power of the phenomenological intuition—people gen­
erally recognize that the analysis of world found in Being and Time is
a masterpiece of phenomenological analysis, but at the same time
they tend to think that his later writings become caught up more and
more in inescapable, mythological skeins of concepts. There is some­
thing to that, insofar as these writings document a deficiency in
language, one that led to some rather questionable rescue attempts.
However, one should carefully avoid suggesting that this proves that
Heidegger was losing his phenomenological power. One needs only
to read the chapter on affect, passion, and feeling in the Nietzsche
volumes to put any such suspicions to rest. Rather, the question to
be asked is much more, “Why is Heidegger’s power of phenomeno­
logical intuition, whose continuity we experience with astonishment
in every encounter with Heidegger through the present day, still
insufficient? What kind of task has he gotten himself into? From
what kind of deficiency is he trying to save himself?”
His critics are in the habit of saying that after the so-called
turn [Kehre] Heidegger’s thinking no longer stood on solid ground.
Being and Time is said to be a magnificent liberation, a work through
which the call to the authenticity of Dasein was made and the busi­
ness of philosophical thinking gained a new intensity and responsi­
bility. But it is also said that after the turn, which is tied up with his
topsy-turvy political folly brought on by his own ambition for power
and his intrigue with the Third Reich, he no longer spoke of demon­
strable things. Rather, like one initiated in the secrets of his God, he
speaks only of “Being.” A mythologist and Gnostic, he speaks as an
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R — 7 5 Y E A R S 21

initiate [ein Wissender]—without knowing what he is saying. Being

withdraws. Being presences. “Nothing” nothings. Language speaks.
What kind of beings are acting here? Are these names—perhaps code
names—for a divinity? Is a theologian talking here—or better, a
prophet who is foretelling the arrival of “Being?” And with what
legitimation? Where in such indemonstrable chatter is the conscien­
tiousness expected of thinking?
People ask such questions without recognizing that all of
these Heideggerian expressions speak from the antithesis. They have
been set with a provocative pungency against a certain habituation of
thought, one that holds that it is the spontaneous activity of our
thinking which “posits” something as an entity, negates something,
or “coins” a word. The famous turn, of which Heidegger spoke to
show the inadequacy of his transcendental conception of the self in
Being and Time, is anything but an arbitrary reversal of a habit of
thinking brought about by some voluntary decision. Rather, this was
something that happened to him. It was not a kind of mystical inspi­
ration, but a simple matter of thinking—something so simple and
compelling, as it can sometimes happen with thinking, that it dares
to push itself to the edge. It is therefore necessary to comprehend
this matter of thinking [Sache des Denkens] that had come to Heidegger
in a way that is true to the inner dynamics of the matter itself
In the turn, Being becomes the point of departure; one no
longer takes one’s start from the consciousness that thinks Being, or
from the Dasein that depends on Being, understands itself in its
relationship to Being, and is concerned about its Being. Thus,
Heidegger does not so much pose the question of Being in Being and
Time as prepare for it. Then, after 1930, Heidegger began speaking of
the “turn,” although the first time he did this publicly was after
World War II in his “Letter on Humanism”—perhaps one of his
most beautiful essays due to its exceptionally relaxed style, written as
though he meant to use the informal form of you [du]. This was, of
course, preceded by a series of Holderlin interpretations that indi­
rectly bear witness to the fact that his thinking was in search of a new
language more suited to new insights; these explications of Holderlin’s
difficult poems and verses were in fact a process of identification.
But to try to give an account of the violence he used to bring about
such an identification would be a miserable undertaking. It could tell
us only what anyone who has been following Heidegger’s thought
22 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

knows only too well; namely, that Heidegger resounded only what
stood before him as his task, and .as one truly obsessed with his own
affairs [Sache], he was able to hear only what promised to be an
answer to his own questions. What is much more astonishing is that
Holderlin’s works were able to maintain such a presence for a thinker
that he tried to think them as his own matter [Sache] and according
to his own measure. It seems to me that no encounter with Holderlin
since Hellingrath’s compares to Heidegger’s in intensity and there­
with also in disclosive power—in spite of all of the distortions and
misrepresentations. It m ust have been a genuine release for
Heidegger-—-a type of freeing of his tongue—when he found himself
free to pursue new ways of thinking as an interpreter of Holderlin.
Now he could speak of heaven and earth, of mortals and gods, of
parting and arriving, and of the desert and home-—-as well of that
which had been thought and will be thought [von etwas Gedachtem
und zu Denkerdem], Later, when the lectures entitled “The Origin of
the Work of Art” were published [1950], about which a great deal
had already been heard back in 1936 in Freiburg, Zurich, and Frank­
furt, one could indeed detect a new tone. The use of word earth gave
the Being of the work of art a conceptual characterization that showed
that Heidegger’s Holderlin interpretations (and these lectures) were
stages on his way of thinking.
Whence came this way? Where did it lead? Was it a deadend,
or did it lead to a destination? Certainly, it did not lead to a mountain
peak from which one would be granted an unobstructed view of the
surroundings, disclosing effortlessly the furrowed formations of the
landscape. And certainly, it was also not without detours, backtrack­
ing, and false starts. In spite of this, Heidegger’s later works do not
present us with an aimless series of efforts that in the end prove to be
a failure, simply because he is never able to state clearly what Being
is—-this Being that is not supposed to be the Being of a being [Seiende]
is sometimes said to be able to be without a being and, at other
times, is said to be unable to be without a being (or not: to “be?”). In
every case, there is a beginning and a series of steps following a way.
The first question of the first beginning was: What is the
Being of the human Dasein? Certainly not mere consciousness. But
what kind of Being is this that neither lasts nor counts the way that
the stars or mathematical truths do, but rather constantly dwindles
like all life caught between birth and death, and yet in spite of its
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R — 7 5 Y E A R S 23

finitude and historicity is a “there” [ein Da],b a here, a now, a pres­

ence in the moment [Gegenwart im Augenblick], not an empty point,
but a saturated temporality and a collected totality? The Being of the
human Dasein is said to be just such a “Da” in which the future and
past are not simply moments rolling toward and then away from the
present; rather, the future is each individual's own future, and each
individual’s own history constitutes its own Being from the accident
o f birth on. Because this Dasein, which projects itself into its own
future, must accept itself in its own finitude—a kind of discovery of
oneself as “thrown” into Being—facticity becomes the keyword, and
not self-consciousness, reason, or spirit, that Heidegger used when
he first introduced the question of Being.
But what is this “Da” that Heidegger was immediately to
name “the Dasein in human beings,” words that ring of gnostic mys­
tery? Certainly this “Da” does not mean merely being present; rather,
it signifies an event. Every “D a ” like all things earthly, dwindles,
passes away, and is carried off into oblivion—yet, it is a “Da” pre­
cisely because it is finite, that is, aware of its own finitude. What is
happening there [da], what happens as a “Da,” is what Heidegger
later calls the clearing of Being [Lichtung des Seins]. A clearing is that
into which one enters after walking endlessly in the darkness of a
forest when, suddenly, there is an opening in the trees letting in the
light of the sun—until one has walked through the clearing as well
and the darkness envelops one anew. Certainly not a bad illustration
of the-finite fate of human beings. When Max Scheler died in 1927,
Heidegger gave a speech in his honor during a lecture that ended in
the words, CA way of philosophy falls into darkness once again.”
But Heidegger's question concerning the Being of Dasein
was not geared toward a new “characterization of human beings” or a
new ontological founding of a philosophical anthropology Certainly,
such an anthropology could not have been based solely on Angst and
death, or on boredom and nothing; it would obviously have to take
into account pleasant emotions and constructive moods as well. How­
ever, because the question is concerned with “Being,” it must linger
at those sites where the “Da” stands out in relief before the receding
beings, such as in the “nothing” of Angst or the emptiness of bore­
dom. But the self-clearing of Being occurs not only in the “Da” that
is die human being. It seems to me that Heidegger took a very
important step in designating the work of art as an event of truth. He
24 H E ID E G G E R ’S WAYS

shows that the work of art is not merely the product of an ingenious
creative process, but that it is a work that has its own brightness in
itself; it is there [da], “so true, so fully existing [so seiend].” Anyone
who has seen a Greek temple in the splendid mountain ranges of
Greece will be able to follow Heidegger on this point: It is precisely
in the small, almost delicate dimensions of these Greek temples,
from which an elemental world of overpowering greatness appears to
have been wrestled, that Earth and Heaven, the Stone and the Light
are more authentic; they come forth into the “Da” of their true
essence.
And again with the essay “The Thing” we reach a new pla­
teau, one that offers another view. In this essay not only the artwork,
that is, the event that opens up and supports a world, but also things
used by human beings [dem von Menschen Gebrauchten] are granted
existence and truth. Yet the thing only is-—existing in itself and pressed
toward nothing—because there is a clearing in the ancient forest of
Being that encloses itself within itself
Finally, the word, ccWhere the word breaks of£ no thing can
be.” Heidegger has put even this poem by Stefan George [“Das Wort”]
on the rack in his self-inquisition to interrogate “the word”—this
most mysterious oddity that lies at the very heart and soul of the
human spirit—about Being. One may be ill-disposed toward all of
the Heideggerian formulations such as fate [Geschick] of Being, with­
drawal of Being, forgetfulness of Being, and so on; but anyone who
is not blind should be able to visualize what Heidegger sees, and in
particular with reference to the word. We all know that there are
words that function merely as signals (even if that which has been
signaled is a real “nothing”), and then there are other words—and
this is not confined to poetry—that bear witness themselves to that
which they communicate. These words are, so to speak, proximate to
something that is; they are neither replaceable nor exchangeable, a
“Da” that discloses itself in its own act of speaking. It is obvious in
this case what empty orfull means. That it is “Being” that is absent or
present there can be learned from carrying Heidegger's way of think­
ing to its conclusion.
To be sure, one must make an effort to see contemplatively
[denkend] if one wants to discern the path that Heidegger’s thinking
takes and understand it as the unwavering pursuit of one thinker’s
question. Otherwise, Heidegger’s thinking comes across as a hope­
less meandering through the lightless twilight of a metaphysics for­
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R — 7 5 Y E A R S 25

saken by God. For it is true: this thinking lacks a language. "Yet this
“lack” itself will completely convince him that this thinking attempts
its reflections in the midst of a forgetfulness of Being. It is enmeshed
in our technical age, an age that views even language as a technical
tool. Language has become a tooth on the cog of the “information
theory.” One encounters with Heidegger a deficiency of language—a
linguistic impass that he himself ran up against. However, in the final
analysis this deficiency is not merely the end result of a thinker’s
attempt to think the unconventional and unthought. Perhaps it has
more the character of an occurrence, drifting in from the distance; a
predicament in which we have all found ourselves at one time or
other. Words no longer emerge like flowers. Instead, ways of talking
become widespread, as schematic as the situations they are designed
to control. And precisely the most abstract language of mathematical
symbolism seems to be uniquely suited to the task of technically
controlling and managing the world. A deficiency of language as
such is not encountered at all. Obviously, there is a forgetfulness of
this deficiency of language that is a type of counterpart to the forget-
fulness of Being that Heidegger speaks of; indeed, the former may be
the very expression and general proof of the latter.
Perhaps it was not to be avoided that this thinker’s language
often resembles a tormented stammering, for it is a language strug­
gling to awaken from the forgetfulness of Being and to think only
that which is worthy of thought. The same man whose words and
phrases could be* of such visual force and power that they were un­
paralleled by those of his philosophical contemporaries, whose words
allowed us to think of materialized phenomena, whose words made
something spiritual tangible—this same man extracts out of the shafts
of language the most peculiar lumps, breaks up the extracted stones
so that they completely lose their usual outline, and moves around in
a world of fragmented word-rocks, searching, checking. These fac­
ets, artificially produced in this manner, carry his message. Some­
times he makes a real discovery; then the words spark suddenly, and
one sees with one’s own eyes what Heidegger is saying. Sometimes a
tragic struggle for the right language and a concept with the ability to
speak permeates Heidegger’s work—in which case anyone wishing
to think with him is necessarily drawn into the struggle.
Why this impass, this deficiency? Typically the philosopher’s
language is that of Greek metaphysics and its legacy, a language that
has been passed on through the Latin of antiquity and the Middle
26 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

Ages to the national languages of contemporary times. Therefore,

many conceptual words in philosophy are foreign words. But the
great thinkers usually have the power to find new ways of expressing
what they want to say—ways that their native tongue held ready for
them. Plato and Aristotle, for example, created a conceptual language
drawn from the living, flexible language of their contemporary Athe­
nians. Likewise, Cicero came up with certain Latin words that could
pass on Greek concepts. Similarly, Meister Eckhart at the beginning
of the Middle Ages, Leibniz, Kant, and above all Hegel were able to
develop new ways of expressing the conceptual language of philoso­
phy. The young Heidegger was also able to draw upon the linguistic
resources of his native Alemannic home and release new linguistic
forces that have enriched our philosophical language.
However, the later Heidegger found himself in a much worse
predicament. N ot only the conceptual and linguistic habits of others
continuously attempted to push him off the course set by his own
questions, but even his own conceptual and linguistic habits exerted
this pressure, habits that were determined by the tradition of occidental
thought. His thinking is threatened in this way because his question
is really a new one. It is not a metaphysical question concerning the
highest being (God) and the Being of all beings. Rather, the concern
is much more about what first opens up the area for such questions
and forms the space in which these metaphysical questions move
about. Indeed, Heidegger’s question is concerned with something
that the tradition assumes to be unquestionable: What is Being in the
first place [uberhaupt]? All of the great metaphysicians were unable to
reply to this question because they always asked what made an entity
an entity or what entities ultimately are. The conceptual tools that
they had developed for use in their answers could offer Heidegger
limited assistance with reference to his question. They always give a
false appearance, as if it were somehow valid to offer assurances that
the being that stood behind all of those previously known would one
day show itself. But Heidegger’s task was much more to become
aware of that which, more than anything else, can become the object
of knowledge, of that which first makes the knowledge itself ques­
tioning itself or thinking itself possible. Whoever attempts to think
the area in which the relationship between thinking and that which
has been thought first disintegrates, seems to get lost in the
unthinkable.0That there is something at all and not nothing—this
 M A R T IN H E ID E G G E R — 7 5 Y E A R S 27

most radical exaggeration of the question of metaphysics speaks of

Being as if it were something known. Is there a way of thinking that
brushes against this unthinkable? Heidegger calls it “rememberance”
[Andenken] and the dubious echo of “reverence” [Andacht] may well
have been intended, in as much as the religious experience touches
this unprethinkability [Unvordenkliche] of Being more than meta­
physical thinking. And what can be said of thinking can also be said
of the language of thinking. Language names the thinkable and that
which has been thought; it has no word for the unprethinkability of
Being. “Being is itself” said Heidegger, frustrating those curious about
Being. Is “Being” nothing? Is “nothing” nothing? The paths Heidegger
has taken, some of which were described previously, permit one to
think what he has called Being. But how can it be said?
Heidegger's rescue attempts are violent. He is constantly rup­
turing the natural understanding of familiar words and forcing new
meanings upon them—often basing this on etymological connec­
tions that no one else sees. The products of this approach are ex­
tremely manneristic expressions and provocations of our linguistic
expectations.
Must it be so? Does not the natural language in its universal
malleability always offer a new way to express what one has to say?
And is it not the case that whatever does not allow itself to be said
has been insufficiently thought? Perhaps. But we have no choice.
Now that Heidegger has posed the question, we are obligated to
continue our inquiry in the direction it delineates; we can only hope
to be assisted by that found in his works which is accessible to our
understanding. It is easy to poke fun at things unusual or violent. To
improve on it is much more difficult. Certainly the game in which
participants shove around the little ivory discs inscribed with
Heidegger's conceptual jargon—a form of following Heidegger that
is very common—should not be played. This type of scholasticism
blocks the way info the opening formed by the question asked no
less than the most caustic polemics.
But either way, Heidegger is there [da]. One cannot get
around him nor—-unfortunately—can one progress beyond him in
the direction of his question. He blocks the path in a most disturbing
way. He is an erratic block awash in a stream of thinking rushing
toward technical perfection. But he is a block that cannot be budged
from its place.
 C hapter T hree

T he Marburg
T heology (1964)

L ^ e t us think back to the 1920s, to that great, tension-

filled time when the theological turn away from the historical and
liberal theology was made, when the philosophical rejection of neo-
Kantianism took place, when the Marburg school was dissolved, and
when new stars rose in the philosophical heavens. At that time Eduard
Thurneysen delivered a lecture to the community of Marburg theo­
logians. For those of us who were younger, it was one of the first
harbingers of the dialectical theology in Marburg, Upon its conclu­
sion, it received the more or less hesitant blessings of the Marburg
theologians. The young Heidegger also took part in this discussion.
He had just come to Marburg as an associate professor, and to this
day it is unforgettable to me how he closed his contribution to the
discussion on the Thurneysenian lecture. After evoking the Chris­
tian skepticism of Franz Overbeck, Heidegger said that it was the
true task of theology—a task that theology must find its way back
to-—-to search for the word that was capable of beckoning one to and
preserving one in faith. A genuine Heidegger sentence, full of ambi­
guity. As Heidegger said this sentence, it sounded as if he was setting
forth a task for theology. But perhaps he was expressing a thought
even more radical than the one he had just quoted; perhaps he was
voicing a skepticism concerning the possibility of theology itself that
transcended Franz Overbeck's attack on the theology of his time.

29
30 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

A stormy epoch of philosophical-theological debates broke

forth then. On the one hand, there was the dignified coolness of
Rudolf Otto, on the other, the sharp, aggressive exegesis of Rudolf
Bultmann; on the one hand, Nicolai Hartmann’s astute, refined art
of chasing, on the other, the breathtaking radicalism of Heidegger’s
questions that also cast a spell over theology. The prototype of Being
and Time was a lecture given to the community of Marburg theolo­
gians in 1924.
That which was first voiced in Heidegger’s discussion of the
Thurneysenian lecture can be followed as a central motif of his think­
ing until the present day [1964]: the problem of language. There was
no foundation for this in Marburg. The Marburg school, which had
been distinguished for decades within the then contemporary neo-
Kantianism because of its methodological rigor, concentrated prima­
rily on the foundations of science. For them' it was completely
self-evident that the complete acquisition of all that is knowable could
take place only in the sciences, that the objectification of experience
through science fulfilled completely the meaning of knowledge. The
purity of the concept, the precision of the mathematical formula, the
triumph of the infinitesimal method—this, not the midworld of un­
stable linguistic shapes, defined the philosophical orientation of the
Marburg school. Even when Ernst Cassirer included the phenom­
enon of language in the topic of the neo-Kantian idealism, he did so
methodically with the methodical idea of objectification. To be sure,
his philosophy of the symbolic forms had nothing to do with a meth­
odology of the sciences; rather, in this theory myth and language
were viewed as symbolic forms, that is, as shapes [Gestalten] of the
objective spirit and, moreover, in such a way that they were to find
their methodical basis in the primary stream of the transcendental
consciousness.
Well, it was then that phenomenology began to mark an
epoch in Marburg. Max Scheler’s founding of the ethics of material
value, which was connected with a overly angry and blind criticism
of the formalism of the Kantian moral philosophy, made a lasting
impression on Nicolai Hartmann early on, who was then the avant-
gardist within the Marburg school.1 It was convincing-—as it had1

1. See N . Hartmann’s review in the Jahrbuch fiir Philosophic und phanomenologische

Forschung, 1 (1914): 35, 97 fF. See also Hartmann, Kleine Sckriftenll (Berlin: DeGruyter,
1958), pp. 365 £E
 T he Marburg T heology 31

been for Hegel a century earlier—that one cannot approach the total­
ity of ethical phenomena from the phenomenon of an “ought,”
that is, as in the imperative form of an ethics. Therefore, a first
limit to the subjective, fundamental basis of the transcendental
consciousness appeared in the field of moral philosophy: the “ought-
consciousness” could not cover the whole scope of moral value. But
the phenomenological school had still a more powerful impact in
that it did not share the Marburg school's orientation toward the
“self-evident” facts of science. Instead, it went behind the scientific
experience and the categorical analysis of scientific methods and
moved the natural life experiences—that which the later Husserl
named with the now-famous term life world—into the foreground of
the phenomenological research. Both of these, the moral-philosophical
tu rn away from the im perative ethics and the tu rn from
methodologism of the Marburg school, had their theological coun­
terparts. The difficulty of speaking of God became a new issue, and
as a consequence, the foundations of systematic and historical theol­
ogy came upon shaky ground. Rudolf Bultmann’s critique of myth
and his concept of the mythical world image, especially insofar as it
still held sway in the New Testament, was also a critique of the claim
to totality made by objectifying thinking. Bultmann’s concept of “hav­
ing at one’s disposal” [Verfugbarkeit], with which he attempted to
encompass in identical ways both the process of historical science
and that of mythical thinking formed a concept that was precisely the
opposite of the actual theological testimony.
Then Heidegger entered the scene at Marburg, and immedi­
ately, whatever he read—whether it was Descartes, Aristotle, Plato,
or Kant who formed the link—his analysis always pressed on to the
most original experience of Dasein, which he disclosed from behind
the concealment of traditional concepts. Theological questions moti­
vated him from the start. An early manuscript, which Heidegger had
sent to Paul Natorp in 1922 and I had a chance to read, shows this
really well. It was a basic introduction to an Aristotle interpretation
that Heidegger had prepared, and above all it dealt with the young
Luther, with Gabriel Biel, and with Augustine. Heidegger would
certainly have named it an exposition of a hermeneutical situation; it
attempted to make the reader aware of the questions and intellectual
expectations with which we approach Aristotle, the master of the
tradition. Today no one would doubt that the fundamental inten­
tion which guided Heidegger in his engrossment with Aristotle was
32 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

critical and de< constructive. At the time, this was not so clear at
all. Heidegger brought superb powers of phenomenological intuition
[Anschauungskraft] to his interpretations and, in so doing, freed the
original Aristotelian text so thoroughly and effectively from the over­
lay of the scholastic tradition and from the miserable, distorted pic­
ture the critical philosophy of the period had of Aristotle (Cohen
loved to say, “Aristotle was a pharmacist.”) that he began to speak in
an unexpected way. Perhaps the strength of opponent was such that
it dominated not only those learning but even Heidegger himself for
a while. Or perhaps the strengthening of the opponent that Heidegger,
true to the Platonic principle that one should strengthen the
opponent’s position,2was willing to dare in his interpretations gave
Aristotle such a dominating presence.3But what else is there to inter­
pret in philosophy if not to engage thoroughly with the truth of the
text and to risk exposing oneself to it?
I became aware of something like this for the first time when
I met Heidegger in 1923—still in Freiburg—and took part in a semi­
nar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. We were studying the analysis
o fphronesis [thinking, practical wisdom]. Heidegger showed us with
reference to Aristotle’s text that all techne [(technical) skill] contained
an internal limit: Its knowledge never entails a complete disclosure
because the work that it knew how to produce is released into the
uncertainty of a use that was not at one’s disposal [eines unveifugbaren
Gebrauchs]. And then, as a topic for discussion, he presented the
distinction that separated all knowledge—especially that of mere doxa
[opinion]—from phronesis: tt^s p,ev toiqtuttjs e£ea>s 3e'oriv,
ypovfjcreais Se o v\ 3e a r tv (1140 b 29).aAs we groped for an interpre­
tation, uncertain about the sentence and completely unfamiliar with
the Greek concepts, Heidegger explained curtly, “That is the con­
science!” This is not the place to reduce the pedagogical exaggeration
contained in this claim to its appropriate dimensions, and even less
the place to point out the logical and ontological weight that Aristotle’s
analysis of phronesis in fact carries. But what Heidegger found in this,
which was also what fascinated him so with Aristotle’s criticism of
Plato’s idea of the Good and with Aristotle’s concept of practical

2. Plato, S o p h is t , 246d.
3. Consider in this respect the reference to Aristotle’s N ic o m a c h e a n E th ic s VI and
M e ta p h y s ic s I ( S e in u n d Z e i t , p. 225, footnote 1).
 T he Marburg T heo lo g y 33

knowledge, is clear today: Here a type of knowing (a ei8os yva)crea)s)4

is described that admits of no reference to a final objectivity in the
sense of a science—a knowing in the concrete situation of existence.
Indeed, could Aristotle perhaps have helped to overcome the onto­
logical prejudices of the Greek concept of the Logos, which Heidegger
later interpreted temporally as being present-at-hand [Vorhandenheit]
and presentness [Anwesenheit]? This violent appropriation of the
Aristotelian text for use with his own questions reminds one of how
the call of the conscience in Being and Time is what first makes the
“Dasein in human beings” visible in its ontological and temporal
event-structure. It was much later that Heidegger, when rethinking
the concept of Dasein in the light of the “clearing,” dissolved all
connections with any transcendental reflective thinking.5Could it be
that in the final analysis the word of faith has found a new philo­
sophical legitimation through the critique of logos and the under­
standing of Being, much in the same way that the later Heidegger’s
“rememberance” [Andenken] never allows one to completely forget
the nearness to the old “reverence” [Andacht], which Hegel had al­
ready observed? Had that been the gist of Heidegger’s ambiguous
contribution to the Thurneysenian discussion?
Later, in Marburg, a similar instance drew our attention.
This time Heidegger was concerned with a scholastic contradiction
and spoke of the distinction between actus signatus [an act that has
been explicitly designated as spontaneously executed] and actus
exercitus [a spontaneously executed act] .bThese scholastic concepts
correspond roughly to the concepts reflexive and directe and refer, for
example, to the distinction between the act of questioning itself
and the possibility of concentrating on the question as a question.
The transition from one to the other can be easily made. One can
designate the question as a question and, thus, not only question
but also point out that one is questioning and that such and such is
questionable. This ability to reverse the transition from that which
is immediate and direct into the reflexive intention seemed to us
then to be a way to freedom. This promised to liberate thinking

4. Aristotle, N ic o m a c h e a n E th ic s VI 9, 1141 b 33£

5. That the Aristotelian concept o f 7 w is [nature] was also important for Heidegger
in this development can be seen in his interpretation o f Aristotle, P h y s B 1 W e v m a r k e n ,
pp. 309-371.
34 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

from the inescapable circle of reflection; it also pledged a way to

regain both the evocative power of conceptual thinking and a philo­
sophical language that had the ability to secure for thinking a posi­
tion next to poetic language.
Certainly Husserl’s phenomenology had moved beyond the
sphere of explicit objectivizations in its analysis of the transcendental
constitution. Husserl talked of anonymous intentionalities, that is,
conceptual intentions in which something was intended and posed as
ontically valid, but that no one person intends and carries out con­
sciously, thematically or individually—intuitions that are nonetheless
basic for everyone. This is more or less how the phenomenon that
we refer to as the stream of consciousness is developed in the inner time
consciousness. The horizon of the lived world is yet another ex­
ample of a product of anonymous intentionalities. However, both
the scholastic distinction with which Heidegger was concerned and
Husserl’s constitutional analysis of the anonymous achievements of
the transcendental consciousness share a basic assumption. They both
presuppose an unlimited universality of reason that can clarify each
and every thing intended in a constitutive analysis—an analysis that
transforms these things anonymously intended into objects of an
explicit act of intending, that is, objectifies them.
Heidegger himself moved resolutely in another direction.
He pursued the inner inextricability of authenticity and inauthenticity,
of truth and error, and the concealment that necessarily accompanies
all disclosure and shows the internal contradiction in the idea of total
objectifiability. Where this led him can already be seen in the insight
that was then the most moving and instructive to us: The most
original way in which the past is is not in memory but in forgetting.6
Here Heidegger’s ontological protest against Husserl’s transcenden­
tal subjectivity shows up most visibly at a point most central to the
phenomenology of inner time consciousness. Certainly Husserl’s phe­
nomenological analysis is more precise than Brentano’s analysis of
the role of memory in time consciousness. Husserl differentiated
explicit recollection, which always accompanies the act of intending
“a perceived entity,” from the entity of the present, which is held fast
in the process of sinking away. Husserl named this process of sinking
away the retentional consciousness, and he based all time consciousness

6. Compare S e in u n d Z e i t , p. 339.
 T he Marburg T heo lo g y 35

and consciousness of entities in time on its performance.7These were

certainly “anonymous” performances, but their goal was nevertheless
to bring about a retention-of-the-present or, so to speak, to arrest the
movement into the past. The now, this rolling into the present from
the future and rolling away into the past, was always understood
from the vantage point of “being currently present-to-hand.”
Heidegger, on the other hand, had in view the original ontological
dimensionality of time that is fundamental to the motility of Dasein.
From this vantage point, light is shed not only on the enigmatic
irreversibility of time—in that it never emerges, it only passes away—
but it also becomes obvious that time does not have its Being in the
now or irn a series of nows; rather it has its Being in the futurity
[Zukiinftigkeit] that is essential to Dasein. This is obviously true to
the real experience of history, to the way in which historicality hap­
pens with us. Forgetting attests to the fact that something happens to
us—rather than that we do it. It is a way in which the past and
passing away show their actuality and power. Clearly Heidegger’s
thinking moved in a direction away from Husserl’s transcendental
philosophy of reflection, which—as in Husserl’s case—thematized
with the help of anonymous intentionalities these structures of tem­
porality as inner time consciousness as well as the self-construction
of inner time consciousness. In the end, the critique of both the
modern concept of the subject and the ontological prejudices found
in the Aristotelian concepts of being and substance put asunder the
idea of transcendental reflection.
Every actus exercitus in which reality is experienced in a com­
pletely unreflective manner, such as the reality of the tool in incon­
spicuous service or the past as it inconspicuously fades away, disallows
its conversion into a designated act unless it is provided with a new
covering. This can be found in a stronger form in Heidegger’s analy­
sis of Dasein as being-in-the-world, in that the Being of the beings
experienced in this way—especially the worldhood of world—is not
encountered “objectively” \gegenstandlich], but rather conceals itself
in an essential way. Already the character of ready-to-hand as a “hold­
ing within,” upon which the “Being-in-itself” was ultimately based

7. Compare the V orlesu n gen z u r P h a n o m e n o lo g ie d e r in n e r e n Z e itb e w u s s ts e in , ed. Martin

Heidegger, in the J a h r b u c h f u r P h ilo s o p h ie u n d p h d n o m e n o lo g is c h e F o rsc h u n g , 4 (1928):
395 ff
36 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

(the “Being-in-itself” could not be explained from the present-at-

hand), had been discussed in Sein und Zeit (p. 75). The Being of
ready-to-hand is not simply concealment and seclusion, upon whose
unconcealment and disclosure everything depended. Its “truth,” its
authentic, undisguisable Being lies manifestly in its inconspicuous­
ness, unobtrusiveness, and nonobstinacy. Already here in Being and
Time are preludes to the radical turn away from the “clearing” and
“disclosedness” that were oriented to the self-understanding
[Selbstverstandnis] of Dasein. Even though the “holding within of that
which is ready-to-hand” may well have been based ultimately
on Dasein as the “for-the-sake-of-which” of all involvement, it is
obviously due to the nature of being-in-the-world itself that
“disclosedness” does not imply a complete transparency of Dasein,
but rather entails an essential being-thoroughly-ruled by the indeter­
minate (Sein undZeity p. 308). This “holding within” of the ready-to-
hand is not so much withholding and concealment as being included
and being sheltered in the fabric of the world in which it had its
Being. The internal tensions not only between “unconcealment” and
“concealment” but also between “unconcealment” and “sheltering”
determine the dimension in which language can become visible in its
elusive, unmanageable Being, a dimension that also can be useful for
the theologians in their understanding of God’s word.—
In the area of theology the concept of self-understanding
experienced a corresponding transformation. It was evident that the
self-understanding of faith, which is the fundamental aim of Protes­
tant theology, could not be appropriately grasped with the transcen­
dental concept of self-consciousness. We are familiar with this concept
from transcendental idealism. Fichte, in particular, had proclaimed
the “Wissenschaftslehre” as the single consistent realization of the self­
understanding transcendental idealism. Perhaps one remembers his
criticism of Kant’s concept of the “thing in itself”8At this point
Fichte said with his characteristic base roughness, “If Kant had un­
derstood himself, then the ‘thing in itself’ could have only meant
something or other. If Kant had not thought that, then he would
have only been a half wit and no thinker at all.”9It is fundamental to
the concept of self-understanding that all dogmatic presuppositions

8. Fichte, D i e Z w e i t e E in le itu n g in d ie W iss e n sc h a ftsleh re , WW I, 471 f.; 474 ff.; 82 f.

9. Ibid., p.486.
 T he Ma rburg T heo lo g y 37

are eliminated through the internal self-production of reason, so that

upon completion of this self-construction of the transcendental sub­
ject a total transparency of the self is rendered. It is astonishing how
close Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology comes to meeting this
demand set forth by Fichte and Hegel.
Such a concept could not be maintained in theology without
a reformulation. For if something is indispensable to the idea of
revelation, then it is precisely this: Human beings are incapable of
obtaining a understanding of themselves solely from themselves. It is
an ancient motif of the experience of faith—a motif that is ever­
present in Augustine’s reflections on his life—that all attempts of
human beings to understand themselves from themselves and from
the world that they have at their disposal are ill-fated. Indeed, it
appears that the word and concept “self-understanding” owes its first
formulation to the Christian experience. We find intimations of this
in the correspondence between Hamann und his friend Jacobi. In
these letters Hamann approaches his friend from the standpoint of
pietistic certain faith and attempts to convince him that he would
never be able to reach a pure self-understanding with his philosophy
and with the role that faith played in it.10What Hamann had in mind
was obviously more than the complete self-transparency of a think-*1

10. See “Renate Knoll, J. G. Hamann und Fr. Jacobi,” in the “Heidelberg Forschg.
7,” 1963. See also my work, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverstandnisses” ( K le in e
S c h r ifte n I, pp. 70-81). My train o f thought in both works shows that I had just
begun to concern myself with the novelty o f the morphology o f “self-understand­
ing” and the difficulties that surround it. In the first edition I expressed myself
incorrectly, an error I have since corrected. The word s e lf -u n d e r s ta n d in g is indeed
young. F. Tschirch (F estsch rift E g g e r s , 1972) presented an extensive collection o f evi­
dence for that. He had obviously either not read or not understood my own works;
otherwise he would have silently corrected this mistake, which went unnoticed by
me. Etymologists should also take note o f the following observations about the
history o f the concept:
1. The collection o f words presented by Tschirch indirectly confirms the pietistic
origin o f the concept as put forth by myself: Both Erwin Metzke and Hans R. G.
Gunther dealt as researchers with pietism (Hamann, Jung-Stilling).
2. Tschirch is not justified in tracing the modern, theological use o f the word
back solely to Karl Schumann. S e lf- u n d e r s ta n d in g was already a favorite word o f
Rudolf Bultmanns in the 1920s— as I have shown with the contribution quoted
previously.
3. Also, Theodor Litt is correct when he wrote in 1938, “ ‘Self-understanding’ is
sought aftei the ‘self-evidence’ o f D a s e i n is gone.**
38 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

ing that has obtained a state of consistent and continuous harmony

with itself. Self-understanding has much more than a determining
moment of historicality. Anyone who has achieved true self-under­
standing has had something and is having something happen to him.
The modern discourse concerning the self-understanding of faith is
concerned precisely with this: The believer has become aware of his
or her dependence on God. The believer gains an insight into the
impossibility of knowing oneself from that which one has at their
disposal.
With the concept of having something at one’s disposal
[Verfugen] and the necessary shattering of any self-understanding based
upon that which one has at one’s disposal, Rudolf Bultmann turned
Heidegger’s critique of the philosophical tradition on theology. In
keeping with his own scientific origins, he sharply distinguished the
Christian orientation to faith from the self-consciousness of the Greek
philosophy. However, Greek philosophy was for him, as one focused
not so much upon the ontological bases as upon the existential state­
ments, the philosophy of the Hellenic age and especially the stoic
ideal of self-sufficiency. This ideal was in turn interpreted as the ideal
of having oneself completely at one’s disposal [voile Selbstverfugung]
and was criticized as being untenable from the Christian point of
view. From this point of departure and under the influence of
Heideggerian thinking, Bultmann explicated his position through the
concepts of inauthenticity and authenticity. This Dasein, which has
fallen into the world and understands itself only through that which
it has at its disposal, is called upon to convert, and the shattering of
the illusion that it had itself completely at its disposal [.Selbstverfugung]
brings about a turn to authenticity. For Bultmann, the transcendental
analytic of Dasein seemed to describe in neutral terms a basic an­
thropological constitution that allowed for an “existentielP0interpre­
tation of the call to faith—irrespective of its content—within
the fundamental movement of existence. It was precisely this
transcendental-philosophical conception found in Being and Time that
was integrated into theological thinking. Certainly the old, idealistic
concept of self-understanding and its culmination in “absolute knowl­
edge” could no longer depict the a priori < nature > [das Apriori] of
the experience of faith. Indeed, it was the a priori < nature> of an
event, the a priori < nature > of the historicality and finitude of the
human Dasein, that was to make the conceptual explication of the
 T he Mar burg T heolo g y 39

event of faith possible. And this is precisely what Heidegger’s inter­

pretation of Dasein accomplished via temporality.
It would exceed my competency to attempt a discussion of
the exegetic richness of Bultmann’s approach here. But one can cer­
tainly say that his new existentiall exegesis was a triumph. It allowed
the Letters of Paul and the Gospel of John to be interpreted in terms
of the self-understanding of their faith with the rigorous methods of
historical philology, and precisely this method of interpretation of
the kerygmatic meaning of the New Testament brought it to its
highest realization.
Meanwhile, Heidegger’s way of thinking led him in the
opposite direction. The transcendental-philosophical conception of
the self began to show itself to be less and less in keeping with the
inner concern of Heidegger’s thinking that had stirred him from the
beginning. The later talk of a turn [Kehre\, which eradicated all exis­
tential overtones from the talk of the authenticity of Dasein and,
thus, the concept of authenticity itself, could no longer be brought
into harmony, so it seems to me, with the fundamental theological
concerns of Rudolf Bultmann. Only after this turn did Heidegger
truly begin to approach a dimension in which his earlier demand on
theology—that it find the word that not only called one to faith but
was also capable of preserving one in faith—could be met. If the call
to faith, the summons that challenged the self-sufficiency of the ego
and made it necessary that the ego become an issue for itself in faith,
was to be able to be interpreted as self-understanding, then the lan­
guage of faith—a language that could preserve one in faith—was
perhaps something quite different. It was exactly this for which
Heidegger’s thinking sketched out an increasingly more visible new
foundation: Truth as an event that contained within itself its own
error [Irre], the unconcealment, the concealment, and with it the
sheltering, also the well-known phrase from the “Letter on Human­
ism” in which language is the “house of Being”—all of this points
beyond the horizon of any self-understanding, be it one shattered
and historical.
Progress can also be made by proceeding along the same
lines from the experience of understanding and from the historicality
o f self-knowledge, and my own attempts at a philosophical
hermeneutics begin at this point. First of all, the experience of art
presents us with an irrefutable evidence that one’s self-understanding
40 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

does not offer an adequate horizon for interpretation. This is cer­

tainly nothing new with reference to the experience of art. Never­
theless, the concept of a genius, which has served as the basis of the
more recent philosophy of art since Kant, contains an essential ele­
ment of the unconscious. For Kant, the internal correspondence to a
creative nature, whose formations bestow us with and confirms in a
human way the wonder of beauty, follows from the fact that the
genius, as a favorite of nature, creates exemplary works with neither
awareness nor application of rules. It is a necessary consequence of
this conception of the self that the artist’s own interpretation loses its
legitimation. The artist’s self-interpretive statements ensue from a
position of subsequent reflection, and the artist is not entitled to a
privileged position over the others who stand before his work. Such
self-interpretive statements are certainly documents and, in some
circumstances, key clues for interpreters who follow, but they are not
of canonical status.
The consequences become even more significant if one ex­
tends this beyond the boundaries of the aesthetics of the genius and
Erlebnis-art and takes into account the internal affiliation of the inter­
preter with the movement of meaning in the work. Then the stan­
dards of an unconscious canon, which are perceived in the wonder
of a creative spirit, must be given up. The universality of the
hermeneutic phenomenon surfaces in its entirety behind the experi­
ence of art.
Indeed, this leads to a deeper penetration into the historical
nature of all understanding. A momentous insight comes to the fore
particularly when one studies the older hermeneutics of the seven­
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Can the mens auctoris,dthat which the
author intended, be recognized in an unrestricted way as the standard
for understanding a text? If one interprets this hermeneutic principle
in a broad and charitable way, then there is certainly something con­
vincing about it. Namely, if one understands “what the author in­
tended by this” as “what he or she could have intended by this in
general [uberhaupt], ” that is, what lay in the author’s own individual
and temporal-historical horizon, and one excludes that “which could
not have occurred to the author at all,” then this principle seems sound.11
It keeps the interpreter from making anachronisms, from inserting*S .

11. Compare Chladenius, quoted in W a h rh e it u n d M e th o d e , p. 172 (G e s . W erke, vol. 1,

S. 187).
 T he Mar burg T heo lo g y 41

things arbitrarily and making illegitimate applications. It seems to pro­

vide a formula for the moral of a historical consciousness and for the
conscientiousness of historical meaning.
However, if one associates the interpretation of texts with
the understanding and the experience of the work of art, then this
principle also contains something fundamentally questionable. Per­
haps there are historically appropriate and, in this sense, authentic
ways to experience the work of art, but the experience of art certainly
cannot to be restricted to them. Even those who do not want to
embrace fully a Pythagoreanizing aesthetic because they want to em­
phasize the historical task of integration—a task that all experiences
of art as hujnan experiences involve—even those will have to recog­
nize that the work of art depicts a peculiar type of structure of mean­
ing whose ideality approaches the ahistorical dimensions of the
mathematical.12Obviously, its experience and explication [Auslegung]
can in no sense be limited by the mens auctoris. If we now add that the
internal unity of understanding and explication—a unity already
pointed out by German Romanticism—brings every object we are
trying to understand, regardless of whether it be a work of art, a text,
or any part of a tradition, into the movement of the present and
allows it to speak again in the language of the present, then I believe
one can see certain theological consequences being sketched out.
The kerygmatic meaning of the New Testament, which lends
the form of application of pro me [for or according to me] to the
gospel, cannot, in the end, contradict the legitimate investigations of
the historical sciences. As I see it, this is an indispensable require­
ment of the scientific consciousness. It is impossible to assume that
there is a mutually exclusive relationship between the meaning and
the salvation-meaning of a scriptural text. But could a relationship of
mutual exclusion be the issue here in the first place? Does not the
intended meaning of the New Testament authors, an intended mean­
ing that they were certainly able to imagine in great detail, move in
the direction of the meaning of salvation for which one reads the
bible? This is not to say that their statements are to be granted the
status of an adequate, appropriate self-understanding. They certainly

12. In my opinion, O. Becker was unable to raise any real issue for a dispute when
he tried to play the “Pythagorean” truth off against my attempts to interpret the
aesthetic experience hermeneutically (see P h ilo s o p h is c h e R u n d s c h a u 10 [1969], begin­
ning on p. 225, see especially p. 237).
42 H E ID E G G E R ’S WAYS

belong to the genre of “original literature” [ Urliteratur], as character­

ized by Franz Overbeck. If the meaning o f a text is understood as
mens auctoris, that is, the “actual” horizon o f understanding of the
Christian authors of the day, then the authors of the New Testament
are given a false honor. Their actual honor lies precisely in the fact
that they are the herald for something that surpasses their own hori­
zon of understanding—even if they are called John or Paul.
We are in no way propagating a theory of uncontrollable
inspiration and pneumatic exegesis. This would squander the knowl­
edge won by the science of the New Testament. What we are dealing
with here is in truth not a theory of inspiration. This becomes clear
when one links the hermeneutical situation o f theology together with
hermeneutical situation of jurisprudence, o f the humanities, and of
the experience of art, as I did in my attempt at a philosophical
hermeneutics. Understanding is never simply regaining that which
the author “intended,” regardless of whether the author was the cre­
ator of a work of art, perpetrator of some act, the writer of a book of
law or whatever. The mens auctoris does not limit the horizon of
understanding in which the interpreter moves, indeed, in which the
interpreter must necessarily move if, instead of parroting, he truly
wants to understand.
The most definitive evidence of this, so it seems to me, lies
in language. Interpretation does not merely take place in the medium
o f language; interpretation deals with linguistic forms, and by trans­
forming these forms into its own understanding, it carries the form
over into its own linguistic world. This is not an act that is secondary
to understanding. After Schleiermacher, the old distinction between
“thinking” (voeiv) and “speaking” (Xeyeiv), which was always held
by the Greeks (a distinction that first appeared in a didactic poem by
Parmenides13), has been unable to confine hermeneutics to the
preliminariness of merely removing occasional difficulties. Also, we
are in essence not dealing with a “carrying over” or a “transferal” at
all, at least not from one language into another. The hopeless inad­
equacy of all translations shows this distinction very clearly. One
who “understands” is not bound by the constraints of a translator—
where one must give a word-for-word rendition of an assigned text—
when one tries to explicate one’s understanding. Rather, one takes

13. See H. Diels, F ra g m e n te d e r V orsokratiker, 5th ed., pp. 2, 7 £, 8, 35 f.

 T he Ma rburg T heolo g y 43

part in the freedom that comes with true speaking, with saying what
is meant or intended. Certainly every understanding is always “un­
derway”; it never comes completely to a close. And nevertheless, a
totality of meaning is present in the free execution of saying what is
meant, and this includes what is meant by an interpreter. Any under­
standing that articulates itself in language finds itself surrounded by a
free space—a space that reverberates with the continuous reply of the
understanding to the words spoken to it, but a space that it is never
completely filled up. “There is much to say”—this is the fundamen­
tal axiom of hermeneutics. Interpretation is no more the subsequent
fixing of fleeting opinions in language than is speaking. That which
comes to language, and this is also the case in our literary tradition, is
not merely a collection of opinions as such; rather an experience of
the world itself is given through this medium, and the totality of our
historical tradition is enclosed within it. A tradition is always perme­
able to that which is carried [tradiert] within it. Every reply to the call
of the tradition, and not only the word that theology is searching for,
is a word that preserves.
 C h a pter Fo u r

W h a t Is
Metaphysics? (1978)

H e i d e g g e r ’s Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1929 occupies

a distinctive place in his work. It is an academic lecture delivered to
the professors and students of his old alma mater, an institution that
he had left after his stay as a student, assistant, and unsalaried lec­
turer and to which he was returning then in 1929—but at that time,
after the sweeping success of Sein und Zeit, as the most famous thinker
of his time. The response to this lecture was also exceptional. Trans­
lations into French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English,
and Turkish followed immediately, and I do not know how many
translations into still other languages have ensued since. But the
rashness and broadness of the first dissemination of this lecture into
other cultures is itself noteworthy A translation of Sein und Zeit
obviously could not follow so quickly due to its size, but the fact that
the lecture “What Is Metaphysics” received such a peculiarly turbulant
and broad response simply cannot be ignored. Especially the fact that
translations into Japanese and later into Turkish appeared so early on
says something, for these translations extended beyond the sphere of
the Christian languages of Europe. Heidegger’s ability to think be­
yond metaphysics obviously came across a special readiness in re­
gions where the Greek-Christian metaphysics did not form a
self-evident and fundamental background. Conversely, this lecture

45
46 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

and its discussion of “nothing” [das Mc/*te]awas the explicit target of

an extreme, logical critique presented by Rudolf Carnap in Erkenntnisb
in 1932. In his critique, Rudolf Carnap repeated and critically sharp­
ened all of the objections Heidegger himself had discussed in the
section of the lecture where he prepared for the question concerning
“nothing” and expressed his doubts about such a question.
But Heidegger himself had also distinguished this small pub­
lication by twice adding detailed commentaries to later editions of
the document: first in the epilogue of the 1943 edition and then in a
longer preface in the 1949 edition. Today’s text amounts to more
than double the original size. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that
Heidegger himself added all three parts [1929, 1943, 1949] to the
collection called Wegmarken, a collection of smaller works published
between 1929 and 1964— obviously as Wegmarken <markers on the
way of his thinking>.
In fact, the monumental theme of overcoming metaphysics
and metaphysical thinking, which was the subject of the later
Heidegger’s thought experiments, emerged for the first time in this
lecture. However, due to the way that the issue emerged, the lecture
itself was still couched in the language of metaphysics. The question
concerning “nothing” was introduced expressly as a metaphysical
question—a question into which one is necessarily drawn if one
decides to dispense with the well-known system of logical defences.
In fact, the question concerning “nothing” and the thought
provoking, fundamental experience of “nothing” were brought up so
that thinking would be forced to think the Da of Dasein. This is the
mission that Heidegger, in an ever more-conscious turn away from
the metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings and the
language of metaphysics, recognized as his own. This question pre­
occupied him his entire life. In a notable entanglement and in a
complete disclosure of his deficiency of language, Heidegger ven­
tured this challenging sentence in the epilogue of 1943: “It belongs
to the truth of Being that Being certainly essences [west, i.e., is present]
without beings, but there is never a being without Being.” But
Heidegger then changed this sentence in the fifth edition into pre­
cisely its contrary: “Being never essences without beings; there is
never a being without Being.” (The latter rendering is the text that
served as the basis for the Italian translation.) The two contradictory
versions span the tense space in which Heidegger’s questioning
moved. Both versions make perfectly good sense. The internal inex-
 W H A T IS M E T A P H Y S IC S ? ’ 47

tricability of the being [das Seiende] from Being’s dimension of es­

sence [Wesensdimension] is expressed in both variants, but the re­
versed dependency of Being on the being is expressed only in the
second and final version. Well, this is a question of perspective. Does
one think the dimension of “essence” in which Being “essences” as
such, as if it “had” “Being” (apart from all beings)? Or, even though
this means that Being is thought in such a way that it can be only
when there are beings, does one think of it merely as the dimension
in which Being “is?” To think Being itself—one senses here the
pressure of reifying thinking. Is this Being, which “is not a thing”
but rather “essences,” a possible subject of thinking and speaking at
all? The ancient seductiveness of the Chorismos [separation]—which
Plato recognized as the seduction of the thinking of the Ideas and yet
just did not know how to avoid completely—tangles up Heidegger’s
analysis of metaphysics here.
The modification of the text that we took as our point of
departure was made in the fifth edition (1949)—to which Heidegger
added yet another new introduction. This is in itself significant
enough. The difference between the tone of this new introduction
and the tone of the older epilogue, however, is no less than the
difference between the two variants of the text as it is there ex­
pressed. The epilogue from 1943 is introduced as if its purpose were
only to put aside a few hinderances that might get in the way of
following the train of thought in the lecture, hinderances connected
with the task of thinking “the ‘nothing’ that attunes angst in its
essence.” In posing the question concerning “nothing,” the lecture
inquires into Being—that which is not a “what,” a tiy and therefore
cannot be thought by metaphysics as “Being.” This epilogue presents
this new questioning as the “essential thinking” and juxtaposes it
against logic and calculative thinking. The apologia, in words and
images trembling with the eschatological emotionalism of those years
of the German catastrophe, comes down in its appeal on the side of
those who attempt to describe from the vantage point of Being itself
a thinking that is determined by the “other to the being.” Here the
talk is of the need for sacrifice, of a gratitude [der Dank] that thinks
of Being and preserves its rememberance, of the “echo of the favor
of Being,” and of the urgency in Dasein to find the word for Being:
It comes across like a confirmation of this sonerous imagery when,
in the end, the epilogue itself draws the speaking of the thinker and
the naming of the poet close together. In contrast to this, the later
48 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

introduction attempts to present the lecture as an internal conse­

quence of the rupture in thinking that first broke open with Being
and Time and continued beyond this lecture to other thought experi­
ments after the so-called turn. In the meantime, not only did
Heidegger’s Holderlin interpretations begin to have a general effect,
but the “Letter on Humanism” and Holzwege also began to make the
ways traveled by Heidegger’s thinking more visible. With precise
references to Being and Time and to the history of philosophy, espe­
cially to Aristotle and Leibniz, the introduction elucidates the mis­
sion of overcoming metaphysics that held Heidegger’s thinking captive
after the “turn.” Again Heidegger’s thinking took its start from a
metaphor, but this time one known in the history of philosophy
itself—the arbor scientiarum [the tree of knowledge], the image of a
tree reaching upward from the ground. Using this image Heidegger
illustrated his point that metaphysics does not think its own founda­
tion, and then he proposed the mission o f clarifying the essence of
metaphysics by returning to and examining its own foundations—
foundations that have heretofore remained hidden from metaphysics
itself. In making metaphysics itself an object o f inquiry, in question­
ing the way that metaphysics “is” and inquiring about the way that
thinking itself began, Heidegger expressly ran up against metaphysics
and its claim that it thinks Being. What does the question concerning
the Being of beings mean for Being itself and for its relation to
humans? The question of metaphysics, “Why are there beings at all
and not rather ‘nothing?’” turned into the question, Why does think­
ing concern itself more with beings than with Being? Unlike the
question concerning “nothing” as posed in the lecture, the question
posed here is obviously no longer a metaphysical question; it is rather
a question put to metaphysics itself Not, What does metaphysics
itself intend? but rather, What is metaphysics really? What sort of fate
[Geschick]? And how does this event determine our destiny? The
introduction that was added to the lecture o f 1949 no longer leads
into the situation of the sciences and the task of the Universitas literarum,
as the programistic lecture of 1929 did; rather, it leads into the situa­
tion of the contemporary world and of humanity as a whole as limned
against the advent of the postwar era and the explosive progression of
the industrial revolution into the second half of the twentieth cen­
tury
 C h a p t e r F iv e

Kant and the

Hermeneutical
T urn (1975)

ant’s place in contemporary thought is virtually unique.

He is more or less a common prerequisite for the most opposed
philosophical tendencies. On one side, there are the empiricists, who
credit themselves with Kant’s destruction of “dogmatic metaphys­
ics,” this work of the “crusher of everything” (Mendelssohn)—even
if they are still dissatisfied with the large portion of the remaining
dogmatic stock of the rationalistic way of thinking, such as Kant’s
derivation of the three-dimensionality of space. And, on the other
side, there are the apriorists, who certainly understand themselves
transcendentally and frequently reference Kant, but who, in the end,
all follow Fichte and would gladly leave the dogmatic remainder of
the thing-in-itself behind in favor of deriving of all validity from the
highest principle, that is, from the ego. As is well known, even the
contrast between idealism and materialism, as seen from the Marxist
perspective, was redefined by Kant in the sense that Marx himself
viewed all pre-Kantian materialism as dogmatic. Around 1860 the
slogan “back to Kant” was used to introduce neo-Kantianism and, in
so doing, was also used to attack not only the dominance of the
Hegelian school of speculative idealism, but also the victorious mate­
rialism, naturalism, and psychologism, which had come on the scene
50 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

as a countermovement to Hegel. Yet, the fact remains that this slogan

was much more firmly rooted in the tradition of Fichte and Hegel
than those following this slogan were aware.
There is still another area in which Kant’s empirical ten­
dency together with the neo-Kantian apriorism led to a modification
of Kant’s image in the post-Kantian and post-Hegelian age: Kant’s
establishment of a moral philosophy based on the rational fact of
freedom tends to fade into the background behind the destruction of
dogmatic metaphysics by the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed, Kant’s
founding of a moral philosophy based on his concept of the au­
tonomy of practical research and on the categorical imperative was
correctly seen as the greatest contribution of Kantian philosophy But
that this founding was a founding of a metaphysics of morals and
that it validated a “moral metaphysics” concerned few.
Certainly Kant’s orientation to the pure natural sciences in
the Newtonian sense had little to offer the world of history, espe­
cially when compared to Hegel’s magnificent and yet violently con­
struing philosophy of world history. Kant’s moral philosophy rejected
all anthropological foundations and expressly claimed to be valid for
rational beings as such. Even in an age that claimed proudly to have
overcome metaphysics, there were still attempts to carry the idea of a
transcendental method over into other areas whenever Kant was in­
terpreted along epistemological lines. Thus, precisely the ingenious
element of Kant’s moral philosophy was interpreted epistemologi­
cally, and a theory was sought that would provide a foundation for
our knowledge of the historical world as well as for the natural sci­
ences. Dilthey’s ambition to place a critique of historical reason along­
side the Kantian critique, and the Windelband-Rickert neo-Kantian
theory that subsumed historical knowledge under the systematic-
theoretical idea of a realm of values, each testifies in it’s own way to
the supremacy of the Kantian critique. But they are quite a way from
Kant’s self-conception, according to which he wanted to point out
the limits of knowledge in order to create a place for faith.
Thus, it was a strangely diluted Kant that, in the age of neo-
Kantianism, was developed into a general system of thought either as
critique or as transcendental philosophy. And it is precisely this neo-
Kantianism—especially in its Marburg form, where the idea of a
transcendental psychology (Natorp) was developed as a counterpart
of a transcendental “general logic”—which lent support to the philo­
sophical self-understanding of Husserl’s budding phenomenology.
 K A N T A N D T H E H E R M E N E U T IC A L T U R N 51

The twentieth century, and especially the philosophical move­

ment after World War I, is tied to the concept of phenomenology,
and what one now calls hermeneutical philosophy is based to a large
extent on a phenomenology But when viewed retrospectively and
historically from a contemporary vantage point, the question arises,
What was phenomenology? It was certainly not primarily a variation
on—or the most consistent implementation of—the Marburg variety
of Neo-Kantianism. As the word itself implies, phenomenology was
a methodical manner of describing phenomena without biases, one
in which there was a methodological renunciation of all explanations
of physiological-psychological origins and of all attempts at deriva­
tions from preconceived principles. Thus, the mechanism of sensa­
tions (Mach), the English utilitarianism of social ethics (Spencer),
James’s American pragmatism, and Freud’s hedonistic school of deep
psychological drives all collapsed under the weight of Husserl’s and
Scheler’s phenomenological critiques. When compared with these
explanative schemata, one could call phenomenological research as a
whole as well as Dilthey’s descriptive and analytical psychology, which
was oriented towards the liberal arts, “hermeneutical”—in a very
broad sense—insofar as the meaning or essence contained in a phe­
nomenon or the structure of the phenomenon is not “explained”
[erklart], but rather is to be “explicated” [zur Auslegung gebracht werden
soil]. Indeed, the word explicate, in the sense of a detailed description,
is found in Husserl’s usage of language quite early on, and in the
final analysis, Dilthey’s formation of theories in the liberal arts is
based completely on the “hermeneutical” character of understanding
meaning and expressions [Sinn- und Ausdrucks-Verstehens].
Nevertheless, the conscious reliance on Neo-Kantianism,
which Husserl used for the purpose of providing a theoretical justifi­
cation for his art of description and his theory of evidence, meant a
renewal of a highly one-sided conception of a system, a system based
less on Kant than on Fichte and Hegel. Certainly, it was a transcen­
dental effort at justification that Husserl undertook with the motto,
“How do I become a honest [ehrlich] philosopher?” but the transcen­
dental reduction leading back to the apodicticity of self-conscious­
ness, which was to transform philosophy to a “rigorous science,” and
his program of a “constitutive” phenomenology, which was erected
upon the evidence of a transcendental ego, did not correspond in the
least bit to transcendental deduction in the Kantian sense. For Kant,
the deduction was given as “proof” of the validity of the categories
52 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

after the metaphysical deduction of the table of categories had been

derived from the “table of judgments.” Husserl’s “constitutive” phe­
nomenology resembled much more the Fichtean ideal of a “deriva­
tion”; that is, obtaining the categories from the actions of an ego
[Tat-Handlung des Ichs]. O f course, Husserl may have well been aware
that the concept o f a system as found in the Fichtean-Hegelian ideal­
ism or in the Neo-Kantianism (of the Marburg school) was lacking a
genuine foundation “from underneath” and that only a phenomeno­
logical clarification of the correlation between an intentional act and
an intentional object could make the transcendental thought of the
“production” or o f the “constitution” feasible. The well-known para­
digm of an investigation of the correlation between an intentional act
and an object was the phenomenology of perception. Here the deci­
sive improvement over Natorp’s concept of correlation became ap­
parent in the rich differentiation of the acts in intentional life, a
differentiation that offered itself over and against the same object as a
theme for phenomenological analysis. This led to a new phenom­
enological clarification of Kantian insights in the sense of a consis­
tently near-Fichtean Neo-Kantianism.
Take, for example, the old crux of Kantianism, the doctrine
of a “thing-in-itself,” which Fichte saw as a metaphor that needed to
be explained away, and which the Marburg Neo-Kantianism (Natorp)
had transformed into the “endless task” of determining the object of
knowledge. Husserl clearly saw through the naivete of those who
wanted to preserve here in Kant a “realistic” element in his idealistic
philosophy, and he elucidated even this “realistic” element of being-
in-itself [Ansichsein] through his masterly analysis of the phenom­
enology of perception. The continuum of shadings, through which
an object of perception is presented according to its essence, is im­
plied in the intention belonging to every act of perception—and
precisely that is the meaning of the being-in-itself of a thing.
Husserl could have unequivocally thought himself to be the
consummator of transcendental thought, inasmuch as he attempted
in his Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness to display in daz­
zling phenomenological analyses the transcendental synthesis of ap­
perception and its connection to the “internal sense.” By constantly
reformulating and refining his questions, he proceeded from this
basis to design the whole system of a phenomenologically based phi­
losophy as a rigorous science, in which he set about solving the most
 K A N T A N D T H E H E R M E N E U T IC A L T U R N 53

difficult problems from the standpoint of the transcendental ego [Ich],

namely, the problem of consciousness of the body, the problem of
constituting the other (the problem of intersubjectivity), and the
problem of the historically varying horizons of the “lived world.”
These are without doubt the three cases that put up the stiffest resis­
tance to constitution by self-consciousness. Husserl’s later works were
dedicated more than anything else to overcoming these sites of resis­
tance. Whoever allowed himself or herself to be led astray in carrying
out transcendental phenomenology by these opposing cases had,
in his eyes, not understood the transcendental deduction. This was
something that Husserl later said not only about the Munich
phenomenologists and Scheler, but ultimately also about the
Heidegger of Being and Time. This is admittedly not clear at first
glance, if one takes Heidegger’s transcendental self-conception into
view. Even in the year 1929, a year after the publication of Being and
Time, Oskar Becker still thought Heidegger’s “transcendental ana­
lytic of Dasein,” as an investigation of the hermeneutical dimension
of the “life-world,” belonged in Husserl’s program of transcendental
phenomenology.
Nevertheless, Heidegger’s true intention, which converged
with his linking of the hermeneutical problematic to the theological
and historical sciences, was quickly carried through; and with this
the original Kant was awakened to a new actuality and relevance in
an astonishing way, albeit one that challenged his speculative follow­
ers. In truth, the categorization of Being and Time as fitting into the
Husserlian transcendental phenomenology must have ruptured the
Husserlian framework, and in the long run, Husserl himself could
no longer conceal the fact that the profound and thoroughly success­
ful work of Heidegger’s was no contribution to “philosophy as a
rigorous science.” Heidegger’s talk of the “historicality” of Dasein
pointed in a totally different direction. The tradition of the historical
school as reflected in the works of Dilthey and Grafen Yorck stood
quite some distance from the transcendentalism of Neo-Kantianism.
U nder the influence of the historical school and, also, with
Schopenhauer’s reformulation of Kant into a metaphysics of the blind
will, the basis of the philosophy of self-consciousness had been shifted
during the nineteenth century to “the thought-forming work of life. ”
More than all others, the budding influence of Friedrich Nietzsche,
which was conveyed through the great novelists of the day as well as
54 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

through Bergson, Simmel, and Scheler, moved “life” into the fore­
ground at the beginning of our century—as it did into the psychol­
ogy of the unconscious. One was no longer concerned with that
which was given phenomenologically by consciousness, but rather
with the interpretation of the phenom ena that arose out of
hermeneutical movement of life and that m ust be subject to inter­
pretation.
Thus, a complicated constellation gave Heidegger’s intellec­
tual contribution its special effect. Reared in Rickert’s Neo-Kantianistic
apriorism and developed by way of a Kantian interpretation of
Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger nevertheless brought this other
tradition, the “hermeneutical” tradition of the humanities and social
sciences, to bear on the fundamental questions of contemporary
thought. In particular, the irrationality of life presented a type of
counterinstance to Neo-Kantianism. Even the Marburg school itself
attempted to break the spell of transcendental thought then, and the
aging Natorp left all logic to return to the underlying “primal con­
creteness” [das “Urkonkrete”]. The sentence, “Life is hazy [diesig],” is
given to us by Heidegger in his earliest lectures. Hazy has nothing to
do with the “this” [Dies]; rather it means misty, foggy. Thus, the
sentence means that it belongs to the essence o f life that no complete
enlightenment can be gained within self-consciousness; rather it is
constantly being reenshrouded in fog. This was thought much more
in the spirit o f Nietzsche. By comparison, the internal consistency of
Neo-Kantianism, as it then existed, was at best able to recognize the
irrational and extratheoretical types of validity as only a kind of bound­
ary concept of their own logical system. Rickert offered his own
critical account of the “philosophy of life.” And Husserl’s idea of
“philosophy as a rigorous science” stood with firm resolve against all
irrational trends of the day, especially against the philosophy of the
Weltanschauung. What Heidegger carried out with the call of the
historicality o f Dasein was in the final analysis a radical turn away
from idealism. It was a recapitulation in our century of the same
criticism of idealism that the young Hegelians had leveled at the
speculative encyclopedism of Hegel’s system after his death. This
recapitulation was mediated especially through the influence of
Kierkegaard. He was the one who had accused Hegel, the absolute
professor in Berlin, of having forgotten “to exist” [das “Existieren”].
In the liberal translation into German by Christoph Schrempf,
 K A N T A N D T H E H E R M E N E U T IC A L T U R N 55

Kierkegaard’s work effected an epoch in Germany in the years before

and after World War I. Jaspers conveyed his teaching through an
exceptional work, “Referat Kierkegaards ” and the so-called philosophy
of existence emerged. The criticism of idealism found in this work
was widely used by philosophers and theologians. Such was the situ­
ation in which Heidegger’s work came to have an effect.
This criticism of idealism was obviously much more radical
than the critical differences that existed between the Neo-Thomists,
Kantians, Fichteans, Hegelians, and logical empiricists. Also, the con­
trast between the systematic thinking of the Neo-Kantians and
Dilthey’s attempts at a critique of historical reason was one that
remained within a framework of common assumptions about the
task of philosophy. The critique of philosophy found in Heidegger’s
new contributions was the only one that shared the radicality of the
young Hegelians. It is obviously no coincidence that the revival of
Marxist thinking could not simply ignore Heidegger’s contribution to
thought, and indeed, Herbert Marcuse attempted to unite these two.
The slogan that the young Heidegger proclaimed was itself
paradoxical enough, and it was critical of all factions. It was the
slogan of a hermeneutics of facticity. O f course, to speak of a
“hermeneutics of facticity” is to speak of something like “wooden
iron.” For facticity means precisely the unshakable resistance that the
factual puts up against all grasping and understanding, and in the
special phrasing in which Heidegger couched the concept of facticity,
it meant the fundamental determination of human Dasein. This is
certainly not merely consciousness and self-consciousness. The un­
derstanding of Being, which distinguishes Dasein from all beings
and constitutes its hermeneutical structure, could not be fulfilled by
the projection of an intellectual constitution through which it raised
itself above all natural beings. The understanding of Being, which
distinguishes the human Dasein by compelling it to question the
meaning of Being, is itself in the highest degree a paradox. For the
question concerning the meaning of Being is not like other questions
concerning meaning, in which “something given” is understood
through a comparison with that which constitutes its meaning. Rather,
the human Dasein, which is concerned with the meaning of its own
Being, sees itself confronted with the ungraspable nature of its own
Dasein <in the sense of “existence,” see note a in Chapter 2>. Re­
gardless of how much certainty human beings are capable of gaining
56 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

concerning the sensibleness of everything and anything in under­

standing, the question of meaning with reference to its own Dasein
and regarding its own ability to understand itself a question it must
pose to itself, runs up against an impassable boundary Dasein is not
only the open horizon of its own possibilities, onto which it projects
itself Rather, it encounters in itself the quality of an impassable
facticity. Dasein may well choose its Being, as with Kierkegaard where
the thought of the “either/or” of choice designated the actual ethical
character of Dasein—but in truth, with this choice Dasein only over­
takes its own existence into which it had already been “thrown.”
Thrownness and projection make up the unitary fundamental con­
stitution of the human Dasein.
With this a critique of two factions is implied: of Husserl’s
transcendental idealism, on one side, and of the philosophy of life
[Lebensphilosophie] as formulated by Dilthey and even Max Scheler
himself, on the other side. Ultimately, this two-pronged critique also
opens up a new passage way to the original Kant.
Heidegger’s critique of Husserl was directed more than any­
thing else toward the unidentifiable character [Unausgewiesenheit] o f
the being of consciousness. Heidegger, who had grown up with
Aristotle, discovered the unknown, potent legacy of Greek thought
in the modern philosophy of consciousness. The analysis of the ac­
tual human Dasein, with which Heidegger began the exposition of
the question concerning Being, expressly condemned the “fantastical,
idealized subject” that the modern philosophy of consciousness had
consistently referred back to when justifying objectifying. This was
obviously not an immanent criticism that Heidegger was giving.
Rather, Heidegger had his eye on an ontological deficiency when he
criticized Husserl’s analysis of time- and self-consciousness as being
prejudiced. Behind this lay a criticism of the Greeks themselves. A
criticism of their “superficiality” lurked in the background, a criti­
cism of the one-sidedness of their perspective in which the outline
and form of a being is grasped and in this invariable “Being” its
Being is then thought. By contrast, the question concerning Being,
which dictates in advance all questions concerning the Being of
beings, was never posed. Spoken with reference to the temporal
horizon, “beings” are what are present contemporarily [das Gegenwdrtig-
Anwesende]—and this is obviously inappropriate to the genuine con­
stitution of human Dasein, which is not contemporariness, nor the
 K A N T A N D T H E H E R M E N E U T IC A L T U R N 57

contemporariness of an intellect, but rather is futurity and care—in

spite of all facticity.
And in the other direction, the new Heideggerean approach
was not simply directed toward the foundation of Dilthey’s concept
of life. Indeed, he recognized in Dilthey’s incessant search for the
ultimate grounding of life a move toward a deeper understanding of
what one usually calls intellect or consciousness, but his own intentions
were ontological. He wanted to grasp the constitution of the Being
of human Dasein in its internal unity, not simply as dualistic tension
between the dulled impulse for life and the brightness of the self-
consciousness of spirit. And he criticized Scheler precisely because
he too remained in such a dualism. Then, during the period when he
was on the way to an ontological deepening of his own approach to a
philosophy of life and when he was immersed in these criticisms of
modern philosophy of consciousness, Heidegger suddenly discov­
ered Kant. And, indeed, it was precisely the Kant that the Neo-
Kantianism and its phenomenological elaboration had concealed: the
reference [Angewiesenheit] to that which is given. The human Dasein
is neither a free self-projection nor a self-realization of an intellect,
but rather a Being toward death—and that means that it is essentially
finite. It was precisely due to this fmitude of Dasein that Heidegger
was able to recognize a premonition of his own insights in Kant’s
doctrine of an interaction between the understanding and intuition
and of the restriction of the use of the understanding to the realm of
possible experience. Especially the transcendental imagination, this
puzzling mid-ability of the human soul in which intuition, the un­
derstanding, receptivity, and spontaneity cooperate, allowed Heidegger
to interpret Kant’s own philosophy as a finite metaphysics. The Be­
ing of an object is not defined though a reference to an infinite spirit
(as in the classical metaphysics). Precisely the human understanding
in its openness to accepting that which is given defines the object of
experience.
Gerhard Kruger then interpreted Kant’s moral philosophy
with a loose application of the impulse that had come from Heidegger.
According to this interpretation, the famous autonomy of practical
reason is seen less like the self-legislation of morals than the free
acceptance of law or, indeed, the obedient submission to the law.
O f course, Heidegger later viewed Kantian philosophy as
having been determined much more by the forgetfulness of Being,
58 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

and he gave up any attempts at a metaphysical understanding of his

new exposition of the question of Being based upon the finitude of
the human Dasein. This happened with the abandonment of the
concept of transcendental reflection in Heidegger’s “turn.” After that,
the Kantian tone disappeared from his thought experiments and with
it all links to Kant’s critique of rational metaphysics. However, the
concept of critical philosophy still remains as a constant method­
ological corrective that philosophy cannot be allowed to forget.
If one follows the intentions of Heidegger’s late philosophy,
as I have done in my own hermeneutical philosophy, and attempts to
use them as a proof of the hermeneutical experience, then one finds
oneself again in the danger zone of the modern philosophy of con­
sciousness. In this regard, it is certainly convincing that the experi­
ence of art conveys more than aesthetic consciousness is capable of
grasping. Art is more than an object of taste, even of the most refined
taste for art. The experience of history, which we ourselves have, is
also covered only to a small degree by that which we would name
historical consciousness. It is precisely the mediation between past and
present, the reality and the effective power of the past, that deter­
mines us historically. History is more than the object of historical
consciousness.—Thus, the only referential basis for this experience
is one that shows itself in the thorough reflection of the procedures
of the hermeneutical sciences and that we could characterize as the
effective historical consciousness. This has more Being than being
conscious; that is, more is historically affected and determined than
we are conscious of as having been effected and determined.
It is inevitable that this kind o f reflection about the
hermeneutical experience must be understood as an abandonment of
the claim of reflection [Rejiexionsanspruch] made in Hegel’s specula­
tive dialectics—especially if one does not restrict it to the herme­
neutical sciences, but rather recognizes the hermeneutical structure
inherent in all of our worldly experiences and their explication. The
original motive, which is captured in the term effective historical con­
sciousness, is given its character precisely by the finitude of the results
of reflection, results that can be gained by a consciousness reflecting
on its determinedness. Something always remains in the background,
regardless of how much one brings to the fore. Being historical means
never being able to pull everything out of an event such that every­
thing that has happened lies before me. Thus, that which Hegel
 K A N T A N D T H E H E R M E N E U T IC A L T U R N 59

named the bad infinity is a structural element of the historical experi­

ence as such. Hegel’s claim to have finally disclosed reason even in
history and to have thrown all mere contingencies onto the rubble
heap of Being corresponds to an immanent tendency of movement
found in reflective thought. A movement toward a purpose that can
never be thought as being completely realizable does indeed seem to
be a bad infinity—one to which thought is not capable of adhering.
But which goal could history possibly contemplate—regardless of
whether it be the history of Being or the history of the forgetfulness
of Being—without straying again into the realm of simple possibility
and phantasmal irrealities? Regardless of how great the temptation
might be to think along with the reflective movement of our thought
beyond every knowable limit and determinedness and to call real
that which can be thought only as possible, in the end Kant’s warn­
ing remains justified. He expressly distinguished the ideas that rea­
son can only peer up to from the type whose meaning is constituted
by the basic concepts of the understanding and that we therefore are
capable of knowing. A critical consciousness of the limits of our
human reason, which he accentuated in the critique of dogmatic meta­
physics, certainly paved the way for a “practical metaphysics” founded
upon the “rational fact” of freedom—but this is preciselyfor practical
reason. Kant’s critique of “theoretical” reason is still a valid argument
against all attempts to put technique in the place of praxis and to
exchange the rationality of our planning, the certainty of our calcula­
tions, and the reliability of our predictions for what we are capable of
knowing with unconditional certainly, that is, what we have to do
and how we are capable of justifying the decisions that we have
made. Kant’s critical turn remains unforgotten in hermeneutical phi­
losophy, a philosophy that gained its foundation with Heidegger’s
reception of Dilthey. This turn is just as present in hermeneutical
philosophy as is Plato himself, who understood all philosophizing as
an endless dialogue of the soul with itself
 C h a p t e r s ix

T he T hinker
Martin Heidegger
(1969)

I he eightieth birthday of a man whose thought has had its

effect on us now for fifty years is an occasion to give thanks. But how
should that take place? Should one speak directly to Martin
Heidegger?—certainly the issue of thinking has grasped him too
strongly for such a direct address to his person to be appropriate.
Does one speak with Martin Heidegger?—it sounds a bit presump­
tuous to dare such a partnership. Or does one speak about Martin
Heidegger in front of Martin Heidegger? All of these possibilities are
excluded. What remains is that one, who was there from early on,
bears witness to all others. A witness says what is and what is true. So
the witness, who is speaking here, is permitted to say what everyone
who has encountered Martin Heidegger has experienced: He is a
master of thinking, of that unfamiliar art of thinking.
This was there [da] suddenly, already apparent with the young
Heidegger’s first appearance at the Freiburg lectern following World
War I. Here was something new, something unheard of. We had
learned that thinking was charting out relations, and it really seemed
to be correct that one should reflectively put a thing in a certain
relation and then make a statement about this relation, which one
called a judgment. Thinking seemed to be process, a proceeding in a
61
62 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

stepwise fashion from relation to relation, from judgment to judg­

ment. But suddenly we learn that thinking is showing and bringing
something to show itself This was an event of fundamental impor­
tance; with one fell swoop Heidegger stepped over the flatness of
this reflective progression and his instructive words led us into a
completely new dimension. This incomprehensible offering by
Heidegger, in which Husserl’s phenomenological legacy became more
forceful and was made more effective, led to the very embodiment of
the current object [Sache] of thought—regardless of what it might
be. It became round, three-dimensional; it was there [da]—one was
always facing it, because every turn of thought always referred back
to the same matter [Sache]. Where, in thinking, we would otherwise
be concerned with proceeding from one thought to another, here we
remained steadfastly concerned with the same matter. And it was not
that the matter was simply made visible, that it was merely given a
vivid portrayal such as in Husserl’s famous analysis of the thing
[Ding] of perception and its shadings. Rather, the boldness and
radicality of the questions that were imposed on those present would
take one’s breath completely away.
Then one might have fancied that what was going on at the
time must have resembled Athens at the close of the fifth century, as
the new art of thinking, the dialectic, was introduced and the Attic
youth plunged into a enthusiastic mania—Aristophanes depicted that
for us splendidly and made no distinctions with reference to Socrates.
The intoxicating effect of the questions emanating from Martin
Heidegger in the early Freiburg and Marburg years seemed to be like
this, and there was no lack of followers and imitators. They coasted
along behind him, trying to outdo his questions and in the process
furnishing a caricature o f the passionate m om entum o f the
Heideggerean questions and thought. But something like a new seri­
ousness also entered into the business of thinking with Heidegger’s
arrival. The subtle technique of academic conceptual exercises sud­
denly looked to us like pure frivolity, and one is not claiming too
much to say that this has had quite a long lasting effect in the life of
the German universities. Those of us who were younger then had
found a model when we made our own first attempts at teaching. A
new dignity of the vox viva [the living voice] and the complete unifi­
cation of teaching and research came on the scene with the risky
business of these radical philosophical questions, replacing the rou­
 T H E T H IN K E R M A R T IN H E ID E G G E R 63

tine way of running courses in which the lecture was neglected be­
cause the professor was still preoccupied with his own work. This
was the event of the 1920s; Martin Heidegger had an effect well
beyond the “discipline” of philosophy
This was not simply a new art, an intuitive power used to
prove once again the value of a conceptual craft. It was much more
than that. Above all, a new impetus was taking hold in Heidegger’s
thought that effected a complete transformation. Here was a think­
ing that attempted to think the very beginning and beginnings—
although certainly not in the style of Neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s
phenomenology “as a rigorous science.” There, the search was for a
beginning as an ultimate foundation that would allow for a system­
atic ordering and derivation of all philosophical propositions—a
beginning found in the principle of the transcendental subject. But
Heidegger’s radical questions were aimed at a much deeper original­
ity than that searched for in the principle of self-consciousness. In
this regard, he was a child of the new century—a century that had
been dominated by Nietzsche, by historicism, and by thought deter­
mined by the philosophy of life, a century that doubted the legiti­
macy of all statements about self-consciousness. In an early Freiburg
lecture, which I gained access to from Walter Brocker’s notes,
Heidegger spoke of a “haziness” of life instead of the principle of
clear and distinct perceptio of the ego cogito. That this life is hazy does
not mean so much that the little ship of life cannot see a clear and
free horizon around itself. Haziness does not simply mean the cloud­
ing of one’s vision; rather, it describes the basic constitution of life as
such, the very movement of life itself. It shrouds itself in fog. Here
lies the inner tension, the internal struggle [Gegenwendigkeit] that
Nietzsche had pointed out: Not only to strive toward clarity and to
know, but also to conceal in darkness and to forget. When Heidegger
named the basic experience of the Greeks’ aletheia, unconcealedness,
he did not simply mean that truth does not lie openly exposed and
that concealedness must simply be ripped from it—as if it were some
kind of loot. He meant moreover that truth was constantly in danger
of receding back into darkness, that efforts at conceptualization must
involve efforts to keep truth from receding back, and that even this
receding back must be thought as an event of truth.
Heidegger named his first attempt to think the beginnings
“ontology”—this was the title of the first lecture that I heard him
64 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

give in 1923. But this was not an ontology in the traditional sense of
Western metaphysics, which gave a first, world-history-making an­
swer to the question concerning Being. Rather, here the sole claim
was merely to have made the most rudimentary preparations for a
formulation of a question. But what does it mean to formulate a
question? It sounds easy, like setting a trap that one falls into with
their answer, or something that one falls for because of the way it is
posed to them. However, here the questions were not posed in an
effort to obtain an answer. Whenever “Being” is questioned, the in­
terrogation is about nothing. And to “pose” the question concerning
Being is much more to give oneself over to the question, to a ques­
tion that allows for “Being” in the first place and without which
“Being” would remain an empty linguistic haze. When Heidegger
asked the question concerning the beginning of occidental meta­
physics, it had completely different meaning than it would have had,
had it been posed by a historian. Occasionally—in connection with
the issue of overcoming occidental metaphysics, whereby the issue
was not so much to put metaphysics behind us as to bring it before
us—Heidegger said of this beginning that it has always already passed
over and moved beyond us. That is to say, inquiries concerning the
beginning are always inquiries concerning ourselves and our future.
O f course, Heidegger’s inquiries concerning the beginning
have been misunderstood in the most absurd ways. He is often inter­
preted as if he were trying to escape from the terrible decline that
had taken place in history and return to a more pristine time that was
still proximate to these beginnings and origins. This misses the seri­
ousness with which that which “is” is questioned. There is nothing
mystical about what has come over us as the “destiny of Being”
[Seinsgeschick]; rather, it is apparent to everyone as a consequence of
the way that occidental thinking has played out in the technical civi­
lization of our day—it covers the globe like an all-encompassing net.
Here the usual tones of a cultural critique gain a peculiar ambiguity,
full of grim forebodings of a disaster but yet anticipating a resistant
future that, due to an effort to produce without limits, holds out a
radical challenge of Being. But there is no illusion here that one
could withdraw from what “is” into a supposed freedom, into a
pining for origins that might one day return.
Herein one finds the roots of the second most common mis­
understanding, the accusation of historicism: The assumption is that if
 T H E T H IN K E R M A R T IN H E ID E G G E R 65

the historicality of truth is understood as the destiny of Being, then the

question concerning truth is lost. This scenario allows for one of two
possibilities. It leads either to a renewal of the difficulties of Dilthey’s
historicism, a historicism that exhausts itself within the question
of infinite, self-entangling reflection, or it leads to a socio-ethical
emotionalism that demands sociological reflection. In the latter case,
one is first made aware of the ideological bias inherent in all knowl­
edge and then, after offering the illusion of a freedom from these
biases by way of a dialectic, a call is made for social involvement.
This all seems a bit odd when seen in contrast to a thinking
that does not share such worries; this thinking does not see itself as
an instrument for some purpose. It is not a thinking in which every­
thing depends on sagacity and a know-it-all attitude; rather, here
thinking is experienced as a pure passion. Here “knowing it all” does
not help. One must recognize that thinking is always selfless in a
deep and final sense—not only in the sense that thinking cannot be
guided by a particular interest in an individual or societal gain. It is
more that the actual self of whoever is thinking, that individual’s
personal and historical determinedness, is extinguished. It is true that
such thought occurs infrequently—and it must accept the accusation
of being socially irresponsible because it does not acknowledge its
own convictions—but there have been great models and convincing
examples of this kind of thinking. The masters at teaching this great
but unfamiliar art of selfless thinking were the Greeks. They even
had a word, nous* for that which is called (in a rough correspon­
dence) the rational and spiritual in German idealism—thinking in
which nothing is meant except that which “is.” Hegel can be consid­
ered the last Greek precisely because his dialectic demanded a selfless­
ness of this type; it elevated thinking without flaunting his own ideas
or a know-it-all attitude. When Martin Heidegger adds his name
nolens volens to the list of classical thinkers, he does so not so much
because he took up the great questions of this great tradition devoid
of any “historical” distance and made the posing of the question
concerning Being his own, but rather because these questions filled
him so completely that there was no longer any space between that
which he thought and taught and that which he was himself The
unfamiliar art of thinking is based on such a selflessness, one that no
longer knows itself and no longer is entangled in the dialectic of
attempting to know oneself better and better.
66 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

With this I come to my last point. Here I would like to give a

testimony concerning the driving momentum of thought that made
its appearance with Martin Heidegger and address a point that is on
everyone’s lips and—precisely for that reason—elicits misunderstand­
ings. I am talking about Heidegger’s language. For Heidegger, more
than for the great tradition of metaphysical thought, the material of
his thinking is language, this most visible selflessness of thought.
People take pleasure in criticizing Heidegger’s unconventional lan­
guage, and it may well be—indeed, it must be—that whoever is not
thinking along with Heidegger will be unable to forget that these are
not the usual tracks of linguistic construction upon which one usu­
ally proceeds. It is certainly not the language of information. The
language of Heidegger and of thinking does not simply transmit
through linguistic means something that is what it is—something
that would be known devoid of all language because in principle it
can be known by anyone. In the askant view of sociologist and politi­
cal scientist, the “straightforwardness” of such thought is certainly
not comprehensible, and it comes across as forced mannerisms. But
Heidegger found himself challenged more and more as he researched
deeper and deeper into the foundations of language and, like a trea­
sure hunter, teased out of those dark shafts and brought to light
gleaming and flashing discoveries. What flashed in that strange “dark-
light”—often very disconcerting and unfamiliar, sometimes generally
convincing in the end, like a precious find worthy of a secure set­
ting—certainly cannot be found in the familiar tracks of the polished
words and phrases that we use to record our worldly experiences.
Also, these are not simply new things that, once unearthed, increase
the wealth of our experience. It is “itself” [es selbst] that should be
thought in all of this harsh and violent thought-constructions; Being
that should come to language. Certainly it is not always the case that
subsequent thinking, in its effort to comprehend, knows how to
justify the necessity of these breaks from the usual linguistic paths.
Language—even the most violent language—always has something
binding. In language something shared, something held in common
comes into Being. Likewise, Heidegger’s radical questioning con­
cerning “Being” is not an esoteric, private activity; rather, the desire
was to compel <one> with linguistic force to go along on the search
for the word that seizes “itself” This is why he dug through the
concealed foundations of language searching for a find. Even the
 T H E T H IN K E R M A R T IN H E ID E G G E R 67

usual relationship between language and what is signified is mislead­

ing. Language is not here and Being there, here an opinion and there
something opined; rather, in the most violent break-in and rupture,
with which he introduced his language, Heidegger draws the “sub­
ject” of his questions—“Being”—closer.
This is what binds the language of thinking that Heidegger
sought to speak to the language of the poets. It is not just that one
finds Heidegger using poetisizing phrases to embellish the barren
language of concepts. The language of a poem [eines Gedichts], one
that is really a poem [ein Gedicht], is not poetic [poetisch]. Rather, that
which the language of thinking has in common with poetic [dichterisch]
language is that nothing is opined here and, therefore, nothing can
be signified. The poetic [dichterisch] word, like the word of thinking,
“opines” nothing. In a poem, nothing is opined that is not already to
be found there [da] in its linguistic formation and what is opined
cannot exist [dasein] in any other linguistic form. Certainly the word
spoken by the philosopher is not the incarnate Being of thought, at
least not in the same way that the word of the poem embodies the
Being of poetry. But in its speaking, the thought itself is not simply
realized; rather, the thought is authenticated in it. This could not be
more apparent than in the movement of thought that is a dialogue of
thinking with itself In thinking philosophy, thinking itself is trans­
formed completely into thought. One need only recall the way
Heidegger approached the lectern—the excited and almost angry se­
riousness with which his thought was ventured, the way he glanced
askant out the window, his eyes only brushing over the audience, and
the way his voice was pushed to its very limit in all of the excite­
ment—to recognize that the language in which Heidegger spoke and
wrote simply cannot be avoided. One must take it as it is and as it
offers itself in its thought. For, in this way is thinking there [da].
That is what we have to thank Heidegger for, not only for being one
who has thought something important and has had something im­
portant to say, but because, in a time that rushed headlong into an
arithmetic and calculative approach, he has left something there [da]
that has set a new standard for thinking for all of us.
 C hapter S even

The Language of
Metaphysics (1968)

Ih e tremendous power emanating from Heidegger’s cre­

ative energies in the early 1920s seemed to sweep along the genera­
tion of students returning from World War I or just beginning its
studies, so that a complete break with traditional academic philoso­
phy seemed to take place with Heidegger’s appearance—long before
it was expressed in his own thought. It was like a new breakthrough
into the unknown that posed something radically new as compared
with all the mere movements and countermovements of the Chris­
tian Occident. A generation shattered by the collapse of an epoch
wanted to begin completely anew; it did not want to retain anything
that had formerly been held valid. Even in the intensification of the
German language that took place in his concepts, Heidegger’s thought
seemed to defy any comparison with what philosophy had previously
meant. And that was in spite of the unceasing and intensive interpre­
tive effort that especially distinguished Heidegger’s academic instruc­
tion—his immersion in Aristotle and Plato, Augustine and Thomas,
Leibniz and Kant, in Hegel and Husserl.

From P h ilo s o p h ic a l H e r m e n e u tic s , by Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and ed. David Linge,
pp. 229-40. Copyright 1976 by The Regents o f the University o f California. Re­
printed by permission o f the University o f California Press.
70 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Altogether unexpected things came to the surface and were

discussed in connection with these names. Each of these great figures
from our classical philosophical tradition was completely transformed
and seemed to proclaim a direct, compelling truth that was perfectly
fused with the thought of its resolute interpreter. The distance separat­
ing our historical consciousness from the tradition seemed to be non­
existent. The calm and confident aloofness with which the neo-Kantian
“history of philosophical problems” was accustomed to deal with the
tradition, and the whole of contemporary thought that came from the
academic rostum, now suddenly seemed to be mere child’s play.
In actual fact, the break with tradition that took place in
Heidegger’s thought represented just as much an incomparable re­
newal of the tradition. Only gradually did the younger students come
to see both how much appropriation of the tradition was present in
the tradition, as well as how profound the criticism was in the appro­
priation. Two great classical figures of philosophical thought, how­
ever, have long occupied an ambiguous position in Heidegger’s
thought, standing out as much by their affinity with Heidegger as by
their radical from him. These two thinkers are Plato and Hegel.
From the very beginning, Plato was viewed in a critical light in
Heidegger’s work, in that Heidegger took over and transformed the
Aristotelean criticism of the Idea of the Good and stressed especially
the Aristotelean concept of analogy. Yet it was Plato who provided
the motto for Being and Time. Only after World War II, with the
decisive incorporation of Plato into the history of Being, was the
ambiguity in regard to Plato removed. But Heidegger’s thought has
revolved around Hegel until the present day in ever new attempts at
delineation. In contrast to the phenomenological craftsmanship that
was all too quickly forgotten by the scholarship of the time, Hegel’s
dialectic of pure thought asserted itself with renewed power. Hence
Hegel not only continually provoked Heidegger to self-defense, but
he was also the one with whom Heidegger was associated in the eyes
of all those who sought to defend themselves against the claim of
Heidegger’s thought. Would the new radicalism with which Heidegger
stirred the oldest questions of philosophy to new life really overtake
the final form of Western metaphysics and realize a new metaphysi­
cal possibility that Hegel had released? Or would the circle of the
philosophy of reflection, which paralyzed all hopes of freedom and
liberation, force Heidegger’s thought too back into its orbit?
 T H E L A N G U A G E O F M E T A P H Y S IC S 71

One can say that the development of Heidegger’s late phi­

losophy has scarcely encountered a critique anywhere that does not
go back in the last analysis to Hegel’s position. This observation is
true in the sense of aligning Heidegger with Hegel’s abortive specu­
lative titanic revolution, as Gerhard Kruger1and countless others af­
ter him have argued. It is also valid in the positive Hegelianizing
sense that Heidegger is not sufficiently aware of his own proximity
to Hegel, and for this reason he does not really do justice to the
radical position of speculative logic. The later criticism has occurred
basically in two problem areas. One is Heidegger’s assimilation of
history into his own philosophical approach, a point that he seems to
share with Hegel. The second is the hidden and unnoticed dialectic
that attaches to all essentially Heideggerian assertions. If Hegel tried
to penetrate the history of philosophy philosophically from the stand­
point of absolute knowledge, that is, to raise it to a science, Heidegger’s
description of the history of Being (in particular, the history of the
forgetfulness of Being) involved a similarly comprehensive claim.
Indeed, there is in Heidegger nothing of that necessity of historical
progress that is both the glory and bane of Hegelian philosophy. For
Heidegger, rather, the history that is remembered and taken up into
the absolute present in absolute knowing is precisely an advance sign
of the radical forgetfulness of Being that has marked the history of
Europe in the century after Hegel. But for Heidegger it is fate, not
history (remembered and penetrable by understanding), that origi­
nated in the conception of Being in Greek metaphysics and that in
modern science and technology carries the forgetfulness of Being to
the extreme. Nevertheless, no matter how much it may belong to
the temporal constitution of human beings to be exposed to the
unpredictability of fate, this does not rule out the claim continually
raised and legitimated in the course of Western history to think
what is. And so Heidegger too appears to claim a genuinely historical
self-consciousness for himself, indeed, even an eschatological self-
consciousness.
The second critical motif proceeds from the indeterminate­
ness and undeterminableness of what Heidegger calls “Being.” This
criticism tries by Hegelian means to explain the alleged tautology of 1

1. See Gerhard Kruger, “Martin Heidegger und der Humanismus,” T h eo lo g isc h e

18 (1950): 148-178.
R u ndschau
72 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

Being—that it is itself—as a disguised second immediacy that emerges

from the total mediation of the immediate. Furthermore, are there
not real dialectical antitheses at work whenever Heidegger explicates
himself? For instance, we find the dialectical tension of thrownness
and projection, of authenticity and inauthenticity, of “nothing” as the
veil of Being, and finally, and most importantly, the way that truth
and error, revealment and concealment revolve around one another
in an inner tension [Gegenwendigkeit], which constitute the event of
Being as the event of truth. Did not the mediation of Being and
“nothing” in the truth of becoming—that is, in the truth of the
concrete as Hegel undertook it—already mark out the conceptual
framework within which alone the Heideggerian doctrine of the
inner tension [Gegenwendigkeit] of truth can exist? Hegel, by his
dialectical-speculative sharpening of the antithesis in understanding,
overcame a thinking dominated by the understanding. Would it be
possible to get beyond this achievement, so as to overcome the logic
and language of metaphysics as a whole?
Access to our problem undoubtedly lies in the problem of
“nothing” and its suppression by metaphysics, a theme Heidegger
formulated in his inaugural address in Freiburg. In this perspective,
the “nothing” of Parmenides and Plato, and also Aristotle’s definition
of the divine as energia and dynamis really constitutes a total vitiation
of “nothing.” God, as the infinite knowledge that has the being [das
Seiende] from itself, is understood from the vantage point of privative
experience of being human, such as in the experience of sleep, death,
and forgetting, as the unlimited presence of everything present. But
another motif seems to be at work in the history of metaphysical
thinking alongside this vitiation of “nothing” that extends even into
Hegel and Husserl. While Aristotelean metaphysics has culminated
in the question, What is the Being of beings? it is the question placed
by Leibniz and Schelling and then called the basic question of meta­
physics by Heidegger, namely, 'W hy is there anything at all and not
rather 'nothing?,”’ which expressly continues the confrontation with
the problem of “nothing.” The analysis of the concept of dynamis in
Plato, Plotinus, the tradition of negative theology, Nicolas of Cusa,
and Liebniz, and all the way to Schelling—from whom Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, and the metaphysics of the will take their departure—all
serve to show that the understanding of Being in terms of presence
[Prdsenz] is constantly threatened by the “nothing.” In our own cen­
 T H E L A N G U A G E O F M E T A P H Y S IC S 73

tury this situation is also found in Max Scheler’s dualism of impulse

and spirit and Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of the not yet, as well as in
such hermeneutical phenomena as the question, doubt, wonder, and
so on. To this extent, Heidegger’s approach has an intrinsic prepara­
tion in the subject matter of metaphysics itself
In order to clarify the immanent necessity of the develop­
ment within his own thought that led Heidegger to “the turn,” and
to show that it has nothing to do with a dialectical reversal, we must
proceed from the fact that the transcendental-phenomenological con­
ception of self in Being and Time is already essentially different from
Husserl’s conception of it. Husserl’s constitutional analysis of the
consciousness of time shows particularly well that the self-constitution
of the primal presence (which Husserl could indeed designate as a
kind of primal potentiality) is based entirely on the concept of con­
stitutive accomplishment and is thus dependent on the Being of
valid objectivity The self-constitution of the transcendental ego, a
problem that can be traced back to the fifth chapter of the Logical
InvestigationSj stands wholly within the traditional understanding of
Being, despite-—-indeed, precisely because of—the absolute historic­
ity that forms the transcendental ground of all objectivities. Now it
must be admitted that Heidegger’s transcendental point of departure
from the being that has its Being as an issue and the doctrine of the
existentiells in Being and Time both carry with them a transcendental
appearance, as though Heidegger’s thoughts were, as Oskar Becker
puts it,2simply the elaboration of further horizons of transcendental
phenomenology that had not previously been secured and that had
to do with the historicality of Dasein. In reality, however, Heidegger’s
undertaking means something quite different. Jaspers’s formulation
of the boundary situation certainly provided Heidegger with a start­
ing point for explicating the fimtude of existence in its basic signifi­
cance. But this approach served as the preparation of the question of
Being in a radically altered sense and was not the explication of a
radical ontology in Husserl’s sense. The concept of “fundamental
ontology”—modelled after that of “fundamental theology”-—-also cre­
ates a difficulty The mutual interconnection of authenticity and
inauthenticity of the revealment of and concealment of Dasein, which

2. See Oskar Becker, “Von der Hinfalligeit des Schonen und der Abendteuerlichkeit
des Kilns tiers," published originally in the F es ts c h riftJ ilr F lu s s e d (1929), pp. 27-52.
74 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

appeared in Being and Time more in the sense of a rejection of an

ethicistic, affect-oriented thinking, turned out increasingly to be the
real nucleus of the “question of Being.” According to Heidegger's
formulation in On the Essence of Truth, ek-sistence and in-sistence are
indeed still conceived from the point of view of human Dasein. But
when he says that the truth of Being is the untruth, that is, the
concealment of Being in “error," then the decisive change in the
concept of “essence" which follows from the destruction of the Greek
tradition of metaphysics can no longer be ignored. For Heidegger
leaves behind him both the traditional concept of essence and that of
the ground of essence.
What the interconnection of concealment and revealment
means and what it has to do with the new concept of “essence” can
be exhibited phenomenologically in Heidegger's own essential expe­
rience of thought in a number of ways. (1) In the Being of the
implement that does not have its essence in its objective obstinacy,
but in its being ready-to-hand, which allows us to concentrate on
what is beyond the implement itself (2) In the Being of the artwork,
which holds its truth within itself in such a fashion that this truth is
available in no other way bht in the work. For the beholder or re­
ceiver, “essence” corresponds to tarrying alongside the work. (3) In
the thing, as the one and only that stands in itself “compelled to
nothing,” and contrasts in its irreplaceability with the concept of the
object of consumption, as found industrial production. (4) And finally
in the word. The “essence" of the word does not lie in being totally
expressed, but rather in what is left unsaid, as we see in remaining
speechless and remaining silent. The common structure of essence
that is evident in all four of these experiences of thinking is a “Being-
there" [Dasein] that encompasses Being-absent as well as Being-
present. During his early years at Freiburg, Heidegger once said,
“One cannot lose God as one loses his pocket knife." But in fact one
cannot simply lose a pocket knife in such a fashion that it is no
longer “there." When one has lost a long familiar implement such as
a pocket knife, it demonstrates its existence [Dasein] by the fact that
one continually misses it. Flolderlin’s “Fehl der Gotter” or Eliot's
silence of the Chinese vase are not nonexistence, but “Being” in the
thickest sense because they are silent. The gap that is left by what is
missing is not a place remaining empty within what is present-to-
hand; rather, it belongs to the being-there [Dasein] of that to which it
 T H E L A N G U A G E O F M E T A P H Y S IC S 75

is missing, and is “presencing” [an~wesend] in it. Hence “essence” is

concretized, and we can demonstrate how what is present is at the
same time the covering over of presence.
Problems that necessarily eluded transcendental inquiry and
appeared as mere peripheral phenomena become comprehensible
when we proceed from such experiences. In the first place, this holds
for “nature.” Becker’s postulation of a paraontology is justified here
insofar as nature is no longer only “a limiting case of the Being o f a
possible inner-worldly being.”-But Becker himself has never recog­
nized that his counterconcept of paraexistence, which is concerned
with such essential phenomena as mathematical and dream exist­
ence, is a dialectical construction. Becker himself synthesized it with
its opposite and thus marked out a third position, without noticing
how this position corresponds to the Heideggerian teachings after
the “turn.”
A second large complex of problems that comes into a new
light in the context of Heidegger’s later thought is that of the Thou
and the We. We are familiar with this problem complex from Husserl’s
ongoing discussion of the problem of intersubjectivity; in Being and
Time it is interpreted in terms of the world of concern. What consti­
tutes the mode of being of essence is now considered from the point
of view of the dialogue, that is, in terms of our capacity to listen to
each other in concrete>, for instance, when we perceive what governs a
conversation or whenever we notice its absence in a tortured conver­
sation. But above all, the inscrutable problem of life and corporeality
presents itself in a new way. The concept of the living being [Lebe~
Wesen\} which Heidegger emphasized in his “Letter on Humanism,”
raises new questions, especially the question of its correspondence to
the nature of human beings [Menschen-Wesen] and the nature of lan­
guage [Sprach-Wesen], But behind this line of questioning stands the
question of the Being of the self which was easy enough to define in
terms of German idealism’s concept of reflection. It becomes puz­
zling, however, the moment we no longer proceed from the self or
self-consciousness, or—as in Being and Time—from human Dasein,
but rather from essence. The fact that Being presences [anwest] in a
“clearing,” and that in this fashion thinking human beings are the
placeholder of Being, points to a primordial interconnection of Be­
ing and human beings. The tool, the work of art, thing, the word—
in all of these, the relation to human beings stands forth clearly in
76 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

essence itself But in what sense? Scarcely in the sense that the Being
of the human self thereby acquires its definition. The example of
language has already shown us that. As Heidegger says, language
speaks us, insofar as we do not really preside over it and control it,
although, of course, no one disputes the fact that it is we who speak
it. And Heidegger’s assertion here is not without meaning.
If we want to raise the question of the “self” in Heidegger,
we will have first to consider and reject Neo-Platonic modes of
thought. For a cosmic drama consisting in the emanation out of the
One and the return into it, with the self designated as the pivot of
the return, lies beyond what is possible here. O r one could consider
what Heidegger understands by “insistence” as the way to a solution.
What Heidegger called the “in-sistence” of Dasein and what he called
errancy are certainly to be conceived from the point of view of the
forgetfulness of Being. But is this forgetfulness the sole mode of
coming to presence? Will this render intelligible the place-holding
character of human Dasein? Can the concept of coming to presence
and the “there” be maintained in exclusive relation to human Dasein,
if we take the growth of plants and the living being into consider­
ation? In his On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger still conceived of “in­
sistence” from the point of view of the being that first “raised its
head” [i.e., human beings]. But does not in-sistence have to be taken
in a broader sense? And hence “ek-sistence” too? Certainly the con­
finement of the living being in its environment, discussed in the
.“Letter on Humanism,” means that it is not open for Being as is
man, who is aware of his possibility of not being. But have we not
learned from Heidegger that the real Being of the living being is not
its own individual being-there, but rather the genus? And is the
genus not “there” for the living being, even if not in the same way
that Being is present for human beings in the in-sistence of the
forgetfulness of Being? Does it not compose a part of the Being of
the genus that its members “know” themselves, as the profound
expression of the Lutheran Bible puts it? Indeed, as knowing, are
they not concealed from themselves but yet in such fashion that
knowing passes over into it? Is it not also characteristic of in-sistence
that the animal intends only itself [conservatio sui] and yet precisely in
this way provides for the reproduction of its kind?
Similarly, we could ask about the growth of vegetation: Is it
only a coming to presence for human beings? Does not every form
 T H E L A N G U A G E O F M E T A P H Y S IC S 77

of life as such have a tendency to secure itself in its Being, indeed to

persist in it? Is it not precisely its fmitude that it wants to tarry in this
manner? And does it not hold for human beings as well that the
Dasein in him, as Heidegger called it, is not to be thought of at all as
a kind of highest self-possession that allows him to step outside the
circuit of life like a god? Isn’t our entire doctrine of human beings
distorted rather than put in order by modern metaphysical subjectiv­
ism, in that we consider the essence of human beings to be society
(£oj>ov t t o A.i t l k .o v [social animal])? Is it not just this belief that
declares the inner tension that is Being itself? And does it not mean
that it is senseless to pit “nature” against “Being?”
Within this context, the continuing difficulty is that of avoid­
ing the language of metaphysics, which conceives of all these matters
in terms of the “power of reflection.” But what do we mean when
we speak of the “language of metaphysics?” It is illuminating that the
experience of “essence” is not that of manipulating thinking. If we
keep this distinction in mind, we can see that the concept of “re­
collection” has something natural about it. It is true that recollection
itself is something and that in it history has its reality, not that history
is simply remembered through it. But what takes place in “recollec­
tion?” Is it really tenable to expect something like a reversal in it—
like the abruptness of fate? Whatever the case may be, the important
thing in the phenomenon of recollection, it seems to me, is that
something is secured and preserved in the “there,” so that it can
never not be, as long as recollection remains alive. Yet recollection is
not something that clutches tenaciously at what is vanishing; the
nonexistence of what disappears is not at all concealed or obstinately
disputed by it. Rather, something like consent takes place in it (of
which Rilke’s Duino Elegies tells us something). There is nothing of
what we have called insistence in it.
Conversely, what we may call fascination arises through the
constructive capacity and technological power of insistence, that is,
of human forgetfulness of Being. There is essentially no limit to the
experience of Being, which, since Nietzsche, we call nihilism. But if
this fascination proceeds from such a constantly intensifying obsti­
nacy, does it not find its own ultimate end in itself] precisely by
virtue of the fact that the constantly new becomes something left
behind, and that this happens without a special event intervening or a
reversal taking place? Does not the natural weight of things remain
78 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

perceptible and make itself felt the more monotonously the noise of
the constantly new may sound forth? To be sure, Hegel’s idea of
knowledge, concealed as absolute self-transparency, has something
fantastic about it if it is supposed to restore complete at-homeness in
Being. But could not a restoration of at-homeness come about in the
sense that the process of making-oneself-at-home in the world has
never ceased to take place, and has never ceased to be the better
reality that is not deafened by the madness of technology? Does this
restoration not occur when the illusory character of the technocracy,
the paralyzing sameness of everything human beings can make, be­
comes perceptible, and human beings are released again into the
really astonishing character of their own finite Being? This freedom
is certainly not gained in the sense of an absolute transparency, or a
being-at-home that is no longer endangered. But just as the thinking
of what cannot be preconceived [das Denken des Unvordenklichen] pre­
serves what is its own, for example, the homeland, what cannot be
preconceived regarding our finitude is reunited with itself in the
constant process of the coming to language of our Dasein. In the up
and down ^.movement, in coming into Being and passing away, it
is “there.”
Is this the old metaphysics? Is it the language of metaphysics
alone that achieves this continual coming-to-language of our Being-
in-the-world? Certainly it is the language of metaphysics, but further
behind it is the language of the Indo-Germanic peoples, which makes
such thinking capable of being formulated. But can a language—or a
family of languages—ever properly be called the language of meta­
physical thinking, just because metaphysics was thought, or what
would be more, anticipated in it? Is not language always the language
of the homeland and the process of becoming-at-home in the world?
And does this fact not mean that language knows no restrictions and
never breaks down, because it holds infinite possibilities of utterance
in readiness? It seems to me that the hermeneutical dimension enters
here and demonstrates its inner infinity in the speaking that takes
place in the dialogue. To be sure, the technical language [Schulsprache]
of philosophy is preformed by the grammatical structure of the Greek
language, and its usages in Graeco-Latin times established ontologi­
cal implications whose prejudiced character Heidegger uncovered.
But we must ask: Are the universality of objectifying reason and the
eidetic structure of linguistic meanings really bound to these particu-
 T H E L A N G U A G E O F M E T A P H Y S IC S 79

lar historically developed interpretations of subjectum and species and

actus that the West has produced? O r do they hold true for all lan­
guages? It cannot be denied that there are certain structural aspects of
the Greek language and a grammatical self-consciousness, particu­
larly in Latin, that fix in a definite direction of interpretation the
hierarchy of genus and species, the relation of substance and acci­
dent, the structure of predication and the verb as an action word. But
is there no rising above such a preschematizing of thought? For
instance, if one contrasts the Western predicative judgment with the
Eastern figurative expression, which acquires its expressive power
from the reciprocal reflection of what is meant and what is said, are
these two not in truth only different modes of utterance within one
and the same universal, namely, within the essence of language and
reason? Do concept and judgment not remain embedded within the
life of meaning of the language we speak and in which we know how
to say what it is we mean?3And conversely, cannot the connotative
aspect of such Oriental reflective expressions always be drawn into
the hermeneutical movement that creates common understanding,
just as the expression of the work of art can? Language always arises
within such a movement. Can anyone really contend that there has
ever been language in any other sense than in the fulfilling of such a
movement? Hegel’s doctrine of the speculative proposition too seems
to me to have its place here, and always takes up into itself its own
sharpening into the dialectic of contradiction. For in speaking, there
always remains the possibility of cancelling the objectifying tendency
of language, just as Hegel cancels the logic of understanding,
Heidegger the language of metaphysics, the Orientals the diversity of
realms of Being, and the poet everything given. But to cancel [aujheben]
means to take up and use.

3. Certainly Derrida would not agree with this rhetorical question. Rather, he would
see in it a lack o f radicality that refers back to “metaphysics”— and this includes
Heidegger. In his eyes Nietzsche is the one who truly can be credited with over­
coming metaphysical thought, and consequently he subordinates language to “ecritu re”
(see V E c ritu re et la d iffera n c e ). [Regarding the contrast between hermeneutics and this
poststructuralistic following o f Nietzsche, see my newer works in the G e s . W e r k e ,
volume 2, pages 330-360 and pages 361-372.]
 C h a p t e r E ig h t

PLATO (1976)

V \ L we learned from Heidegger was above all the per­

vasive unity of the metaphysics originated by the Greeks and its
continued validity under the subtly altered conditions of modern
thought. The Aristotelean question concerning a primary science,
which Aristotle himself expressly designates as the science to be sought
for, initiated the tradition of Western thought. In this tradition the
question of the Being of beings was posed in terms of the highest
and most eminent of beings, namely, the divine. If Heidegger under­
stood his own endeavor as a preparation for posing the question of
Being anew, then this assumed that the traditional metaphysics, since
its beginning with Aristotle, had lost all explicit awareness of the
questionableness of the sense of Being. This was a challenge to the
self-understanding of a metaphysics which would not recognize
itself in its own consequences: in the radical nominalism of the mod­
ern age, and in the transformation of the modern concept of science
into an all-embracing technology. The main concern of Sein und Zeit
was to urge just such a recognition by metaphysics and its secondary
formations. At the same time Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics
gave rise to the question of the beginnings of Greek thought,
beginnings which preceded the development of the metaphysical

From. T h e Q u e s tio n o f B ein g> trans. and ed. Mervyn Sprung (University Park and
London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), pp. 45-53. Copyright 1978 by
the Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission o f the publisher.

81
82 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

question. It is well known that in this respect Heidegger, like

Nietzsche, placed special emphasis on the origins of Greek thought.
For Heidegger, Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides were not a
preliminary phase of the metaphysical inquiry, but witnesses to the
essential ppenness of the beginning—where aletheia (unconcealedness,
truth) had as yet nothing of the correctness of a statement, indeed
not even of the mere revealedness of a being.
But what of Plato in this matter? Did his thinking not stand
in between the early thinkers and the scholastic form of metaphys­
ics—a metaphysics which assumed its initial form in the teachings of
Aristotle? How can his place be determined? Heidegger’s question­
ing back to a point before the question of metaphysics was posed,
i.e., to the Being of beings, was certainly not meant to be a return to
a mythical pre-age, nor was a presumptuous criticism of metaphysics
from a superior standpoint intended. Heidegger never wanted to
“overcome” metaphysics as an aberration of thought. He understood
metaphysics as the historical course of the West, determining its des­
tiny. Here destiny is that which has overtaken us and which has
irrevocably determined our own position and all possible ways into
the future. There is no historical rue. And Heidegger most certainly
attempted to find the way of his own questioning within the history
of metaphysics and its internal tensions, and not apart from it.
Aristotle was in many respects not only his opponent but
also his ally. It was especially Aristotle’s repudiation of Plato’s idea of
a universal good, based on the concept of analogy, and Aristotle’s
penetration of the nature of physis, particularly Book VI of the
Nicomachean Ethics and Book II of the Physics, which Heidegger
interpreted in a fruitful way. It is evident that it is precisely these two
“positive” aspects of Aristotle’s thought which are the most impor­
tant documentations of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato. In the first place,
there is the severing of the question concerning the “Good,” as some­
thing which human beings bring into the question concerning
human praxis, from the theoretical posing of the question concerning
Being. In the second place, there is the criticism of the Platonic
theory of Forms. This finds its expression in the ontological primacy
of motility in Aristotle’s concept of physis [nature] and claims to
overcome the orientation toward the Pythagorean mathematical forms.
Both point at Plato, and in both respects Aristotle appears almost as a
forerunner of Heideggerean thought. The doctrine of phronesis as
 PLATO 83

practical knowledge stands opposed to all objectifying tendencies of

science, and in the concept ofphysis and its ontological primacy there
is at least a hint of a dimension of “givenness” [Aufgehen] which is
superior to any subject-object opposition.
This was certainly Heidegger’s own fruitful “recognition”; it
would be ridiculous to speak of Aristotle’s influence on Heidegger.
In depicting the role which Franz Brentano’s treatise on the various
significances o f being [Seiende] in Aristotle had played for him,
Heidegger himself told us what Aristotle meant to him as an initial
inspiration. Brentano’s careful delineation of the variety of meanings
which lie in Aristotle’s concept of Being led Heidegger to be seized
by the question of what might be concealed behind this discon­
nected variety. In every case, taking Aristotle as the point of departure
carried with it the implication of a critical orientation towards Plato’s
theory of forms.
But then, upon opening Sein und Zeit, we find right on the
first page the famous quotation from the Sophist concerning the ques­
tion of Being, which has always been posed, always in vain. It is true
that this quotation contains no detailed articulation of the way in which
the question of Being is posed. Furthermore, the overcoming of the
Eleatic concept of Being which commences with the Sophist points in
an entirely different direction from that of the question concerning the
hidden unity of the various meanings of Being which had aroused the
young Heidegger. There is still another passage in the Sophist which
Heidegger does not quote, although he refers to it, and which actually,
even though only in a merely formal way, implies the continuing
predicament concerning Being. This predicament was the same in the
fourth century before Christ as it is in our twentieth century.
The stranger from Elea expounds the two basic modes of
manifestation of beings as motion and rest. These are two mutually
exclusive modes of Being, but they appear to exhaust completely the
possibilities of the manifestation of Being. If one does not wish to
conceive of the state of rest, one must conceive of motion, and vice-
versa. Where should one look if one does not wish to catch sight of
one or the other but of “Being?” There appears to be no possibility
whatsoever of open questioning. It is clearly not the intention of the
Eleatic stranger to understand Being as the universal genus which
differentiates itself into these two aspects of Being. What Plato has in
mind, rather, is that in speaking about Being a differentiation is
84 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

implicit which does not distinguish different realism of Being but

rather suggests an inner structuredness of Being itself Selfness or
identity as well as otherness or difference are essential to all dis­
course about Being. These two aspects, far from being mutually
exclusive, are rather mutually determining. Whatever is identical with
itself is thereby different from anything else. Insofar as it is what it is,
it is not everything else. Being and Non-being are inextricably inter­
twined. Indeed, it appears to be precisely the mark of a philosopher
as against the sham logic of the sophist that it is the togetherness of
Being (the affirmation) and Non-being (the negation) which consti­
tutes the nature of beings.
Now it is precisely at this point that the later Heidegger takes
up the question: the determinate nature of beings, whose relation­
ship to Being constitutes the entire truth of Being, preceded and
precluded any posing of the question concerning the meaning of
Being. Heidegger, in fact, describes the history of metaphysics as the
growing forgetfulness of the question concerning Being. The
revealedness of beings—the self-manifestation of the eidos in its un­
changeable form—amounts to the abandonment of the question con­
cerning the meaning of Being. What manifests itself as eidos, i.e., as
an unchangeable determinateness showing the “What-of-Being” [Was-
Sein], understands “Being” implicitly as a continuous presence
[Gegenwart], and this determines as well the meaning of uncon­
cealedness, that is, truth, and establishes the criterion of right and
wrong for every assertion about beings. The claim “Theatetus can
fly” is false because people are incapable of flight. In this way, through
his reinterpretation of the Eleatic doctrine of Being as the dialectic of
Being and Non-being, Plato grounds the meaning of “knowledge” in
the logos which allows assertions about the beingness of beings, that
is, about the What-of-Being. In so doing, Plato predetermines the
way the question will be put in the Aristotelean doctrine of t u f | v
e i v a i [the essence, that which something is], the core of his meta­

physics. In this sense the distortion of the question of Being begins

with Plato, and the criticism which Aristotle brings against the Pla­
tonic doctrine of forms does not change the fact that the science of
Being which Aristotle sought remains within this prior determina­
tion and does not attempt to question behind it.
It is not appropriate to develop at this point the problematic
of modern philosophy to which Heidegger's critical return to Greek
metaphysics is a response. It will suffice to recall the way Heidegger
defined the task of “destroying55 the basic concepts of modern phi­
losophy, especially the concepts “subjectivity55 and “consciousness.55
Above all, the impressive way in which Husserl, in inexhaustible
variations, attempted to determine the constitution of self-conscious­
ness as temporal consciousness was a determining factor—in an anti­
thetical way—in Heidegger's own way of taking up the problem of
the temporal structure of Dasein. Certainly, Heidegger's familiarity
with the Greek philosophical heritage stood him in good stead in
critically distancing himself from Husserl's Neo-Kantian, idealistic
programming of phenomenology. In any case, it is a crass simplifica­
tion to interpret Heidegger's accentuation of history and the histori­
cal as merely a thematic turn which separates him from Husserl’s
thinking. Not only the controversy between Husserl and Dilthey but
especially the unpublished second volume of the Ideas, with which
Heidegger was naturally quite familiar, are evidence against any doubt
of Husserl's concern with the question of history and the historical.
Indeed, they confirm the attempt to accommodate Heidegger's Sein
und Zeit within the Husserlian phenomenology, as in Oskar Becker's
unlucky attempt in the Husserl Festschrift of 1928. There is no doubt
that it was clear to Husserl from the beginning that the “mortal
danger” of skepticism, which he took historical relativism to be, could
not be averted without clarifying the constitution of the historical
structure of human social life.
Nevertheless, what .Heidegger undertook in Sein und Zeit
was not only a deepening of the foundations of a transcendental
phenomenology, it was also a preparation for a radical change which
would bring the collapse of the entire concept of the constitution of
all conceivable meanings in the transcendental ego, and above all of
the concept of the self-constitution of the ego itself In analyzing the
temporal nature of the stream of consciousness, Husserl conceived
of the self-manifestation of the stream, that is, the nonmediated pres­
ence, as the ultimate factor in the ego to which we can descend. He
did not regard the structure of iteration, which becomes evident in
the self-constitution of the ego, in any way as an aporia, but claimed
it as a positive description. That meant, basically, he did not go
beyond the Hegelian ideal of the perfect self-transparency of abso­
lute knowledge.
Heidegger does not merely set the unpredictability of exist­
ence off against this ideal, as th e ^ u n g Hegelians and Kierkegaard had
already done in a variety of ways. That is not what is truly novel about
86 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

his endeavor. If it were, he would have remained in fact dialectically

dependent, caught in a Hegelianizing anti-Hegelianism. (It is odd to
note that Adorno, in his “negative dialectic,35 never realized how close
he comes to Heidegger, if one only sees Heidegger in light of his
critique of Hegel.) The truth is that Heidegger, as a student of early
Greek thought and as one who also entered into dialogue with it,
posed the problem of facticity in a more radical and original sense.
Because metaphysics in its beginnings attempted to question the
unconcealedness of beings through the logos and its presence and
preservation in thought and speech, the authentic dimension of the
temporality and historicality of Being fell into a deep and lengthy
shadow.
Heidegger, on the other hand, questioned behind the begin­
nings of metaphysics and sought to open a dimension in which, as
with “historicism,” historicality would no longer serve as a limiting
hinderance to truth and the objectivity of knowledge. Nor can this
be understood as a coup de main which attempts to solve the problem
of historical relativism by radicalizing it. It seems to me to be signifi­
cant that the later Heidegger, in his self-interpretation, no longer
takes the problem of historicism seriously (see "Mein Weg in die
Phanomenologie”). Historicality is for Heidegger the ontological struc­
ture o f the “temporalizing” o f Dasein in self-projection and
thrownness, in the clearing and withdrawal of Being. It is concerned
with a realm which lies behind all questioning concerning beings. It
is possible to recognize, as Heidegger does, this dimension of the
question of Being in its beginnings in the riddle of Anaximander, in
the monumental singleness of Parmenides’s truth and in Heraclitus’s
“one and only wise man.” But one can raise the contrary question of
whether the founders of metaphysical thinking themselves did not
give evidence of this dimension and whether, in the logos of the
Platonic dialectic of in Aristotle’s of nous, which perceives essence
and determines it as what it is, the realm in which all questioning
and speech find their field of activity [Spielraum] does not become
visible. Does the initial question of metaphysics concerning the “what”
of beings really obstruct the question of Being completely, as without
a doubt do the modes of speech developed in the sciences which
logic makes into its analytical theme?
Heidegger, as it is well known, saw in Plato’s doctrine
o f forms the first step in the transformation of truth from
unconcealedness to the appropriateness and correctness of statements.
That this is one-sided he himself later conceded, but his self-correc­
tion amounts merely to saying that Plato was not the first, rather
"alethcia” was experienced right away and only as orthotes} as the cor­
rectness of statements (Heidegger, “Zur Sache des Denkens/} p. 78). I
would like to raise the question, contrary to this, whether Plato him­
self did not attempt to think the realm of unconcealedness, at least in
the Idea of the Good, and not merely because of certain complica­
tions and internal difficulties in the doctrine of forms; but rather
whether from the very beginning he had not questioned behind this
doctrine and thereby aletheia as correctness. It seems to me that some­
thing can be said for this.
O f course, one cannot read Plato’s works through the eyes of
the Aristotelean critique. This critique aims relentlessly at the refuta­
tion of the chorismos [separation or split] of the ideas, a point to which
Aristotle always returns and which he developed into the essential
difference between Socrates’s definitional questions and Plato (Met M
4). In fact, this thesis of Aristotle’s suffers from a weakness which was
made into an accusation, especially by Hegel and the Marburg Neo-
Kantians, that Plato himself in his dialectical dialogues of the later
period dealt with the chorismos in a radical way and critically rejected it.
The genuine depth of the Platonic dialectic is constituted precisely by
its claim to be able show the way out of this dilemma of the chorismos
and participation by lessening the importance of the separation be­
tween what partakes and that in which it partakes.
That this is not merely a later development of Platonic think­
ing becomes clear, in my view, if one considers the exceptional role
which the Idea of the Good played in Plato’s works from early on.
Because the Idea of die Good does not fit easily into the scheme of
Aristotle’s critique of chorismos and in fact, as could be shown, is only
hesitantly and cautiously included in Aristotle’s general critique of
the Ideas, the critique of the Idea of the Good is carried out from a
practical point of view. The theoretical problem remains, however,
that it is not merely chance equivocations which permit calling very
different things “good,” but that this conceals a genuine problem
which Aristotle attempted to solve in his doctrine of analogia entis
[analogy of Being]. But let us turn to Plato himself
Initially we encounter the question concerning the Good
itself as the constant negative instance on which the collocutors
88 H E ID E G G E R ’S W AYS

understanding of arete [virtue] comes to grief. The underlying idea

of knowledge, which is modeled on craft skill and whose meaning
is the mastery of practical situations, proves to be inapplicable in
the case of the Idea of the Good. It is obviously more than mere
literary art when Plato’s statements about the Good in itself have a
tendency to withdraw in a peculiar way into a realm beyond. In the
Republic the special position of the Idea of the Good in contrast to
the arete concepts of definite content is insisted on so that it is only
by means of a sense analogy, that of the sun, that the Good is
spoken of. It is decisive that the sun functions as the bringer of light
and that it is light which makes the visible world visible to the seer.
It is significant that the Idea of the Good, conforming to the fre­
quently used analogy, is, so to speak, only indirectly visible. Within
the whole of the thought of the Republic that means that the consti­
tution of the soul, the state and—in the Timaeus—the world is
grounded in the One, that is, in the Good, even as the sun is the
ground of light that binds together everything. The Good is that
which bestows unity rather than that which is itself a One. It is,
after all, beyond all Being.
There can be no doubt that this Super-Being should not be
thought of after the manner of neo-Platonism as the source of a
cosmic drama, nor is it the goal of a withdrawal and mystical union.
It is true, however, that this One which is the Good, is not, as the
Philebus shows, comprehensible in any way as one but only as a
trinity of measure, appropriateness, and “truth” as most suitably be­
fits the nature of the beautiful. “Is” the Good anywhere at all if not in
the form [Gestalt] of the beautiful? And does that not mean that it is
not an existent particular, but is to be thought o f as the
unconcealedness o f emergence into the field of vision ( t o
skTpavscTTaTOV [stepping out into visibility], Phaedrus 250d).
Even Aristotle’s interpretation of Plato takes account of this
singular position of the Good in an indirect way. As was mentioned
earlier, Aristotle, in the context of practical philosophy, denied the
Idea of the Good any relevance at all and, on the other hand, carries
out his criticism of the doctrine of Forms without regard for the Idea
o f the Good. But he sees the theoretical problem of the unity of the
Good so closely related to the problem of the unity of Being that one
is justified in distinguishing his ways of thinking, those of analogy
and attribution, from his general approach to Plato’s doctrine of
Forms. It can be shown from Aristotle’s own work that he could
indeed distinguish between the acceptance of the Forms in general
and their logical and ontological inadequacies which he pointed out,
on one hand, and the principle of this acceptance, on the other—
which forms the topic of Book VI of the Metaphysics. In Aristotle’s
terms, that is, the Good—and Being likewise—is not one Form among
many but a beginning, an arche. It is not entirely clear if "the Good
itself” is the one which as arche, together with twoness, forms the
basis of all determinations of the Forms, or whether perhaps the One
is itself prior to this twoness of One and indefinite plurality. One
thing, however, is definite: The One is as little a number as the Idea
of the Good is a Form in the sense of the eidos that Aristotle criticized
as a vacuous duplication of the world.
The Idea of the Good is no longer spoken of in the later
Plato when the central question qf the dialectic, that is, the logos
ousias [concept of essence], becomes thematic. That is even true of
the Philebus, where the theme is explicitly the Good, admittedly the
Good in the life of human beings. Here, however, the criterion of
the Good, which, as we saw, was defined in the form [Gestalt] of
the beautiful, cannot be left undiscussed. In the Philebus the funda­
mental discussion of the four categories is conducted without espe­
cially distinguishing the Idea of the Good. And in the Sophist and
Parmenides the discussion of the Platonic dialectic appears to be far
beyond the doctrine of Forms, and, indeed, these dialogues have
been understood as the renunciation of the doctrine of the Forms.
The doctrine of the logos of Being which is developed in these
dialectical dialogues is, in any case, as little subject to Aristotle’s
chorismos-criticism as is the Idea of the Good. “Dogmatic Platonism,”
which Aristotle’s criticism belabors, has no basis in these dialogues.
On the contrary, the schema of the dihairesis which Plato presents as
his dialectical method in these dialogues has been for some time
understood as a successful resolution of the methexis problem
(Natorp, N. Hartmann, J. Stenzel), which invalidates Aristotle’s
criticism. It is even more noteworthy that the possibility of dialec­
tic in the sense of dihairesis [the analyzing or dissecting of concepts]
cannot itself be justified by the dihairetic method. This doctrine of
the highest categories is intended to explain how the disjunction
and synthesis of what belongs together is possible at all. But this is
presupposed in any discussion of the Many or One. The participa­
tion of the Many in the One, on which level it could always come
up as a problem, has as a separation (chorismos) and as overcoming
90 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

of this separation a common basis in Being itself: It is Being and

Non-being.
In this context the question ofpseudos [error] arises and plays
a constantly disconcerting role. One may understand the problem to
mean roughly that, if thinking is distinguishing, one is capable of
distinguishing falsely. As the Platonic analogy has it: Mistaking the
joints when carving the sacrificial animals, one proves that one is not
master of the true dialectic and so, after the manner of the sophist,
one becomes prone to misconceptions of the logos. It remains un­
clear, however, how these misconceptions are possible if one under­
stands the Being of the eidos as parusia, as pure contemporariness. So
the question concerning pseudos becomes hopelessly complicated in
the Theatetus. Neither the analogy of the wax tablet nor that with the
dovecote advance the argument a single step: What could that be, in
the case of pseudos, that could be meant with the “presence” of the
false? What is there when a statement is false? A dove of falseness?
One can say that the Sophist attempts to advance this ques­
tion toward a positive solution by means of the proof that Non-
being “is” and is indissolubly conjoined with Being, as difference is
with unity. If, however, Non-being means nothing but the difference
which, along with identity, forms the basis of all differentiating speech,
then it is indeed understandable how true speech is possible but not
how pseudos, falseness, and illusion are possible. The coexistence of
the other (the different) with the identical is far from explaining the
existence of something as what it is not, but explains it merely as
what it is, that is to say, this and nothing else. The mere criticism of
the Eleatic concept of Being does not suffice to genuinely invalidate
its basic assumption, the thinking of Being as presence in logos. Even
if difference is a kind of visibility, the eidos of Non-being, then the
question ofpseudos remains a puzzle. Insofar as the existence [Dasein]
of the “not” turns out to be the eidos of otherness, especially then the
nothingness ofpseudos conceals itself
At most one can go along with Plato so far as to recognize a
fundamental limitation in the way that “nothing” presents itself.
Insofar as otherness turns up only when it is entertwined with
sameness, that is, only with reference to something identifiable as the
Non-being of everything else, are we thinking beings caught up in
the unending discourse. Not only is it infinite regress in which all
differentiation is lost; since a differentiation sameness is always
implied, an infinite indeterminacy is present with every single differ­
entiation, an indeterminacy which the Pythagoreans called the apeiron
[the endless or infinite]: everything else forces its way through in
accompaniment. In this regard the “not” itself lies in “presence”
[Anwesen]. This is virtually the formulation found in the Sophist (258e),
the Non-being consists in the contra-position to Being. As the na­
ture of the other and respectively the otherness, it is distributed at
the one time in a reciprocal relationship to beings. Only in this
distribution is it encountered and only thusly is it Non-being. It
seems entirely nonsensical to think of the totality of all differences as
being “there” [als “da” zu denken]—including the total presentness of
Non-being. The “not” of otherness is more than mere difference, it
is a genuine “not” of Being. It was the fundamental “not” in Being
that I think Plato had in view in the lecture “Concerning the Good,”
where he seems to have posited the indeterminable twoness along­
side the determining one. But if one accepts the “not” of otherness
and difference, the nothingness of error truly becomes harmless, and
the concealment which began with the eleatic suppression of the
“nothing” [des Nichts] is perpetrated. One might bear in mind as well
that, in the production of the world according to the Timaeus, sameness
and difference function as cosmological factors and constitute knowl­
edge and opinion, of course, alethes doxa [true opinion]. An ontologi­
cal foundation for pseudos doxa [false opinion] is lacking.
Here we have assuredly reached the point where Heidegger
discerned the limits of the concept of aletheia, that is to say, the
beginning of the distortion of the question of Being.
One can, however, put the matter the other way around. As
we become aware that the ontological question concerning pseudos is
never really solved in Platonic thought, we are forced towards a
dimension in which Non-being does not mean mere difference and
Being mere identifiability, but a dimension in which the One is more
original, is prior to such a differentiation and at the same time makes
it possible. The grand one-sidedness of the Parmenidean insistence
on Being in which there is no “not,” no negation, brought the abyss
of the “nothing” to light. The Platonic recognition of the “not” in
Being made the “not” of the other to Being harmless, but in so doing
the nothingness of “not” was brought to consciousness in an indirect
way. The suppression of the “nothing” through its interpretation as
difference occurs in a discussion whose context demands the inevi­
92 H E ID E G G E R ’S WAYS

table recognition and ontological engrossment in the nothingness of

the “not.” For only after one has understood not only difference but
also semblance [Schein] does one know who the sophist is. Sem­
blance is not difference from Being, but rather its “appearance”
[Anschein]. To me this does not seem to deny that Plato was aware of
the deeper ontological problem which existed here and which was
tied up with the possibility of sophistry. Neither difference, nor in­
correct distinctions, nor willful confusion or even the false state­
ments of a liar approach the phenomenon of sophistry whose
enlightenment Plato was trying to bring about. Still, the most fitting
analogy to the sophist is the con man—a mendacious human being
through and through, completely devoid of any sense of truth. The
sophist is not put into the class of ignorant imitators in the Platonic
dialogue without thinking. But even that is not unambiguous enough.
But there is one final distinction which conjures up the whole of the
power of nothingness—a distinction made between two types of ig­
norant imitators. The distinction is between two kinds of imitators:
there are those who really believe that they have knowledge, even
though they do not; and then there are those imitators who secretly
are aware of their lack of knowledge, but are compelled by fear and
concern about losing their superiority to conceal this ignorance by
veiling themselves in the false spell of their speech. And yet there is
another distinction. There are two forms of such speech, both of
which have something eerie about them precisely because the speaker
feels his own emptiness. Plato calls them the “feigning imitators.”
On one hand there is the demagogue who lives off of applause (such
as in the Gorgias where the rhetoric is characterized as flattery), and
on the other hand there is the sophist, who must remain victorious
and have the last word in discussions and arguments. Neither are
liars, they are hollow figures of speech.
It is byway of this detour that the recognition of “nothing” is
first shown by the “strangers” at the end with reference to the illuso­
riness and nullity of sophistry. Certainly it remains subliminal that
pseudos is not simply error, but that it includes the eeriness of sem­
blance within it. In Aristotle’s theory of atetheia and pseudos, as it is
given in Book IX of the Metaphysics (chapter 10), there are absolutely
no traces of this to be found.
One must look back beyond Parmenides or forward beyond
Hegel if one wishes to think the true affiliation of the nothingness of
 PLATO 93

semblance with. Being and wants to do away with notion that it is

merely being disconcerted by error. It was Heidegger who attempted
to take the step backward and in so doing took a step forward as well,
a step which would allow modern civilization to realize the limits of
Greek thought, of aletheia and its formative power. Thinking should
not be allowed to traverse this limit.
 C h a p t e r N in e

The T ruth of the

Wo rk o f A r t (1960)

W e , we look back today on the time between the two

world wars, we can see that this pause within the turbulent events of
our century represents a period of extraordinary creativity. Omens of
what was to come could be seen even before the catastrophe of
World War I, particularly in painting and architecture. But for the
most part, the general awareness of the time was transformed only by
the terrible shock that the slaughters of World War I brought to the
cultural consciousness and to the faith in progress of the liberal era.
In the philosophy of the day, this transformation of general sensibili­
ties was marked by the fact that with one blow the dominant phi­
losophy that had grown up in the second half of the nineteenth
century in renewal of Kant’s critical idealism was rendered unten­
able. “The collapse of German idealism,” as Paul Ernst called it in a
popular book of the time,awas placed in a world-historical context by
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West The forces that carried out
the critique of this dominant Neo-Kantian philosophy had two pow­
erful precursors: Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism and
Christendom, and Soren Kierkegaard’s brilliant attack on the

From P h ilo s o p h ic a l H e r m e n e u tic s , by Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and ed. David Linge,
pp. 213-28. Copyright 1976 The Regents o f the University o f California. Reprinted
by permission o f the University o f California Press.

95
96 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

Reflexionsphilosophie of speculative idealism. Two new philosophical

catchwords confronted the neo-Kantian preoccupation with meth­
odology. One was the irrationality of life, and of historical life in par­
ticular. In connection with this notion, one could refer to Nietzsche
and Bergson, but also to the great historian of philosophy, Wilhelm
Dilthey. The other catchword was Existenz, a term that rang forth
from the works of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher of the
first part of the nineteenth century, whose influence was only begin­
ning to be felt in Germany as a result of the Diedrichs translation.
Just as Kierkegaard had criticized Hegel as the philosopher of reflec­
tion who had forgotten existence, so now the complacent system­
building of neo-Kantian methodologism, which had placed philosophy
entirely in the service of establishing scientific cognition, came under
critical attack. And just as Kierkegaard—a Christian thinker—had
stepped forward to oppose the philosophy of idealism, so now the
radical self-criticism of the so-called dialectical theology opened the
new epoch.
Among the forces that gave philosophical expression to the
general critique of liberal culture-piety and the prevailing academic
philosophy was the revolutionary genius of the young Heidegger.
Heidegger’s appearance as a young teacher at Freiburg University in
the years just after World War I created a profound sensation. The
extraordinarily forceful and profound language that resounded from
the rostrum in Freiburg already betrayed the emergence of an origi­
nal philosophical power. Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time,
grew out of his fruitful and intense encounter with contemporary
Protestant theology during his appointment at Marburg in 1923. Pub­
lished in 1927, this book effectively communicated to a wide public
something of the new spirit that had engulfed philosophy as a result
of the convulsions of World War I. The common theme that cap­
tured the imagination of the time was called existential philosophy.
The contemporary reader of Heidegger’s first systematic work was
seized by the vehemence of its passionate protest against the secured
cultural world of the older generation and the leveling of all indi­
vidual forms of life by industrial society, with its ever stronger uni­
formities and its techniques of communication and public relations
that manipulated everything. Heidegger contrasted the concept
of the authenticity of Dasein, which is aware of its finitude and
resolutely accepts it, with the “they,” “idle chatter,” and “curiosity,”
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 97

as fallen and inauthentic forms of Dasein. The existential seriousness

with which he brought the age-old riddle of death to the center of
philosophical concern, and the force with which his challenge to the
real “choice” of existence smashed the illusory world of education
and culture, disrupted well-preserved academic tranquility And yet
his was not the voice of a reckless stranger to the academic world—
not the voice of a bold and lonely thinker in the style of Kierkegaard
or Nietzsche—but of a pupil of the most distinguished and consci­
entious philosophical school that existed in the German universities
of the time. Heidegger was a pupil of Edmund Husserl, who pur­
sued tenaciously the goal of establishing philosophy as a rigorous
science. Heidegger’s new philosophical effort also joined in the battle
cry of phenomenology “To the things themselves.” The thing he
aimed at, however, was the most concealed question of philosophy
one that for the most part had been forgotten: What is Being? In
order to learn how to ask this question, Heidegger proceeded to
define the Being of human Dasein in an ontologically positive way
instead of understanding it as “merely finite,” that is, in terms of an
infinite and always existing Being [seiende Sein], as previous meta­
physics had done. The ontological priority that the Being of human
Dasein acquired for Heidegger defined his philosophy as “funda­
mental ontology” Heidegger called the ontological determinations of
finite human Dasein determinations of existence “existentiells.” With
methodical precision, he contrasted these basic concepts with the
categories of the present-at-hand that had dominated previous meta­
physics. When Heidegger raised once again the ancient question of
the meaning of Being, he did not want to lose sight of the fact that
human Dasein does not have its real Being in determinable pres-
ence-at-hand, but rather in the motility of the care with which it is
concerned about its own future and its own Being. Human Dasein is
distinguished by the fact that it understands itself in terms of its
Being. In order not to lose sight of the finitude and temporality of
human Dasein, which cannot ignore the question of the meaning of
its Being, Heidegger defined the question of the meaning of Being
within the horizon of time. The present-at-hand, which science knows
through its obselevations and calculations, and the eternal, which is
beyond everything human, must both be understood in terms of the
central ontological certainty of human temporality. This was
Heidegger’s new approach, but his goal of thinking Being as time
98 H E I D E G G E R 'S WAYS

remained so veiled that Being and Time was promptly designated as a

“hermeneutical phenomenology,” primarily because self-understand­
ing still represented the real foundation of the inquiry Seen in terms
of this foundation, the understanding of Being that held sway in
traditional metaphysics turns out to be a corrupted form of the pri­
mordial understanding of Being that is manifested in human Dasein.
Being is not simply pure presence or actual presence-at-hand. It is
finite, historical Dasein that “is” in the real sense. Then the ready-to-
hand has its place within Dasein’s projection of a world, and only
subsequently does the merely present-at-hand receive its place.
But various forms of Being that are neither historical nor
simply present-at-hand have no proper place within the framework
provided by the hermeneutical phenomenon of self-understanding:
the timelessness of mathematical facts, which are not simply observ­
able entities present-at-hand; the timelessness of nature, whose ever-
repeating patterns hold sway even in us and determine us in the
form of the unconscious; and finally the timelessness of the rainbow
or art, which spans all historical distances. All of these seem to desig­
nate the limits of the possibility of hermeneutical interpretation that
Heidegger’s new approach opened up. The unconscious, the num­
ber, the dream, the sway of nature, the miracle of art—all these
seemed to exist only on the periphery of Dasein, which knows itself
historically and understands itself in terms of itself They seem to be
comprehensible only as limiting concepts.1
It was a surprise, therefore, in 1936, when Heidegger dealt
with the origin of the work of art in several addresses. This work had
begun to have a profound influence long before it was first published
in 1950, when it became accessible to the general public as the first
essay in Holzwege} For it had long been the case that Heidegger’s
lectures and addresses had everywhere aroused intense Interest. Copies
and reports of them were widely disseminated, and they quickly
made him the focus of the very “idle chatter” that he had character­
ized so acrimoniously in Being and Time. In fact, his addresses on the
origin of the work of art caused a philosophical sensation.

1. More than anyone else it was Oskar Becker, a student o f Husserl and Heidegger,
who doubted the universality o f historicality in reference to this type o f phenomena.
S e e D a s e i n u n d D a w e s e n (Pfullingen, 1963).
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 99

It was not merely that Heidegger now brought art into the
basic hermeneutical approach of the self-understanding of humans in
their historicality nor even that these addresses understood art to be
the act that founds whole historical worlds (as it is understood in the
poetic faith of Holderlin and George). Rather, the real sensation caused
by Heidegger’s new experiment had to do with the startling new
conceptuality that boldly emerged in connection with this topic. For
here, the talk was pf the “world” and the “earth.” From the very begin­
ning, the concept of the world had been one of Heidegger’s major
hermeneutical concepts. As the referential totality of Dasein’s projec­
tion, “world” constituted the horizon that was preliminary to all pro­
jections of Dasein’s concern. Heidegger had himself sketched the history
of this concept of the world, and in particular, had called attention to
and historically legitimated the difference between the anthropological
meaning of this concept in the New Testament (which was the mean­
ing he used himself) and the concept of the totality of the present-at-
hand. The new and startling thing was that this concept of the world
now found a counterconcept in the "earth” As a whole in which hu­
man self-interpretation takes place, the concept of the world could be
raised to intuitive clarity out of the self-interpretation of human Dasein,
but the concept of the earth sounded a mythical and gnostic note that
at best might have its true home in the world of poetry At that time
Heidegger had devoted himself to Holderlin’s poetry with passionate
intensity, and it is clearly from this source that he brought the concept
of the earth into his own philosophy. But with what justification? How
could Dasein, being-in-the-world, which understands itself out of its
own Being, be related ontologically to a concept like the “earth”-—-this
new and radical starting point for all transcendental inquiry? To an­
swer this question we must return to Heidegger’s earlier work.
Heidegger’s new approach in Being and Time was certainly
not simply a repetition of the spiritualistic metaphysics of German
idealism. Human Dasein’s understanding of itself out of its own
Being is not the self-knowledge of Hegel’s absolute spirit. It is not a
self-projection. Rather, it knows that it is not master of itself and its
own Dasein, but comes upon itself in the midst of beings and has to
take itself over as it finds itself It is a “thrown-projection.” In one of
the most brilliant phenomenological analyses of Being and Time,
Heidegger analyzed this limit experience of Dasein, which comes up
upon itself in the midst of beings, as “disposition” [.Befindlichkeit],
100 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

and he attributed to disposition or mood [Stimmung] the real disclo­

sure of Being-in-the-world. What is come upon in disposition repre­
sents the extreme limit beyond which the historical self-understanding
of human Dasein could not advance. There was no way to get from
this hermeneutical limiting concept of disposition or moodfulness to
a concept such as the earth. What justification is there for this
concept? What warrant does it have? The important insight that
Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” opened up is that
“earth” is a necessary determination of the Being of the work of art.
If we are to see the fundamental significance of the question
of the nature of the work of art and how this question is connected
with the basic problems of philosophy, we must gain some insight
into the prejudices that are present in the concept of a philosophical
aesthetics. In the last analysis, we need to overcome the concept of
aesthetics itself It is well known that aesthetics is the youngest of the
philosophical disciplines. Only with the explicit restriction of En­
lightenment rationalism in the eighteenth century was the autono­
mous right of sensuous knowledge asserted and with it the relative
independence of the judgment of taste from the understanding and
its concepts. Like the name of the discipline itself] the systematic
autonomy of aesthetics dates from the aesthetics of Alexander
Baumgarten. Then in his third critique—the Critique ofAestheticJudg­
ment—Kant established the problem of aesthetics in its systematic
significance. In the subjective universality of the aesthetic judgment
of taste, he discovered the powerful and legitimate claim to indepen­
dence that the aesthetic judgment can make over against the claims
of the understanding and morality. The taste of the observer can no
more be comprehended as the application of concepts, norms, or
rules than the genius of the artist can. What sets the beautiful apart
cannot be exhibited as a determinate, knowable property of an ob­
ject; rather it manifests itself in a subjective factor: the intensification
of the Lehensgefuhl [life feeling] through the harmonious correspon­
dence of imagination and understanding. What we experience in
beauty—in nature as well as in art—is the total animation and free
interplay of all our spiritual powers. The judgment of taste is not
knowledge, yet it is not arbitrary It involves a claim to universality
that can establish the autonomy of the aesthetic realm. We must
acknowledge that this justification of the autonomy of art was a great
achievement in the age of the Enlightenment, with the insistence on
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 101

the sanctity of rules and moral orthodoxy. This is particularly the

case at just that point in German history when the classical period of
German literature, with its center in Weimar, was seeking to establish
itself as an aesthetic state. These efforts found their conceptual justi­
fication in Kant's philosophy
Basing aesthetics on the subjectivity of the mind's powers
was, however, the beginning of a dangerous process of subjectification.
For Kant himself to be sure, the determining factor was still the
mysterious congruity that existed between the beauty of nature and
the subjectivity of the subject. In the same way, he understood the
creative genius who transcends all rules in creating the miracle of the
work of art to be a favorite of nature. But this position presupposes
the self-evident validity of the natural order that has its ultimate
foundation in the theological idea of the creation. With the disap­
pearance of this context, the grounding of aesthetics led inevitably to
a radical subjectification in further development of the doctrine of
the freedom of the genius from rules. No longer derived from the
comprehensive whole of the order of Being, art comes to be con­
trasted with actuality and with the raw prose of life. The illuminating
power of poesy succeeds in reconciling idea and actuality only within
its own aesthetic realm. This is the idealistic aesthetics to which
Schiller first gave expression and that culminated in Hegel's remark­
able aesthetics. Even in Hegel, however, the theory of the work of art
still stood within a universal ontological horizon. To the extent that
the work of art succeeds at all in balancing and reconciling the finite
and the infinite, it is the tangible indication of an ultimate truth that
philosophy must finally grasp in conceptual form. Just as nature, for
idealism, is not merely the object of the calculating science of the
modern age, but rather the reign of a great, creative world power that
raises itself to its perfection in selficonscious spirit, so the work of art
too, in the view of these speculative thinkers, is an objectification of
spirit. Art is not the perfected concept of spirit, but rather its mani­
festation on the level of the sense intuition of the world. In the literal
sense of the word, art is an intuition of the world [Welt-Anschauung].
If we wish to determine the point of departure for Heidegger's
meditation on the nature of the work of art, we must keep clearly in
mind that the idealistic aesthetics that had ascribed a special signi­
ficance to the work of art as the organon of a nonconceptual
understanding of absolute truth had long since been eclipsed by
102 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

Neo-Kantian philosophy; This dominant philosophical movement

had renewed the Kantian foundation of scientific cognition without
regaining the metaphysical horizon that lay at the basis of Kant’s own
description of aesthetic judgment, namely a teleological order of
Being. Consequently the Neo-Kantian conception of aesthetic prob­
lems was burdened with peculiar prejudices. The exposition of the
theme in Heidegger’s essay clearly reflects this state of affairs. It
begins with the question of how the work of art is differentiated
from the thing. The work of art is also a thing, and only by way of its
Being as a thing does it have the capacity to refer to something else,
for instance, to function symbolically or to give us an allegorical
understanding. But this is to describe the mode of Being of the work
of art from the point of view of an ontological model that assumes
the systematic priority of scientific cognition. What really “is” is thing-like
in character; it is a fact, something given to the senses and developed
by the natural sciences in the direction of objective cognition. The
significance and value of the thing, however, are secondary forms of
comprehension that have a mere subjective validity and belong nei­
ther to the original givenness itself nor to the objective truth ac­
quired from it The Neo-Kantians assumed that the thing alone is
objective and able to support such values. For aesthetics, this as­
sumption would have to mean that even the work of art possesses a
thing-like character as its most prominent feature. This thing-like
character functions as a substructure upon which the real aesthetic
form rises as a superstructure. Nicolai Hartmann still describes the
structure of the aesthetic object in this fashion.
Heidegger refers to this ontological prejudice when he in­
quires into the thing-character of the thing. He distinguishes three
ways of comprehending the thing that have been developed in the
tradition: it is the bearer of properties; it is the unity of a manifold of
perceptions; and it is matter to which form has been imparted. The
third of these forms of comprehension, in particular—the thing as
form and matter—seems to be the most illuminating, for it follows the
model of production by which a thing is manufactured to serve our
purposes. Heidegger calls such things “implements.” Viewed theologi­
cally from the standpoint of this model, things in their entirety appear
as manufactured items, that is, as creations of God. From the perspec­
tive of human beings, they appear as implements that have lost their
implement-character. Things are mere things, that is, they are present
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 103

without reference to serving a purpose. Now Heidegger shows that

this concept of being-present-at-hand, which corresponds to the ob­
serving and calculating procedures of modem science, permits us to
think neither the thing-like character of the thing nor the implement-
character of the implement. In order to focus attention on the imple­
ment-character of the implement, therefore, he refers to an artistic
representation—a painting by Van Gogh depicting a peasant's shoes.
The implement itself is perceived in this work of art—-not a being that
can be made to serve some purpose or other, but something whose
very Being consists in having served and in still serving the person to
whom it belongs. What emerges from the painter's work and is vividly
depicted in it is not an incidental pair of peasant's shoes; rather the
true essence of the implement comes forth as it is. The whole world of
rural life is in these shoes. Thus, it is the work of art which is able to
bring forth the truth of this entity. The emergence of truth that occurs
in the work of art can be conceived from the work alone, and not at all
in terms of its substructure as a thing.
These observations raise the question of what a work is that
truth can emerge from it in this way. In contrast to the customary
procedure of starting with the thing-character and object-character
of the work of art, Heidegger contends that a work of art is charac­
terized precisely by the fact that it is not an object, but rather stands
in itself. By standing-in-itself it not only belongs to its world; its
world is present in it. The work of art opens up its own world.
Something is an object only when it no longer fits into the fabric of
its world because the world it belongs to has disintegrated. Hence a
work of art is an object when it becomes an item of commercial
transaction, for then it is worldless and homeless.
The characterization of the work of art as standing-in-itself
and opening up a world with which Heidegger begins his study
consciously avoids going back to the concept of genius that is found
in classical aesthetics. In his effort to understand the ontological struc­
ture of the work independently of the subjectivity of the creator or
beholder, Heidegger now uses “earth” as a counterconcept alongside
the concept of the “world,” to which the work belongs and which it
erects and opens up. “Earth” is a counterconcept to world insofar as
it exemplifies self-sheltering and closing-off as opposed to self-open­
ing, Clearly, both self-opening and self-closing-off are present in the
work of art. A work of art does not “mean” something or function as
104 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

a sign that refers to a meaning; rather, it presents itself in its own

Being, so that the beholder must tarry by it. It is so very much
present itself that the ingredients out of which it is composed—
stone, color, tone, word—only come into a real existence of their
own within the work of art itself As long as something is mere stuff
awaiting its rendering, it is not really present, that is, it has not come
forth into a genuine presence. It only comes forth when it is used,
when it is bound into the work. The tones that constitute a musical
masterwork are tones in a more real sense than all other sounds or
tones. The colors of a painting are colors in a more genuine sense
than even nature’s wealth of colors. The temple column manifests
the stone-like character of its Being more genuinely in rising upward
and supporting the temple roof than it did as an unhewn block of
stone. But what comes forth in this way in the work is precisely its
being closed-off and closing-itself-off—what Heidegger calls the Be­
ing of the earth. The earth, in truth, is not stuff, but that out of
which everything comes forth and into which everything disappears.
At this point, form [Form] and matter [Stoj$]} as reflective con­
cepts, prove to be inadequate. If we can say that a world “rises” in a
great work of art, then the arising of this world is at the same time its
entrance into a reposing form [Gestalt]. When the form [Gestalt]
stands there it has found its earthly existence. From this the work of
art acquires its own peculiar repose. It does not first have its real
Being in an experiencing ego, which asserts, means, or exhibits some­
thing and whose assertions, opinions, or demonstrations would be its
“meaning.” Its Being does not consist in its becoming an experience,
Rather, by virtue of its own existence it is an event, a thrust that
overthrows everything previously given and conventional, a thrust in
which a world never there before opens itself up. But this thrust
takes place in the work of art itself in such a fashion that at the same
time it is sustained in an abiding [ins Bleiben geborgen]. That which
arises and sustains itself in this way constitutes the structure of the
work in its tension. It is this tension that Heidegger designates as the
conflict between the world and the earth. In all of this, Heidegger
not only gives a description of the mode of Being of the work of art
that avoids the prejudices of traditional aesthetics and the modern
subjectivitistic thinking, he also avoids simply renewing the specula­
tive aesthetics that defined the work of art as the sensuous manifesta­
tion of the Idea. To be sure, the Hegelian definition beauty shares
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 105

with Heidegger's own effort the fundamental transcendence of the

antithesis between subject and object, I and object, and does not
describe the Being of the work of art in terms of the subjectivity of
the subject. Nevertheless, Hegel’s description of the Being of the
work of art moves in this direction, for it is the sensuous manifesta­
tion of the Idea, conceived by self-conscious thought, that consti­
tutes the work of art. In thinking the Idea, therefore, the entire truth
of the sensuous appearance would be cancelled [aufgehoben]. It ac­
quires its real form \Gestalt] in the concept. When Heidegger speaks
of the conflict between world and earth and describes the work of art
as the thrust through which a truth occurs, this truth is not taken up
and perfected in the truth of the philosophical concept. A unique
manifestation of truth occurs in the work of art. The reference to the
work of art in which truth comes forth should indicate clearly that
for Heidegger it is meaningful to speak of an event of truth. Hence
Heidegger’s essay does not restrict itself to giving a more suitable
description of the Being of the work of art. Rather, his analysis sup­
ports his central philosophical concern to conceive Being itself as an
event of truth.
The objection is often made that the basic concepts of
Heidegger’s later work cannot be verified. What Heidegger intends,
for example, when he speaks of Being in the verbal sense of the
word, of the event of Being, the clearing of Being, the revealment of
Being, and the forgetfulness of Being, cannot be fulfilled by an in­
tentional act of our subjectivity. The concepts that dominate
Heidegger’s later philosophical works are clearly closed to subjective
demonstration, just as Hegel’s dialectical process is closed to what
Hegel called representational thinking. Heidegger’s concepts are the
object of a criticism similar to Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s dialectic in
the sense that they too are called “mythological.”
The fundamental significance of the essay on the work of art,
it seems to me, is that it provides us with an indication of the later
Heidegger’s real concern. No one can ignore the fact that in the
work of art, in which a world arises, not only is something meaning­
ful given to experience that was not known before, but also some­
thing new comes into existence with the work of art itself It is not
simply the laying bare of a truth, it is itself an event. This offers us
an opportunity to pursue one step further Heidegger’s critique of
western metaphysics and its culmination in the subjectivism of the
106 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

modern age. It is well known that Heidegger renders aletheia, the

Greek word for truth, as unconcealedness. But this strong emphasis on
the privative sense of aletheia not only means that knowledge of the
truth tears truth out of the realm of the unknown or concealedness
in error by an act of theft (privatio means “robbery55). This is not the
only reason why truth is not open and obvious and accessible as a
matter of course, though it is certainly true and the Greeks obviously
wanted to express it as such when they designated beings as they are
as unconcealed. They knew how every piece of knowledge is threat­
ened by error and falsehood, and that everything depends on avoid­
ing error and gaining the right representation of beings as they are. If
knowledge depends on our leaving error behind us, then truth is the
pure unconcealedness of beings. This is what Greek thought had in
view, and in this way it was already treading the path that modern
science would eventually follow to the end, namely, to bring about
the correctness of knowledge by which beings are preserved in their
unconcealedness.
In opposition to all this, Heidegger holds that unconcealedness
is not simply the character of beings insofar as they are correctly
known. In a more primordial sense, unconcealedness “occurs,55 and
this occurrence is what first makes it possible for beings to be
unconcealed and correctly known. The concealedness that corre­
sponds to such primordial unconcealedness is not error, but rather
belongs originally to Being itself Nature, which loves to conceal
itself (Heraclitus), is thus characterized not only with respect to its
possibility of being known, but rather with respect to its Being. It is
not only the emergence into the light but just as much the sheltering
itself in the dark. It is not only the unfolding of the blossom in the
sun, but just as much its rooting of itself in the depths of the earth.
Heidegger speaks of the “clearing of Being,55 which first represents
the realm in which beings are known as disclosed in their
unconcealedness. This coming forth of beings into the “there55 [da]
of their Dasein obviously presupposes a realm of openness in which
such a “there55 can occur. And yet it is just as obvious that this realm
does not exist without beings manifest in themselves in it, that is,
without there being an open place [Offenes] that openness occupies.
This relation is unquestionably peculiar. And yet even more remark­
able is the fact that only in the “there55 of this self-manifestation of
beings does the concealedness of Being first present itself To be sure,
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 107

correct knowledge is made possible by the openness of the there.

The beings that come forth out of unconcealedness present them­
selves for that which preserves them. Nevertheless, it is not an arbi­
trary act of revealing, an act of theft, by which something is tom out
of concealedness. Rather, this is all made possible only by the fact
that revealment and concealedness are an event of Being itself To
understand this fact helps us in our understanding of the nature of
the work of art. There is clearly a tension between the emergence
and the sheltering that constitute the Being of the work itself It is
the power of this tension that constitutes the form-niveau of a work
o f art and produces the brilliance by which it outshines everything
else. Its truth is not constituted simply by its laying bare its meaning,
but rather by the unfathomableness and depth of its meaning. Thus
by its very nature the work of art is a conflict between world and
earth, emergence and sheltering.
But precisely what is exhibited in the work of art ought to
constitute the essence of Being itself The conflict between reveal­
ment and concealment is not the truth of the work of art alone, but
the truth of every being, for as unconcealedness, truth is always such
an opposition of revealment and concealment. The two belong necessarily
together. This obviously means that truth is not simply the mere
presence of a being, so that it stands, as it were, over against its
correct representation. Such a concept of being unconcealed would
presuppose the subjectivity of the Dasein that represents beings. But
beings are not correctly defined in their Being if they are defined
merely as objects of possible representation. Rather, it belongs just as
much to their Being that they withhold themselves. As unconcealed,
truth has in itself an inner tension and ambiguity Being contains
something like a “hostility to its own presence,” as Heidegger says.
What Heidegger means can be confirmed by everyone: the existing
thing does not simply offer us a recognizable and familiar surface
contour; it also has an inner depth of self-sufficiency that Heidegger
calls its “standing-in-itself ” The complete unconcealedness of all
beings, their total objectification (by means of a representation that
conceives things in their perfect state) would negate this standing-in-
itself of beings and lead to a total leveling of them. A complete
objectification of this kind would no longer represent beings that
stand in their own Being. Rather, it would represent nothing more
than our opportunity for using beings, and what would be manifest
108 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

would be the will that seizes upon and dominates things. In the work
of art, we experience an absolute opposition to this will-to-control,
not in the sense of a rigid resistance to the presumption of our will,
which is bent on utilizing things, but in the sense of the superior and
intensive power of a Being reposing in itself Hence the closedness
and withdrawnness of the work of art is the guarantee of the univer­
sal thesis of Heidegger’s philosophy, namely, that beings hold them­
selves back by coming forward into the openness of presence.
The standing-in-itself of the work betokens at the same time the
standing-in-itself of beings in general.
This analysis of the work of art opens up perspectives that
point us farther along the path of Heidegger’s thought. Only by way
of the work of art were the implement-character of the implement
and, in the last analysis, the thingness of the thing able to manifest
themselves. All-calculating modern science brings about the loss of
things, dissolving their character of standing-in-themselves, which
“can be forced to do nothing,” into the calculated elements of its
projects and alterations, but the work of art represents an instance
that guards against the universal loss of things. As Rilke poetically
illuminates the innocence of the thing in the midst of the general
disappearance of thingness by showing it to the angel,cso the thinker
contemplates the same loss of thingness while recognizing at the
same time that this very thingness is preserved in the work of art.
Preservation, however, presupposes that what is preserved still truly
exists. Hence the very truth of the thing is implied if this truth is still
capable of coming forth in the work of art. Heidegger’s essay, “What
Is a Thing?” thus represents a necessary advance on the path of his
thought/ The thing, which formerly did not even achieve the imple­
ment-status of being-present-to-hand, but was merely present-at-
hand for observation and investigation, is now recognized in its
“whole” Being [in seinem “heilen" Sein] as precisely what cannot be
put to use.
From this vantage point, we can recognize yet a farther step
on this path. Heidegger asserts that the essence of art is the process
of poeticizing. What he means is that the nature of art does not
consist in transforming something that is already formed or in copy­
ing something that is already in Being. Rather, art is the projection
by which something new comes forth as true. The essence of the
event of truth that is present in the work of art is that “it opens up an
 T H E T R U T H O F T H E W O R K O F ART 109

open place,” In the ordinaiy and more restricted sense of the word,
however, poetry is distinguished by the intrinsically linguistic charac­
ter that differentiates it from all other modes of art. If the real project
and the genuine artistic element in every art—even in architecture
and in the plastic arts—can be called “poetic,” then the project that
occurs in an actual poem is bound to a course that is already marked
out and cannot be projected anew simply from out of itself the
course already prepared is language. The poet is so dependent upon
the language he inherits and uses that the language of his poetic work
o f art can only reach those who command the same language. In a
certain sense, then, the “poetry” that Heidegger takes to symbolize
the projective character of all artistic creation is less the project of
building and shaping out of stone or color or tones than it is their
secondary forms. In fact, the process of poeticizing is divided into
two phases: into the project that has already occurred where a lan­
guage holds sway, and another project that allows the new poetic
creation to come forth from the first project But the primacy of
language is not simply a unique trait of the poetic work of art; rather,
it seems to be characteristic of the very thing-being of .things them­
selves. The work of language is the most primordial poetry of Being.
The thinking that conceives all art as- poetry and that discloses that
the work of art is language is itself still on the way to language.
 C h a p te r T en

M a r t in H e id e g g e r
85 Y E A R S (1974)

Ih a t Martin Heidegger is celebrating his eighty-fifth birth­

day must be a true surprise for some of the younger generation. The
thinking of this man has been a part of our general consciousness for
so many decades, and in spite of all the changes in the constellations,
he has remained indisputably a presence throughout all of the fluc­
tuations in our century. Periods in which Heidegger looms large and
periods in which he is but a distant figure come and go, as is the case
for the truly great stars that determine epochs. It was during the
period directly following World War I when the effects of this young
assistant to Husserl began to be felt in Freiburg. Even then a unique
aura radiated from him.
The effect that he had on academia increased drastically dur­
ing the five years that he taught in Marburg, suddenly bursting forth
into the public sphere in 1927 with Being and Time. In one fell swoop
he was world famous [... der Weltruhm war da].
In our times, in a Europe provincialized since 1914 where
usually only the natural sciences have been able to call forth rash
international echos—names like Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg
come to mind—and where at best some theologians such as Karl
Barth were carried beyond national barriers by the church, this world­
wide fame of the young Heidegger was completely unique. And after
the fall of the Third Reich, when Heidegger was not allowed to

111
112 H E ID E G G E R ’S WAYS

continue as a professor at Freiburg due to his initial commitment to

Hitler, a true international pilgrimage to Todtnauberg began, where
Heidegger spent the greatest part of the year in his cottage, an ex­
tremely modest little house nestled in the Black Forest.
The 1950s represented another high point of Heidegger’s
presence, even though he was seldom active anymore as a teacher. I
can remember how he came to Heidelberg for a lecture on Holderlin
during this period, and what a technical problem it was to control to
some degree the life-threatening crowd in the large lecture hall at the
New University. And it was like that every time this man made an
appearance in public.
Then, with the frenzied development of the economy and
technical knowhow, of prosperity and comfort, new, sober ways of
thinking emerged among the academic youth. Technology and the
Marxist critique of ideology became the decisive intellectual forces,
and Heidegger disappeared from the “idle talk,” which he had once
characterized so negatively—up until his most recent appearance in
our day. He is gradually being rediscovered by a new generation of
students as if he were a forgotten classic.
What is the secret of this enduring presence? He certainly
never lacked opponents; he still has them today. In the 1920s he had
to work against the resistance of innumerable forms of academic
self-righteousness. He was not thought of too highly in the ten years
from 1935 to 1945, and the whole of public opinion in the period
from after the war up to this day has been no less harsh. The de­
struction of reason (Lukacs), the jargon of authenticity (Adorno), the
abandoning of rational thinking for a pseudo-poetic mythology, his
quixotic battle against logic, the flight from time into “Being”—one
could lengthen this list of attacks and accusations considerably. But
in spite of this, when the Klostermann Press announces the planned
release of a seventy-volume publication of his collected works, they
can be sure that everyone is listening. Even the eye of someone who
knows nothing of Heidegger can scarcely continue to wander when
it comes across a photograph of this solitary old man—a man who
peers into himself, listens to himself and reflects beyond himself
When people claim to be “against” Heidegger—or even “for” him—■
then they make fools of themselves. One cannot circumvent think­
ing so easily.
Why is this so? How did it come to be? I can remember
exactly how I first heard his name. It was in Munich in 1921. In one
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R — 8 5 Y E A R S 113

of Moritz Geiger’s seminars a student gave a most strange and

passionate speech using rather unusual expressions. Later, when I
asked Geiger what that was all about, he said very casually, “Oh that.
He has been Heideggerized.>,aAnd was I not also Heideggerized soon
thereafter? It was scarcely a year later that my teacher, Paul Natorp,
gave me a forty-page manuscript from Heidegger to read, an intro­
duction to some Aristotle interpretations. For me this was like being
hit by a charge of electricity. I had experienced something like this
when, as an 18-year-old, I first came across some verses by Stefan
George (whose name was completely unknown to me). The under­
standing that I brought to Heidegger’s analysis of the “hermeneutical
situation” at that time was certainly insufficient for a philosophical
interpretation of Aristotle. But, first of all, that Aristotle was brought
into focus via a discussion of the young Luther, of Gabriel Biel and
Petrus Lombardus, of Augustine and of St. Paul, and then second
that a highly unusual language was spoken there, that the talk was of
the “in-order-to,” of the “upon-which,” of the “grasping-in-advance”
[Vbrgriff] and “grasping-through” [Durchgriffs]—such remains in my
memory still today—it grasped through. This was not simply a schol­
arly activity or a comforting solution to a historical problem. All
of Aristotle was imposed upon us, and my eyes were opened as I
received my first instruction in Freiburg.
Yes, that was it—my eyes were opened. Today people like to
say of Heidegger that his thought lacks conceptual precision and is
couched in a vague, poetic language. And it is definitely true that
Heidegger’s language was just as far from the strange “almost En­
glish” that has become the style in philosophy today as it was from
the mathematical symbolism and the games with categories and mo­
dalities that I used to play in Marburg. When Heidegger lectured,
one could see the things in front of one, as if they were physically
graspable. The same could be said of Husserl, although there it was a
more tame version and was restricted to the more basic area of phe­
nomenology. Even his terminology was not the most phenomeno­
logically productive aspect of his language. It is no coincidence that
the young Heidegger preferred over all of Husserl’s other works his
sixth logical investigation, in which Husserl developed the concept
of the “categorical intuition” [Anschauung], Today, this doctrine is
often considered unsatisfactory, and there is a tendency to replace it
with modern logic. But his praxis—like Heidegger’s-—cannot be so
easily refuted. This was an encounter with a living language in
114 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

philosophizing, a language that cannot be replaced with the technical

precision of logical means.
In the Fall of 1923, Heidegger left for Marburg as a young
professor. As a farewell gesture, he invited a large number of friends,
colleagues, and students up to his place in the Black Forest for a
summer celebration. That evening, an immense log was set on fire
up on a hill, and Heidegger delivered a talk that impressed all o f us.
It began with the words, “Being alert with the fire of the night”—and
his next words were, “The Greeks . . . ” Certainly, the romanticism of
the youth movement was swaying along with his words, but this was
more than just that. It was the determination of a thinker who saw
the present and the past, the future and the Greeks as a totality.
Heidegger’s arrival in Marburg cannot be overdramatized,
although he personally would not have been interested in causing a
sensation. Certainly his appearance in the lecture hall was accompa­
nied a bit by the self-assurance of one who knew that he is going to
have an effect, but the essence [das Eigentliche] of his person and
teachings consisted in the way he completely immersed himself in
his work and in the way this radiated from him. Lectures suddenly
became something completely new. They were no longer the teach­
ing apparatus of a professor who put all of his own energy into
research and publications.
The great monologues from texts lost their precedence with
Heidegger. What he offered was much more: It was the complete
supply of all of the power—and what ingenious power—of a revolu­
tionary thinker who would literally startle himself with his own ever
more radical questions and who was so filled with the passion of
thought that it was carried over into the auditorium, unable to be
stopped by anything. Who could forget the bitterly angry polemics
with which Heidegger caricatured the cultural and educational affairs
[Betrieb] of the day, the “madness in the vicinity,” the “they,” the “idle
talk,” “all of this without a derogatory meaning”—and this as well!
Who could forget the sarcasm used when he discussed his colleagues
and contemporaries? How could anyone following him then forget
the breathtaking storm of questions that he developed early on in the
semester, only to completely entangle himself in the second or third
question—but then to roll these deep, dark clouds of sentences to­
gether at the end of the semester, from which lightening flashed,
leaving us half stunned.
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R — 8 5 Y E A R S 115

After Nicoli Hartmann heard one of Heidegger’s lectures for

the first (and only) time—the first one that Heidegger gave in
Marburg—he said to me that he had not seen such a dramatic and
energetic entrance since Hermann Cohen. These two were very much
antipodes: the cool, reserved Baltic, who came across like a bourgeous
seignior; and the dark-eyed, small, rustic man of the mountains,
whose temperament always cut through any restrained discipline. I
saw them once as they met each other on the steps of Marburg
University. Hartmann was going to his lecture, dressed as usual in
striped pants, a black jacket, and a white, old fashioned tie; Heidegger
was on his way out in a ski suit. Hartmann stopped for a minute and
asked, cAre you going to lecture like that?” There was a special
reason for Heidegger’s satisfied laughter. Namely, he was giving a
lecture on skiing that evening, which was to serve as an introduction
to a then new course on dry skiing. The way he began the lecture
was pure Heidegger: “One can learn to ski only on the slopes and for
the slopes.” The typical knock-out punch; it dealt a heavy blow to
fashionable expectations, but simultaneously provided an opening
for new expectations. “I will take anyone who can make a respectable
stem turn with me on every ski trip.”
Heidegger, a skier from his childhood, certainly had an ath­
letic side, and it had infected the Heidegger school. We were the
second-best volleyball team in Marburg—we always made it to the
finals—and Heidegger joined the exercise team year-round—even if
he was not as superior to us in this as he was in everything else.
Naturally, he did not always run around in a ski suit, but he
was also never to be seen in a black jacket. He had his own suit—we
called it his existential suit It had been designed by the painter Otto
Ubbelohde and belonged to a new sort of men’s clothing that vaguely
resembled a farmer’s garb. In this clothing Heidegger certainly did
have something of the unassuming splendor of a farmer dressed for
Sunday,
Heidegger began his day quite early, and early in the morn­
ing, he gave us a dose of Aristotle four times each week. Those were
memorable interpretations, not only because of their power to illus­
trate relevantly, but also because of the philosophical perspective that
they opened up. In Heidegger’s lectures we were confronted with
matters [Sachen] in such a way that we no longer knew if the matters
[Sachen] he was speaking of were his or Aristotle’s. It was a profound
116 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

hermeneutical truth that we began to understand then and that I was

later to defend and justify theoretically
We were a very proud, small group, and we let our pride in
our teacher and his work habits go to our heads—and to consider
now what was going on in the second and third ranks of the
Heideggereans, with those whose academic talent was limited or
who had not yet progressed very far along in their education.
Heidegger affected them like an intoxicant. This storm grew to such
proportions and Heidegger’s radical, entangling questions were on
the lips of so many imitators that the scene began to take on the
character of a burlesque. I admit, I would have not liked to have been
a colleague of Heidegger’s then. Students who had cribbed from the
master perfectly “how he hacked and spit” began to show up every­
where. These young people disrupted a few seminars with these
“radical questions,” but it was more that their involvement with these
questions hid their own idleness. When they uttered their dark,
Heideggerized German, some professors must have been reminded
of the scene that Aristophanes described in his comedy, where the
Attic youth were kicked over their traces by the teachings of Socrates
and the Sophists. But one could certainly not blame Socrates then
because his students got carried away or hold it against him that not
every follower was freed by his teachings to pursue his own serious
work—and one cannot now hold this against Heidegger. But it is still
a curious turn of events that Heidegger, the one who had coined the
expression liberating solicitude, in spite of this liberation—no, precisely
because of this liberation'—could not impede the loss of so many
people’s freedom. Moths fly toward light.
We noticed this when Heidegger was writing Being and Time.
Occasional observations were expounded upon in advance. One day,
in a seminar on Schelling, he read this sentence to us: “The Angst of
life itself drives human beings out of the center.” Then he said, “Tell
me a single sentence from Hegel that compares to this sentence in
profundity!” It is well known that the initial effect of Being and Time—
especially on theology—was to make an existential appeal to our
impending death [zum Vorlaufen zum Tode]; it was a call to authentic­
ity. One hears more Kierkegaard in this than Aristotle. But already in
the book on Kant, which appeared in 1929, the talk was no longer of
the Dasein of a human being but suddenly of the “the Da-sein in a
human being.” The question concerning Being and its “Da,” which
Heidegger had gleaned from the Greek aletheia (unconcealedness),
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER*—8 5 Y E A R S 117

could no longer be missed. This was no revival of Aristotle. Rather,

this was a thinker who had been preceded not only by Hegel but also
by Nietzsche, and who reflected back upon the beginning, upon
Heraclitus and Parmenides, because the neverending interplay be­
tween disclosing [Entbergung] and concealment [Verbergung] and the
secret of language, in which both idle talk and the “sheltering”
[.Bergung] of truth occurred, had unfolded before him.
Heidegger first realized this when he returned home to
Freiburg and the Black Forest and began “to feel the energy of his
old stomping ground” as he had put it in a letter to me. “It all came
to .me in a rush.” He named this thought-experience the “turn”
[.Kehre]—not in the theological sense of a conversion [Bekehmng],
but rather in the sense of the word as he knew in his dialect. A turn
is a bend in a way [Wkg] as it moves up a mountain. Here one does
not turn around; rather, the way itself turns in the opposite direc­
tion—to ascend. To where? No one can easily say. The fact that
Heidegger named one of the most important collections of his later
works Holzwegeh is significant. These are ways that ultimately lead
nowhere, but nevertheless, they encourage one to climb into a here­
tofore uncharted area-—or they force one to turn around. But, in any
case, one is still in the heights.
I know nothing from personal experience of Heidegger’s
Freiburg period, the period beginning in the year 1933. ’Vet, it was
visible from a distance that Heidegger pursued the passion of think­
ing with a new enthusiasm after his political interlude and that his
thinking led into new, impassable areas. An essay dealing with some
of the key words in Holderlin’s poetry appeared, oddly enough, in
the journal The Internal Reich. It sounded like Heidegger had shrouded
his thinking in Holderlin’s poetic words on the divine and divinities.
Then, one day in 1936, we drove to Frankfurt to hear
Heidegger’s three-hour lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art.” “A
Landscape Devoid of People” was the title of the commentary by
Stemberger in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The challenging austerity of
this thoughtful excursion must have been strange to this newspaper
correspondent, a friend of the panorama of the human hustle and
bustle. And it was, in fact, quite unusual to hear talk of the earth and
the heavens, and of a struggle between the two—as if these were
concepts of thought that one could deal with in the same way that
the metaphysical tradition had dealt with the concepts of matter and
form. Were these metaphors? Concepts? Expressions of thought?
118 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

Perhaps the proclamation of a neoheathenistic mythology? Nietzsche's

Zarathustra, the teacher of the eternal return of the same, seemed to
be Heidegger's new model, and during this period Heidegger did in
fact devote himself to an intensive explication of Nietzsche. His
labor culminated in a two-volume work—the true counterpart to
Being and Time.
But this was not Nietzsche, and it had nothing to do with
religious eccentricity. Even if there were occasional eschatological
overtones and even if the talk—as if from an oracle—was of “the
god” who “presumably, could suddenly appear,” this was an extrapo­
lation of philosophical thought and not the words of a prophet. It
was a difficult struggle for a philosophical language that would be
capable of reaching back beyond Hegel and Nietzsche to retrieve the
oldest beginnings of Greek thinking. Up in his cottage one day dur­
ing the war, I remember how Heidegger began to read an essay on
Nietzsche that he had been working on. He stopped suddenly,
pounded on the table so hard that the tea cups rattled, and exclaimed
with frustration and doubt, “This is Chinese!” Heidegger had run
into a linguistic impasse; he was experiencing a deficiency in lan­
guage, as happens only to those who have something to say. It re­
quired all of his power to hold out under this deficiency and to let
nothing offered by the traditional ontotheological metaphysics and
its conceptualizations distract him from his question concerning Be­
ing. And it was this dogged energy of his thought that permeated the
whole atmosphere when he delivered a lecture—be it “Building,
Dwelling, and Thinking” in the great hall of the Darmstadter dia­
logues, the lecture on the “thing” [das Ding], which danced to a
puzzling roundelay, or the explication of a poem by Iraki or of a later
Holderlin text, often taking place in the all too distinguished
Buhlerhohe sanitarium. Once even Ortega y Gasset followed him
there, drawn by this prospector of language and thought.
Later, he immersed himself completely into the structure of
academic life once again. He gave a talk on “Hegel and the Greeks”
in a regular work conference o f the Heidelberger Akadamie der
Wissenschaften. He delivered a long, difficult lecture called “Identity
and Difference” as part of a ceremony celebrating the anniversary of
the Freiburg University. On one such occasion he also held a semi­
nar, just like in the old days, with his then-aging students. The semi­
nar was on a single sentence from Hegel: “The truth of Being is the
essence.” This was really the old Heidegger: Spellbound with his
 MARTIN H E ID E G G E R —8 5 Y E A R S 119

own questions and thought, gingerly testing the ground out in front
to see if it was solid, annoyed when others could not find the place
he had sought out as a hold, and unable to help except by prodding
us with his own thoughtful inteijections. Often I was able to get him
together with my own circle of students in Heidelberg. Sometimes a
discussion would ensue, i.e., one would be taken along on a journey
of thought, unable to deviate from the way. Only those u>ho go along
know that there is a way.
Today the majority think of things differently. They no longer
want to go along; rather, they want to know in advance where they
are going—or they are of the opinion that they have a better idea of
where one should go. Their only interest in Heidegger is in catego­
rizing him—for example as belonging to the crisis of late capitalism.
They see him as fleeing from time into Being or into an irrational
intuitionalism, neglecting modern logic. Perhaps the moderns are
mistaken insofar as they neither would have anything to classify nor
would they even know that there was anything to overcome critically
if this thinking was not simply there \da]. In reflecting less upon this
thinking than the thought of contemporaries, these moderns are ef­
fectively closed themselves off to all reflection about this thinking.
But there are two points that no one can deny. First, no one prior to
Heidegger had done the kind of retrospection necessary to show the
link between Greek thought and its founding of science and estab­
lishment of metaphysics, on the one hand, and the turn in the course
of human history towards today’s technological civilization and the
ensuing struggle for control of the earth, on the other. And second,
no one had dared to tread far enough out onto the shaky ground of
unconventional concepts to allow human experiences of other cul­
tures, especially of Asian cultures, to emerge from afar and show
themselves for the first time as experiences that could possibly be
our own.
The poet Paul Celan was one of the many pilgrims who
journeyed to Todtnauberg, and his encounter with Heidegger re­
sulted in a poem. This is really something to consider: After being
persecuted as a Jew, this poet—he lived in Paris rather than Germany,
but he was a German poet—-anxiously ventured this visit. He must
have been greeted both by the eyebrights of the little rustic estate,
complete with the flowing stream (with “the starred die [der
Sternwiiifel] atop”), and by this little rustic man with the flashing
eyes, He entered his name in the house register like so many before,
120 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

a line of hope that he held in his heart. He walked over the soft
meadows with the thinker, both individuals, standing alone like the
flowers (“orchis and orchis”). Only later, during the drive home, did
it become clear what Heidegger, then still crude, had muttered to
him-—-he began to understand. He understood the risk of this way of
thinking, one that others (“the person”) can listen in on without
being able to understand; he understood the risk of treading on shaky
ground—such as on a log pathway that one cannot follow to the end.
The poem reads:

Todtnauberg
arnicas, eyebrights, the
drink from the well with the
starred die.atop,
in the
cottage,
the line in the book
—whose names have been entered
before mine?—
the line in this book,
written with a hope, today,
harbored in the heart,
of a thinker’s,
coming
word
fields in the forest, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, standing alone,
crude, later, with the drive,
clear,
he who drives us, the person,
who listens along with,
the half-
traversed log
pathway in the moor
damp,
much.
 C hapter Eleven

The Wa y in
the T urn (1979)

I n a certain sense, the philosophical work o f M artin

Heidegger already belongs to history That is, for a long time now it
has gone beyond the first and second wave o f its effect and has taken
a firm place among the classics o f philosophical thought. This fact
implies that each present age has to determine anew its position in
relation to, or its attitude towards, his work. Someone who has him­
self participated as a contemporary in the development and dissemi­
nation o f Heidegger’s philosophical questioning will not only have
to redetermine the place of Heidegger’s thinking in recent philoso­
phy, but also his own standpoint in relation to it. Also, he will not
claim to judge the historical significance of Martin Heidegger, but,
on the contraiy, will strive to continue to participate in the move­
ment o f thought initiated by Heidegger’s questions.
After all, it is safe to say that the position developed by
Heidegger has to be determined under two totally different aspects:

From Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Heidegger’s Paths,” trans. C. Kayser and G. Stack, in

P h ilo s o p h ic E x c h a n g e ,
2, no. 5 (Summer 1979). Copyright 1979 by the Center for
Philosophic Exchange. Reprinted by permission o f the Center for Philosophic Ex­
change. As in the other reprinted chapters, revisions have been made to bring the
translation o f some o f Gadamer’s technical terms in line with my translation and to
accommodate revisions in the German text Gadamer made.

121
122 H E I D E G G E R ’S WAYS

(1) under the aspect of role in the academic philosophy of this cen­
tury (especially within the German scene) and (2) under the aspect
of his impact on, and significance within, the general consciousness
of our epoch. His rank is principally determined by the fact that
these two aspects can no more be separated from each other in his
case than in the case of other great classical thinkers such as Kant,
Hegel or Nietzsche.
Within the academic philosophy of our century, Heidegger’s
thinking may be classified, in terms of his own admission, as part of
the phenomenological movement. And, whoever is familiar with the
development of Husserl’s phenomenology to which Heidegger is
referring also knows that this means, at the same time, a kind of
placement in relation to the then prevailing Neo-Kantianism. These
orientations must not be understood in a narrow sense of philo­
sophical schools. For, in regard to both orientations, Heidegger’s
thought presents itself in a decidedly critical profile.
For years Heidegger was assistant to, and later on a young
colleague of the founder of the phenomenological school. And, doubt­
lessly, he learned much from the masterful art of description in which
Edmund Husserl excelled. His first great effort in the realm of
thought, Sein und Zeit [Being and Time\ introduced itself in theme
and language (and even through the place of its publication) as a
phenomenological work. The expression “phenomenology”—in the
manner in which Husserl used it—contained a polemical allusion to
all theoretical constructions of thought that originated from within
the constraints of an inaccessible system. Husserl’s power of phe­
nomenological intuition had proven itself precisely in the reflection
and criticism of all of the constructivistic biases of contemporary
thought. This was especially the case in his famous criticism of
psychologism and naturalism. One will also have to admit that
Husserl’s carefulness in description was coupled with a genuine meth­
odological consciousness. The phenomena that he brought to recog­
nition were not a naive set of “givens,” but correlates to his analysis
of the intentionalities of consciousness. Only by going back to the
intentional acts themselves could the concept of the intentional ob­
ject—i.e., the phenomenon or that which was meant as such—be
secured.
As Heidegger named and elucidated the concept of phenom­
enology in the introduction of his own first work, it could almost be
 T H E WAY IN T H E T U R N 123

read as a simple variation on Husserl’s methodological program. Yet,

in spite of this, a new accent was heard by virtue of the fact that
Heidegger, in a paradoxical emphasis, did not introduce the concept
of phenomenology from the direction of its “givenness,” but rather,
from its “ungivenness,” its hiddenness.
Although Heidegger, in this first presentation of his thought,
avoided an overt critique of Husserl’s phenomenological program
(something he had attempted to formulate for some time in his
lectures), the critical distinction between his and Husserl’s phenom­
enological point of departure could not be overlooked in the devel­
opment of Being and Time. It proved not to have been in vain that
Heidegger (in section seven of Being and Time) had understood the
idea of phenomenology in terms of the hiddenness of the phenom­
enon and as a discovery that had to be wrested from hiddenness.
By means of his idea of phenomenology, Heidegger did not
only intend to display the customary certainty of the descriptive
method’s victory in which the phenomenologist felt his superiority
to the theoretical constructions of contemporary philosophy. Rather,
the hiddenness that was dealt with here was, so to speak, more deeply
rooted. Even the classic analysis of thing-perception that Husserl had
developed as a gem of his phenomenological art of description to the
finest possible subtlety could still be accused, taken as a whole, of
hiding a prejudice. That, indeed, was Heidegger’s first accomplish­
ment: he turned the pragmatic or functional context in which per­
ceptions and perceptual judgments meet against the Husserl’s
descriptive structure. What he elaborated in the conception of “ready-
to-hand” [.Zuhandenheit] was not, in truth, a higher dimension in the
wide thematic field of Husserl’s investigation of intendonality. To the
contrary, the simple perception that apprehends something as presence-
at-hand [Vorhandenes] and makes it present proved to be ah abstrac­
tion based upon a dogmatic prejudice—the prejudice that what is
presence-at-hand [Vorhandenheit] must receive its ultimate proof
through pure presence to consciousness. The young Heidegger had
already dealt with the logic of impersonal judgments as a student of
Heinrich Rickert, and here he may have followed a dark impulse that
was now raised to the level of theoretical clarity. The result of his
dissertation, namely, that the shout of “fire!” resisted the logical trans­
formation into a predicative judgment and could only be coerced
into a logical scheme, may have been felt by the later Heidegger as a
124 H E ID E G G E R ’S WAYS

confirmation of his first intuition: at the base of all logic lies an

ontological restriction.
In the meantime, by reinterpreting the metaphysics and
ethics of Aristotle in a new and ingenious way, Heidegger had ac­
quired the intellectual tools that allowed him to expose the ontologi­
cal prejudices that continued to permeate his own thinking, as well
as that of Husserl and Neo-Kantianism. These ontological principles
were operative in the then current concept of consciousness and
especially in the fundamental role of the concept of transcendental
subjectivity The recognition that subjectivity was a transformation of
substantiality and a final ontological derivation of Aristotle’s concepts
of Being and essence gave such impact to Heidegger’s pragmatically
toned critique of Husserl’s analysis of perception that it toppled all
perspectives and especially the very foundations of Husserl’s pro­
gram. In speaking of “Dasein” Heidegger did not only replace the
concepts of subjectivity, self-awareness and the transcendental ego
by a new word of striking force; by elevating the time-horizon of
human existence, an existence that knows itself to be finite (i.e., is
certain of its end), to the rank of a philosophical concept, he tran­
scended the understanding of Being that was the basis of Greek
metaphysics. The leading concepts of the modern philosophy of con­
sciousness, subject and object, as well as their identity in speculative
thinking, proved themselves to be dogmatic constructions as well.
However, it was not the case that the phenomenological con­
scientiousness of Husserl did not endeavor to break the dogmatism
of the traditional concept of consciousness. That was precisely the
point of the concept of intentionality-—-that consciousness was always
“consciousness of something.” Also, the evidence-postulate of com­
plete apodicticity that could be met only by the ego cogito [I think] did
not represent for Husserl a passport to freedom. Rather, he dis­
solved, in a lifelong, continually refined analytical process, the basic
Kantian concept of the transcendental unity of apperception into a
constitutional analysis of internal time-consciousness, and he worked
out, more and more carefully, the process-character of the self-con­
stitution in the “I think.” With the same insistence Husserl pur­
sued—under the rubric of “intersubjectivity”—the aporia of the
constitution of the alter ego [the other I], of the “we,” and of the
monadic universe. This is especially the case in his unfolding of the
problematic of the life-world [Lebenswelt] in his studies concerning
the “crisis” [Krisis], for these showed that he wanted to meet every
•challenge that could be raised from the standpoint of the problematic
of history. It should be noted, however, that Husserl’s analyses per­
taining to the problem of the life-world were considered as counter­
moves to Heidegger’s critical insistence on the historicality of Dasein.
It remains a peculiar fact that Husserl’s critical defense in his
Krisisabhandlung was simultaneously directed against Heidegger and
Scheler, even though they did not belong together at this particular
point. Scheler never questioned the eidetic dimension as such from
the perspective of historicality, as Heidegger did in a fundamental
ontology construed as a hermeneutics of facticity. Rather, Scheler
tried to ground phenomenology in metaphysics. It is not “spirit” or
Geist that experiences “reality” Rather, it is “urge” or “drive” or,
more precisely, Gefuhlsdrang: the striving or impulse towards the sat­
isfaction of felt needs. The unactualized essence-look of “spirit” itself
must break forth from the reality of the striving itself Phenomenol­
ogy has no ground in itself Indeed, for Husserl, this was a turning
away from the assumption that philosophy ought to be an exact
science insofar as the science of actuality cannot be exact by virtue of
its very nature. The “crisis-treatise” is primarily concerned with the
clarification of such “misunderstandings.” At any rate, Husserl con­
sidered it a fact that both Scheler and Heidegger simply had not
understood the inevitability of the transcendental reduction and of
the ultimate foundation for the apodictic certainty of the cogito.
We may illustrate the disparity in regard to the emerging
problematic by pointing out that Heidegger considered Husserl’s
mode of inquiry into the ontological prejudices upon which the meta­
physical tradition rested hopelessly entangled. When, towards the
end of the 1950s, Heidegger got together with some of my own
students in Heidelberg and participated in a seminar which I was
giving on the subject of Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness, he
asked us what Husserl’s analysis had to do with Being and Time.
Every answer that was given to him was rejected; it had “nothing” to
do with it!
That was certainly said on the basis of the decisiveness by
which the later Heidegger had freed himself from the transcendental
mode of questioning; a freedom that had not yet been truly achieved
even in Being and Time. All the same, one will have to admit, when
looking back with Heidegger on his own development, that his
126 H E ID E G G E R ’S WAYS

starting point with “Being-in-the-World” and the explication of the

question of Being along the lines of this allegedly “transcendental”
analysis of Dasein truly pointed in a completely different direction,
An analysis of time-consciousness such as Husserl's no longer satis­
fied Heidegger, even though Husserl's progress beyond Brentano
consisted precisely in the fact that he recognized the temporality
[Zeitlichkeit] of time-consciousness itself. In addition, Husserl turned
against a theory of time-consciousness that conceived of the past and
the becoming past only under the perspective of memory and, in so
doing, conceived of it as something brought back to the present.
This step leading beyond Brentano is expressed in the con­
cept of “retention”: a holding fast that is an original function of the
presently perceiving consciousness. However, Heidegger's problem
was much more radical. Being and Time was not at all, as Oskar
Becker interpreted it at the time, a mere elaboration of a problem on
a higher level within Husserl's phenomenological program. This
“piece of philosophical anthropology” that was contained in Being
and Time (Sein und Zeit} first edition, p. 17) was subordinated to a
much more far reaching question concerning the nature of Being.
This “Being” Heidegger oriented along something he called “Being
as a whole” and, later on, he always insisted that this “Being” could
not be clearly read from Dasein as the “place of understanding of
Being” (p. 11, footnote b in Vol. 2 of the Collected Works).
In the Marburg lecture of the summer of 1928 (vol. 26,
Collected Works) the following presupposition is asserted: that “a pos­
sible totality of all beings is already there.” Only then can there be
Being in understanding (p. 199). Dasein is admittedly exemplary, how­
ever, not as a case of Being that has been marked by our thinking
but, rather, as the being “that is in the manner of being its 'there'
[da]” Even the later term, Lichtung or “clearing” already appears here.
However, it is still characterized by an anthropological turn towards
the characteristics of the elucidated disclosedness of Dasein, but with
the ontological sense of “protruding into the openness of the 'there':
‘ek-sistence' [Ek-sistenz] ” (Sein und Zeit} p. 177, footnote c). Even the
term “the turn” (which later became a key word) can be found
already in 1928. It is used to refer to “ontology itself expressly turned
back into the metaphysical ontic in which it is always standing.”
Here, too, Heidegger is still thinking in terms of human existence or
Dasein insofar as the latent change that the fundamental ontology
 T H E WAY IN T H E T U R N 127

undergoes as the analytic of Dasein (when considered as a “temporal

analysis”) is called “the turn.”
Heidegger’s later marginal notes in his cottage copy give a
totally new interpretation to the exemplary function of human exist­
ence (Sein und Zeit, p. 9, footnote c). Human existence is “exem­
plary” in the sense of the “happening” of Being that accompanies it.
That, naturally, is a clear change in interpretation. But even such
altered interpretations (for that is surely what they are) have their
truth. They bring to light Heidegger’s unclear intention. For the
rekindling of the question of Being it was the “there” of human
existence, the Da of Dasein, that was of essential importance, not so
much the priority of the Being of Dasein.
Th6re are similar questions of interpretation in regard to
other critical points in Husserl’s program. Thus, in Heidegger’s chap­
ter concerning Mitsein or “being with” (section 26 of Being and Time)
this analysis is completely defined in terms of the critical delimita­
tion against Husserl’s problematic of intersubjectivity. Indeed, the
dominant ontological prejudice governing his thought is no less rec­
ognizable in Husserl’s treatment of the problem of intersubjectivity
than it is in his description of the allegedly “pure” perception. There,
only a higher level “transcendental intuition” is supposed to animate
the pure thing-perception in the alter ego! Obviously, Heidegger adopts
a polemical orientation towards Husserl when, in contrast to such an
account, he speaks of “being with” or Mitsein as an a priori condition
of all being-with other Dasein [Mitdasein] and when he expressly
makes the claim of an equal originality, a claim with which he
frequently counters Husserl’s idea of a “last foundation” (c£ p. 131).
The Mitsein is not added later as a supplement to Dasein. Rather,
Dasein is always at the same time Mitsein, regardless of whether oth­
ers join in being there or not, regardless of whether they can do
without me or whether I “need” no one.
When Heidegger designates Dasein and Mitsein as modi of
Being-in-the-World and denotes Care [Sorge] as the basic constitu­
tion of “Being-in-the-World, he still follows, in the structure of his
argument, the mode of thinking in terms of a transcendental proof
that Husserl shared with the Neo-Kantians. In reality, however, he
was not merely aiming, in his transcendental analytic of human
existence, at a concretization of transcendental consciousness, that
is, substituting factical, human Dasein for the fantastically stylized
128 H E I D E G G E R ’S W AYS

transcendental ego. Indirectly, that was already made apparent by the

fact that he phenomenologically orients the question of the “who?”
of Dasein towards the “everydayness” [Alltaglichkeit] of existence, which
is bound to a “circumspective concern” for the world, for what is
“ready~to~hand” and “together” [Miteinander]. In this “fallenness” the
true phenomenon of the “there” is constantly hidden, as is true “I
myself” It is the “they” [das Man] that is no one and has been no one
that is encountered first and foremost by Dasein. This is not only to
be understood polemically in the sense of a cultural criticism of the
century of anonymous responsibility Rather, behind it was the criti­
cal motive that questioned the concept of consciousness itself But
this required a unique preparation that was peculiar enough in itself:
to make visible, behind this fallenness in the world of circumspective
concern and “solicitude” others [Fiirsorgen], the authenticity of Dasein,
the “there” veiled by “the nothing,” and to accomplish this through
the anticipation of death.
It is true that Heidegger always emphasized that the “every­
dayness” of existence that understands itself as circumspective con­
cern and “solicitude” belongs as much to Dasein as the highest peak
of the moment in which the mineness [Jemeinigkeit] of Dasein reveals
itself through the mineness of dying and in which the original char­
acter of temporality (in contrast to the inauthenticity of the vulgar
understanding of time and of eternity as well) reveals itself as finite
temporality. However, even at this level in the development of his
thinking, Heidegger reflected on the question of if a mere reversal of
fundamental relationships might be sufficient or whether there was
not even in a temporal interpretation of Being as such already a
misinterpretation in hiding: ‘iAlready the basic act of constitution of
ontology, that is, of philosophy, the objectification of Being, that is,
the projection of Being to the horizon of its comprehensibility, is
given to uncertainty.. . . ” (vol. 24, p. 459).
Here the entire problematic of the objectification, of Being
can be felt, the problematic that led him to “the turn.” In the same
place from which the above quotation was taken, Heidegger says that
the horizon of comprehensibility could be reduced insofar as objecti­
fication—which is connected with such thematization—“is contrary
to the everyday relations to beings.” “The project itself necessarily
becomes an ontic one. . . . ” These statements from the lecture in
1927 give a new dramatic accent to an assertion found in Being and
Time (Sein und Zeit, p. 233) that sounds more like a rhetorical ques­
tion there: “. .. it even becomes questionable . . . whether a genuine
ontological interpretation of Dasein is not bound to fail precisely
because of the manner of Being of this thematic being itself”
Then that was more of a rhetorical question. But, in retro­
spect—which is only now possible-—-there is a question that has been
occupying me since the appearance of Being and Time, a question that
assumes greater urgency for me: Was the introduction of the prob­
lem of death into the train of thought of Being and Time truly cogent
and commensurate with the actual subject matter? In his formal
argument, Heidegger claims that the ontological interpretation of
“Being-in-the-World” as “Care” (and, consequently, as temporality)
would have to show explicitly “the potentiality-for-being-whole” of
Dasein if it wants to attain self-certainty. But this Dasein becomes
limited because of its fmitude, its Being-towards-an-end, that hap­
pens in death. Thus, reflection of death is called for. Is this really
convincing? Is it not much more convincing that it is in the structure
of Sorge or “Care” as such and in its temporal interpretation that
finiteness is already contained? Does not Dasein, in projecting itself
towards the future, continuously experience “the past” as the passage
of time itself? Insofar as Dasein is continuously involved in its antici­
pation of death (for this is what Heidegger really means and not that
with this anticipation the “whole” or totality of Dasein comes into
view), it is the experience of time as such that confronts us with the
essential finiteness that governs us as a whole.
It may be noted, after all, that Heidegger proceeded precisely
along this way and never again placed the problematic of death at the
center of his thought. In his cottage copy Heidegger leaves these
passages intact, and the way of his thinking ultimately led him from
the ecstatic horizon of Dasein and the instant into the structural analysis
of the dimensionality of time. (See Being and Time.)
And the later marginal notes of Being and Time point in the
same direction. There, the expression “the place of the understand­
ing of Being” [Statte des Seinsverstandnisses] (Sein und Zeit, p. 11, foot­
note b) is especially instructive. With this expression Heidegger
obviously wants to mediate between the older point of departure
from Dasein (in which its Being is at stake) and the new movement
of thought of the “there” [Da] in which das Sein or Being forms a
clearing. In the word place [Statte] this latter emphasis comes to the
130 H E I D E G G E R 'S WAYS

fore: it is the scene of an event and not primarily the site of an

activity by Dasein.
The entire structure of the argument in Being and Time seems
to be dominated by a twofold motivation that is not completely bal­
anced. On the one hand, there is the ontological denotation of the
“disclosedness” of Dasein that is the basis and premise of all other
ontic phenomena in relation to the activity of Dasein and of the inner
tension between the inauthenticity and authenticity of Dasein, On
the other hand, the exposure of the authenticity of Dasein in contrast
to its inherent inauthenticity is at stake in Heidegger’s thinking. How­
ever, not in the sense of the existential appeal along the lines of
Jaspers, but with the purpose of delineating true temporality and the
time-horizon of Being in its universal range. Both of these motives
combine in the aprioristic fundamental thought with which Heidegger
equipped the transcendental question of Being at that time.
At any rate, there can be no doubt that by sacrificing the
transcendental understanding of the self and by sacrificing the hori­
zon of understanding Heidegger’s thinking lost the sense of urgency
that made it appear similar to the so-called “philosophy of existence”
of his contemporaries. Certainly, Heidegger had already emphasized
in Being and Time that the tendency to fallenness of Dasein, its ab­
sorption in the circumspective concern of the world, is not a mere
error or lack, but that it is just as original as the authenticity of Dasein
and is an essential part of it. Certainly, the magic phrase, “the onto­
logical difference,” with which Heidegger worked in his Marburg
period, did not only have the obvious meaning of a differentiation
between Being and beings that constitutes the essence of metaphys­
ics. Rather, it also aimed at something that could be called the differ­
ence in Being itself, a difference that finds its reflective expression in
a struggle and resolution [Austrag] within metaphysics.
During his Marburg years, even before the publication
of Being and Time} Heidegger did not intend that the ontological
difference (a formula he constantly used) be understood as if this
differentiation between Being and beings was one made by ourselves
in our thinking. And certainly Heidegger, from the very beginning,
was aware of the fact that the aprioristic scheme of Neo-Kantianism
and Husserl’s separation of essence and fact were insufficient for a
convincing delineation of the scientific-theoretical specificity of phi­
losophy against the aprioristic basic concepts of the positive sciences.
 T H E WAY IN T H E T U R N 131

The paradoxical formula of a “hermeneutics of facticity” is an elo­

quent expression of this, as is the reversion of an existential analytic
in existence.
Heidegger was fully justified in opposing the understanding
of Being and Time as a "dead-end street.” By recognizing the question
of Being in general, it led into the open. And yet it was like an
opening into a new realm when Heidegger used the surprising phrase,
“the Dasein in human beings,” in his next publication, Kant and the
Problem ofMetaphysics. Where this was to lead could not yet be seen in
the Kant book. Even before 1940, in marginal notes in a copy of his
Kant book that he had sent to me as a replacement for the one I had
lost, Heidegger criticized himself in the following way: “relapsed
totally into the standpoint of the transcendental question.” The idea
of a finite metaphysics that he developed there (and which he tried
to support by means of Kant) ultimately held onto the thought of a
transcendental foundation that was the same as that presented in his
Freiburg inaugural lecture. That is certainly neither coincidental nor
a mere half-heartedness in Heidegger’s thinking. On the contrary, it
reflects the serious problem concerning the means by which the
radical impulse of thought that was directed towards the destruction
of the conceptuality of metaphysics could be reconciled with the idea
of philosophy as a strict science. At that time, Heidegger still ac­
cepted this idea—to the growing disappointment of Jaspers, as the
latter’s recently published Notizen uber Heidegger indicate. That is the
reason for his “transcendental” self-interpretation in Being and Time.
The transcendental philosophy could still understand itself as a sci­
ence even if it rejected all hitherto existing metaphysics as dogmatic.
In doing so, it was able to offer the sciences as such an argument by
which it could see itself confirmed as the true heir of metaphysics.
This was still completely true for Husserl’s program; for Heidegger,
it becomes problematic.
Being and Time fused, in a remarkably magnificent simplifica­
tion, the understanding of Being in metaphysics (i.e., in Greek
thought) with the concept of scientific objectivity that is the founda­
tion of the self-understanding of the positive sciences in modern
times. Both were construed as “present-at-hand,” and it was the claim
of Being and Time to demonstrate the derivative character of this
understanding of Being. But this means to show that the Being of
Dasein gains, not in spite of, but because of, its finiteness and
132 H E I D E G G E R ’S W A Y S

historicality, its authentic character, from which such derivative modes

of Being as present-at-hand or objectivity could be understood in the
first place. Such an enterprise was destructive for the configuration
of thought in classical metaphysics. When Heidegger, on the basis of
Being and Time, asked the question “What Is Metaphysics?” this ques­
tion, too, was more a case of a questioning metaphysics itself than a
revival of it or a re-founding of metaphysics on a deeper basis.
It is well-known that Heidegger’s way of thinking during the
1930s and the early 1940s was not manifested by means o f publica­
tions, but more in the form of academic teaching or by appearing in
special lectures. The literary public first learned, in a comprehensive
way, about what Heidegger called “the turn” when the “Letter on
Humanism” was published in 1946. Only in the following years
were the steps Heidegger had taken during the 1930s delineated
more clearly by the publication o f Holzwege. Everyone immediately
noticed that here the framework o f scientific institutions and the
self-understanding of philosophy as scientific philosophy was trans­
gressed. The addition of the vocabulary of the poet Holderlin as well
as Heidegger’s strangely powerful reflections were not necessary in
order to see a rekindling of the question of Being. The question that
Being and Time had aimed at had burst open, as a result of the original
impulse, the frameworks of science and metaphysics.
Certainly, there were also new themes that Heidegger’s think­
ing began to focus upon: the w ork of art, the thing and language;
obviously, these were issues for thought for which the metaphysical
tradition had no commensurate concepts. The essay on “The Origin
of the Work of Art” developed, w ith the greatest urgency, the con­
ceptual inadequacy of so-called aesthetics. And, with the problem of
the “thing,” a new challenge was set for the process of thinking for
which neither philosophy nor science had any means available for
dealing with it. For long ago the experience of the “thing” had lost its
legitimacy for the scientific thinking of the modern age.
What are “things” in an age of industrial production and
general mobility? In reality, the concept of the “thing” had lost its
philosophical birthright a long time ago, that is, since the beginning
of modern natural science and the paradigmatic function of mechan­
ics for this science. Within the realm of philosophy, too, the concept
of “thing” had been replaced, characteristically, by the concepts of the
object and the percept [Gegenstand]. But, in the meantime, it was not
 T H E W A Y IN T H E T U R N 133

only a change in the form of science and in the conceptual under­

standing of the world, but a change in the appearance of the world
itself which no longer left a place for the “thing.” Even if one
allowed the work of art a continued existence in a kind of protective
area of cultural awareness, in a kind of musee imaginaire, the disap­
pearance of thing was an irresistible process that no regressive or
progressive thinking could ignore.
Thus, it was by no means an expansion into new areas (nor
even a resounding of the old tones of cultural criticism) that forced
Heidegger to direct the question of Being precisely and primarily
toward the form of life [Lebensform] that today we call the age of
technology. In doing so, he had no intention of confusing romantic
conjurations of a fading and paling past with the task of thinking
“what is.” Heidegger was quite serious when, in Being and Time, he
granted the inauthenticity of Dasein its essential right in relation to
the authenticity of Dasein, even if it did sound like a self-repudiation
of his passion for cultural critiques. Now, in contrast to that, the
“thinking-to-the-end” of the modern age, the escalation of the tech­
nical world-project to an all-determining fate of human beings formed
the one, uniform level of experience from which Heidegger’s ques­
tion of Being received its orientation. The oft-quoted “forgetfulness
of Being,” with which Heidegger had originally characterized meta­
physics, proved to be the fate of the entire age. Under the sign of
positive science and its translation into technology, the “forgetfulness
of Being” is carried towards its radical completion. For technology
allows nothing else beyond itself to be noticed that might have a
more authentic Being in the reservation of “the sacred.” Thus, a new
pointedness is found in Heidegger’s thinking insofar as he attempted
to think in the total concealedness and absence of Being, the pres­
ence o f this absence: that is, Being itself However, this in itself was
not a mode of calculating thinking. It would be misunderstood if one
endeavored to calculate, from Heidegger’s point of departure, the
possibilities that may or may not be realized in the future of
humanity.
There can be no calculative thinking at all that is thinking
about thinking as if it were disposable or calculable. Here Heidegger
is very close to Goethe when he said, “My son, I did it very cleverly, I
never thought about the thinking.” Heidegger’s thinking is not think­
ing about thinking either. What Heidegger thought about technology
134 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

and about the turn is not in actuality thinking about technology or

the turn, but it is a standing in Being itself which elicits thinking
that follows from its own inner necessity H e calls this “essential”
thinking and also talks about “thinking beyond” [Hinausdenken] or
“thinking against” [Entgegendenken], This is not thinking in the sense
of seizing or grasping something; rather, this is something like “a
projection” of Being into our thinking, even if only in the radical
form of the total absence of Being.
It is not necessary to stress that such thinking-endeavors can­
not use terms and concepts with which one can size up, grasp and
overpower objects. Consequently, such a form of thinking gets e n ­
tangled in an extreme lack of language insofar as the thinking and
speaking that is being attempted here does not achieve anything, nor
does it possess a store of ensured terms for an object. Even the
utterances with which Heidegger attempts to oppose this calculating
thinking that considers future possibilities retain something of the
awkward prejudgment that accompanies conceptualizations. Certainly,
it is true that all fore-seeing that hopes for something new, different
and saving does not include real calculations or even pre-calculations.
And when Heidegger refers to the arrival o f Being and then adds,
“very suddenly, presumably!” (VuA, 180), or when he says, in that
famous interview, “Only a god can save us,” these phrases are more
rejections designed to repudiate the calculating intent to know about
and to dominate the future than real statements. Being cannot be
ascertained or thought as something that can be grasped, as some­
thing accessible to us. This is why such utterances are in no way
predictions. They are not at all real statements of his thinking nor o f
the thinking of “what is.” For such statements it also holds true that,
to use Heidegger’s language, the project contained in them becomes
itself necessarily an ontic one.
How, then, can such counter-thinking come about? There is
no need to speculate about this; on the contrary, the essays presented
by Heidegger can be questioned. There is no doubt that in this
sequence of relatively short works which in every case acquired the
angle o f their questioning from the criticism of metaphysical
conceptualization and theory-formulation, the direction of his think­
ing is maintained with an almost monomanical insistence. However,
the formation of a conceptual language commensurate with this angle
of questioning and consistent with itself is hardly achieved.
 T H E W A Y IN T H E T U R N 135

When Heidegger looked back upon what he had achieved

towards the end of his life, and when he planned a kind of introduc­
tion to the complete edition of his works that he prepared, he chose
as its motto: “Ways, not works.” Ways [Wfcge] are there to be walked
upon, such that one can leave them behind and progress forward;
they are not something static on which you can rest or to which you
can refer. The language of the later Heidegger is a constant breaking
up of habitual phrases, a charging of words with a new, elemental
pressure that leads to explosive discharges. His language establishes
nothing. Therefore all of the almost ritualistic repetition in the dic­
tion of the later Heidegger, as it is also frequently found among his
disciples, is entirely inappropriate. However, his language is not
exchangeable at will. Ultimately, it is as completely untranslatable as
the words of a lyric poem, and it shares with the lyric poem the
evocative power that proceeds from the complete unity and insepara­
bility of the form of sound and the function of meaning.
And yet, it is not the language of poetry, for such language is
always tuned to the poetic tone in which a poem is embedded.
Heidegger’s language, however, remains—even in the stammering
search for the right word—the language of thought. A language that
overtakes itself continuously, a dialectic answering to something pre­
thought and preconceived.
Let us take an example. “Nur was aus Welt gering, wird einmal
Ding " [“Only what smalls (or rounds) from the world, will ever
become thing.”] This sentence cannot even be translated into Ger­
man! At the end of a long pathway of thought that opposed the
undifferentiated equalizing of all things near and far with the true
essence of the thing, the smallness [das Geringe] of the thing is un­
derstood, for a moment, as a process, a happening, an event that is
expressed in the verb geringen. Although this verb does not exist in
the German language, it alludes to ringeln [“cur\”],geringlet [“curled”],
and the rich field of meaning surrounding “ring,” “circle,” “encircle,”
and “around.” In addition, it alludes to the total roundness of the
world—the globe—from which the insignificance of the thing is
wrested and in which it rounds itself This mode of thinking follows
the furrows that it makes in language. Language, however, is like a
field from which a variety of seeds can come forth.
Here we are reminded of Heidegger’s interpretation of the
saying of Anaximander in which he finds the “Weile” [while] that is
136 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

given to beings when it experiences its “genesis.” Along these lines,

the smallness [das Geringe] o f the thing is something that “aus Welt
gering. ” Certainly, das Geringe is used first as a noun derived from an
adjective, but, by forming a noun from the adjective,gering, a collec­
tive totality of movement is evoked, just as is done by “Gemenge,
Geschiebe, and Getriebe” Thus, Heidegger finally dares to change it
completely into the imperfect tense o f a verb. This is similar to
“Nichten,” “Dingen” and “Sein” [Being] that he spells “Seyn.” The
“einmal” or “ever” of the sentence in question underpins the past
meaning of the artificial verb, gering, as does the rhymed answer
Ding. In the neologism “gering” you can hear allusions to the follow­
ing: “gerinnt” [coagulates], (lgerannt” [coagulated], “gelingf [succeeds],
“gelang” [succeeded], but, in addition, “geraten” [to come off, to turn
out] and ugeriet” [came off] also belongs to the same semantic field.
Thus, the final sentence of the essay on “the thing” summarizes the
way that has been travelled and it means: only where world has
curled itself around the round ring of a center, regardless o f how
small it might be, will a thing come to be in the end.
The question can be raised whether this coercion o f lan­
guage and this creation of words does what it is meant to do: that is,
to communicate, to be communicative, to gather thinking into the
word and to gather us in the word around something commonly
thought. Neologisms (i£ that is, they can be called that here— for, in
actuality, they are additions of new semantic relations to already ex­
isting semantic units) require support, that is why poets who have
the support of rhythm, melody and rhyme can get away with the
most astonishing creations. Examples of German poets, in this re­
gard, are Rilke and Paul Celan. Heidegger dared to do something
similar in his very early thinking. One of the earliest creations of this
type that I encountered when I had not yet met Heidegger, and
when he had not yet published, a creation that demonstrated his new
and daring treatment of language, was the phrase: “es weltet” [it is
worlding]. That struck the target like a flash of lightning lighting a
long yawning darkness; the darkness of the beginning, of the origin,
of earliness. Even for this darkness he found a word (not a new one,
but one from an entirely different area: the language used to describe
the weather in northern Germany). When he said, as early as 1922,
“Leben ist diesig— es nebelt sich immer wieder ein” [life is hazy, it always
shrouds itself in fog], he meant that it surrounds itself with fog again
and again and does not grant clarity and a clear view for very long.
 T H E W A Y IN T H E T U R N 137

The support that Heidegger is searching for in his thinking is

not of the long-lasting quality that the word fused into a poem dis­
plays. Many of his props break down instantly. Here, I am reminded
of “Entfernung” for “Naherung” However, within the ducts of his
thought they provide their guiding epagogical service. Heidegger ex­
presses it in the following way: “Thinking follows the furrows that it
makes in language.” And language, as I have said, is like a field from
which the most diverse seeds can come forth.
Granted, these are images, metaphors, parables, means of
speech that are props used in following a direction of thought, noth­
ing that shall or can be kept forever; they just come forth as do words
when you want to say something. And “saying” means “showing,”
keeping and communicating, but only for those who look around
themselves.
That is why the untranslatability of this language is not a loss
or even an objection to the kind of thinking that articulates itself in
this manner. Wherever translation, i.e., the illusion of a free and
unrestricted transposition of thought, fails, thinking breaks through.
We do not know where thinking will lead us. Where we believe we
know, we only believe that we think. For, then it would not be a
“standing” under the challenge that strikes us and which we do not
choose. Thinking challenges us, and we have to stand or fall. Stand­
ing, however, means to stand fast, to correspond, to answer—and not
to play, in a calculating manner, with possibilities.
 C hapter Tw elve

The Greeks (1979)

Ih ere are many aspects of a thinker of Martin Heidegger’s

stature that show his importance and illustrate the magnitude of his
effect. There is the way he picked up the concept of existence as
coined by Kierkegaard. There is his analysis of angst and of Being
toward death, which had a particularly profound effect on the Prot­
estant theology of the 1920s and which also influenced the first
reception of Rilke. There is his “turn” in the 1930s to the German
poet Holderlin, from whom Heidegger gained an almost prophetic
message. There is the splendid attempt and counterattempt at a
coherent interpretation of Nietzsche, in which the will to power and
the eternal return of the same were thought together for the first
time. And, in particular during the period after World War II, there is
his interpretation of occidental metaphysics with its culmination in
the age of universal technology as the fate of the forgetfulness of
Being—whereby one constantly has the feeling that some sort of
secret theology of a concealed god is lurking in the background. One
may want to haggle over details concerning Heidegger’s interpreta­
tions. Or one may want to have absolutely nothing to do with
Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics, perhaps rejecting it as a
secular presumptuousness or, precisely the opposite, as the last, yes,
definitely the last, dying gasp of nihilism. But argue as one may, no
one can deny that the challenge presented by Heidegger’s daring
thought to the European philosophy of the last fifty years is simply
unparalleled. And in the face of the almost breathtaking effect of the

139
140 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Heideggerean thought experiments, no one can deny the internal

necessity of his way, even if it comes across to some as the wrong
way leading into the fields of the ineffable.
N onetheless, the diversity o f these aspects found in
Heidegger’s works and effect, as well as the unity of the way that he
has taken, is apparent in his relationship to the Greeks as it is no­
where else. Greek philosophy has certainly played a leading role in
German thought since the days of German idealism, with regard to
both history and historical problems. Hegel and Marx, Trendelenburg
and Zeller, Nietzsche and Dilthey, Cohen and Natorp, Cassirer and
Nicolai Hartmann make up an impressive list of witnesses, and the
list could be easily lengthened if we also were to consider the great
classical philologists of the Berlin school.
But with Heidegger something new began: There was a
new nearness and a new critical inquiry concerning the Greek
beginnings that directed his first independent steps and then ac­
companied him constantly up until his last years. Anyone who has
read Being and Time can easily verify this—from near and from far.
But to be aware of the extent to which Aristotle was present in
Heidegger’s thought in those early Marburg years, one must have
sat in on Heidegger’s lectures during that period. In the year 1922,
just as I finished my doctorate, I came down with polio precisely at
the time when I had wanted to go to Freiburg to study Aristotle
with Heidegger. He comforted me then with the news that an
extensive “phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle” would
appear in the next volume of an annual: “The first part (about
fifteen pages) deals with the Ethica Nicomachea A, Metaphysica A. 1.2.,
and the Physica A.8; the second part (of about the same length) is
concerned with the Metaphysica Z H 0 , De Motu An, De Anima. The
third part will appear later. Since the annual will be published later,
I will send you a separate copy.” This publication never came to be.
Only a copy of an introduction to it, an analysis of the hermeneutical
situation in which Aristotle presented himself to us, became known
to a few people. I became aware of it by way of Natorp. This bold
and exciting manuscript became the basis for Heidegger’s appoint­
ment to Marburg, and the appointment was the reason why the
intended publication never came to be.
Heidegger was confronted with some new, immense tasks,
and the series of Marburg lectures, which are now in the process of
 TH E GREEKS 141

being published, is an impressive testimony to the way they were

managed.
One can get only a preliminary idea from Being and Time and
perhaps the lectures on logic given in 1925-26 (vol. 21 of the
Gesamtausgabe, par. 13) of how much Heidegger’s interpretations of
Aristotle influenced the Marburg lectures. But anyone who heard
Heidegger during the Marburg years has a much better idea of this.
Aristotle was forced on us in such a way that we temporarily lost all
distance from him—never realizing that Heidegger was not identify­
ing himself with Aristotle, but was ultimately aiming at developing
his own agenda against metaphysics. The primary value of these
early interpretations of Aristotle lie in their ability to wipe away the
scholastic overlay and serve as a model of a hermeneutical “fusion of
horizons,” which allowed Aristotle to come to language like a con­
temporary. Heidegger’s lectures had their effect. I myself learned
something really crucial about the udianoetic [intellectual] virtues”
from his textual and resolute interpretation of the sixth book of the
Nicomachean Ethics; namely, that phronesis and its closely related synesis
are nothing other than the hermeneutical virtues themselves. Here,
in the critique of Plato that crystallizes the differentiation between
techne, epistime, and phronesis, Heidegger took his first, decisive step
away from “philosophy as a rigorous science.” It was no less impor­
tant that Heidegger was able to think the categories and concepts of
dynamis and energia together, an affinity that is very apparent in the
line of thought presented in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Brocker worked
out these Heideggerean ideas concerning the connection between
kinesis and logos, and a few other works by other followers belong
here as well. Heidegger himself made use of his old manuscripts
when he gave the seminar on Aristotle’s Physics B 1 in Freiburg in
1940, the text of which was first published in II Pensiero III in 1958.
Beginning with the essay on Anaximander in Holzwege, all of
Heidegger’s later publications that have something to do with his
relationship to the same degree. In the earlier studies this fusion was
pushed almost to the point of identification. The treatise on Aristotle’s
physis attempted with radical determination to recreate this Aristote­
lian concept and to set it off against the modern attack on “nature”
by contemporary science. It is obvious that Heidegger was making
use of his earlier studies. Even though the treatise develops the
Aristotelean concept of physis entirely in light of the beginnings of
142 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Greek thought and stands resolutely opposed to the later reformula­

tion of the concept of nature by Latin and contemporary thinking, it
still cannot be classified as fitting squarely into the later theme of
overcoming metaphysics.
But this should not be taken to mean that there was some­
thing like a break in Heidegger’s philosophical development. In truth,
this seems to me to be much more a question of perspective. The
fact that Heidegger still made use of his earlier studies of Aristotle in
1940 and that these studies served as the basis of a work published in
1958 points much more to a continuity in his thinking through the
so-called turn. His involvement with the Greeks was of fundamental
importance to him; it distinguished him from all other pheno-
menologists from early on. (I went to Freiburg in 1923 not so much
for Husserl’s phenomenology as to learn about Heidegger’s interpre­
tations of Aristotle.) His orientation was influenced so strongly by
the Greeks that, by comparison, the transcendental conception of a
self in Being and Time had something provisionary about it.
In this respect, the famous “turn” was anything but a break
in Heidegger’s thinking. It was much more his running up against an
inappropriate interpretation of self, one that had been prescribed by
the strong influence of Husserl. Even the theme of overcoming meta­
physics, which was only later expressed as a theme, must be thought
of as a consequence of his orientation to the Greek beginnings.
The later Heidegger also saw Greek thinking as a whole as
having something originative. Although the question concerning
Being appeared even then always and always only as the question
concerning the Being of beings, it had not yet been driven from the
original experience of da and of aletheia by the “imposition of the
Roman will” [romische Willensstellung"] (Dilthey) or by the contempo­
rary “concern [Sorge] about a recognized knowledge” (Heidegger’s
lectures in Marburg in 1923).
What else could have been so helpful for the Heideggerean
question, which attempted to break the logical immanence of the
transcendental self-consciousness, but Greek thinking—thinking that
covered the enormous questions of the beginning, of Being and “noth­
ing,” and of the One and the Many, and that was also capable of
thinking psyche, logos, and nous without falling prey to the idols
o f self-knowledge and the methodological primacy o f self-
consciousness. The historical effort to think Greek and to wring the
 TH E GREEKS 143

Greek way of thinking from our own modern habits of thought

served Heidegger’s own interrogative impulse here in a peculiar way.
He did not simply try to overcome the subject-object split by way of
the phenomenological reduction of pure consciousness. Rather, he
posed to the field of reduction of intentionality and to the research
into the noetic-noematic correlation itself the question, What does
“Being” mean?—be it the “Being” of consciousness, of ready-to-
hand, of present-to-hand, of Dasein, or of time.
Thus, we have here a unique case. As an inquirer consumed
by his own questions, Heidegger had been always searching for a
interlocutor, and ultimately he was to invent some rather powerful
partners. There was Nietzsche, for example; Heidegger traced out
the metaphysical implications inherent in Nietzsche’s thought and
then faced these implications himself as his own greatest challenge.
Or there was Holderlin, the poet of poetry—who was no thinker of
thought—who prodded Heidegger in his thinking and promised to
propel his thinking out beyond the entanglements surrounding the
concept of self-consciousness as found in German Idealism. But he
had already found at the very beginning his true partners—the Greeks.
They constantly demanded of him that he think them in an even
more Greek way and, in so doing, demanded that he recapitulate
questions he had posed to them. This thinker, who had gained a
reputation for rendering coercive interpretations, often impatiently
shoved history [das Historische] aside when he heard and rediscovered
only himself in the texts—but here he could not be “historical”
[historisch] enough when trying to rediscover himself
W ithout a doubt, the beginnings of Greek thought are
shrouded in darkness, and what H eidegger recognized in
Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides was certainly himself. But
these were, in fact, only collected remnants; they had not been pre­
served as texts, and they did not contain complete speeches or
thoughts. Thus, Heidegger was using fragments when he attempted
to erect his own building, fragments that he turned over and over
again and assembled according to his own blueprint.
There are certainly some coercive acts in Heidegger’s use of
the pre-Socratic texts that I would not defend. For instance, he rips
Anaximander’s 8Jikt|v Kal tutiv [just reparation and penance] apart,
an expression that is more or less a set phrase. In the case of
Parmenides’s verses, he ignored the fact that t ’a u r a [the same] can
144 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

be used only as a predicate. And it goes on. But all in all one has to
say that our ability to understand pre-Socratic quotes is no different
than Plato and Socrates’s, especially with respect to the words of
Heraclitus. On one occasion Socrates made the famous comment
that a Delic diver was needed to understand his fragments. But what
Heidegger did understand was excellent. . . . Methodically, he went
about it the right way, inasmuch as he used the Aristotelean text as a
springboard for his inquiry into the pre-Socratic beginnings. The
single extant text that includes everything was in fact that of Aristotle.
Only the thought-event o f the Platonic dialogues—the first philo­
sophical text that we still have—remained inaccessible to this impa­
tient questioner in spite of all of the momentum behind his
appropriations.
Like coming out of a hot spring—that is what Heidegger
loved to call it when he would immerse himself in Aristotle’s shape­
less studio papers—these originative experiences of Greek thought
rose up out of the consistent analyses of Aristotle and came into
Heidegger’s view, challenging him with their simplicity and other­
ness. To think what it must have meant for this young man who had
been educated in scholastic Aristotelianism when he developed an
ear for the language of these beginnings. In aletheia he saw not so
much the unconcealedness and unhiddenness of speaking, but first
and foremost the being itself that showed itself in its true Being, like
pure, unadulterated gold. That was thought in a Greek way Thus, it
was with true enthusiasm that Heidegger defended the distinguished
position of truth [Wahrsein] in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (0 10) as the
completion of the whole train of thought found in the central books
of that text. And this was certainly not done from the perspective of
the philosophy of identity found in German Idealism, the perspec­
tive that must have made this chapter so attractive to the Hegelians;
rather, this was done from a perspective that had been brushed by an
echo of the experience of Being, which allowed him to think it
< Being or, possibly, truth > within the horizon of time. One could
learn directly from Plato and Aristotle that Being is presentness
[Anwesenheit] and that that which is always present [das immer
Anwesende] is most of all beings.3But beyond that Heidegger made
the ingenious observation that “always,” 5asi, had nothing to do with
aeternitas [eternity], but must be thought along the lines of the cur­
rentness \Jeiveiligkeit] of that which is present. This can be drawn
 TH E GREEKS 145

from the usage of the language: 6 d el (3acri\ei5u)vb refers to the king

who is currently governing. (We also say in German, “wer immer
Konig ist!”.)c It is well known that the later Heidegger recognized
specifically that the Greeks themselves did not think of this experi­
ence of Being as aletheia; rather, they understood aletheia more along
the lines of a correspondence between Being and appearance,
between usia and phantasia (Met. A 23) (the “false” things as well as
the “false” talk, see Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 77). But that does not
change the fact that the experience of Being itself, which articulates
itself in statement, cannot be measured by the statement or thought
in which it presents itself. The late Heidegger speaks of the event or
of the clearing that made the presentness of beings possible in the
first place. This was certainly not thought in a Greek way, but it did
sketch out something unthought in Greek thinking. To a great extent
this was true of the Aristotelean analysis o f physis, inasmuch as the
question concerning Being was approached in this analysis within
the horizon of time. This treatise occupies more or less a central
position in Heidegger’s incessant efforts to think with the Greeks and
to think back beyond them in a more originary way. The Gesamtausgabe
has made a couple of volumes available that deal with the lectures
given in Freiburg (“Heraklit,” vol. 55; “Parmenides,” vol. 54).
To think the Greeks more Greeklike—does this challenge
not lead to some hopeless hermeneutical difficulties, especially if
attempted with one of Aristotle’s pedagogic texts, such as his lectures
on physics? Certainly this text no longer belongs to the groping
attempts of earlier times at converting the Homeric verse and a mys­
tical vocabulary into conceptual language. It may well be possible to
divine something left unthought in these pre-Socratic quotes, but
the use of arguments and speeches had been introduced into the
disciplines of logic and dialectics after the pre-Socratic period, and a
new pedagogic school came into being—something to which the
Aristotelean text itself attests. Can it be justified historically, or is it
even possible at all to think back behind the use of pedagogy in
Aristotle’s texts? Does this not degenerate into an artificial archaism,
like that which we come across with some of Heidegger’s risky
endeavors with the German language?
Well, it is certainly correct that in both cases Heidegger con­
sciously used force in an attempt to break the preunderstanding of
words, a preunderstanding that seems so natural to us. But in
146 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

Aristotle’s case is this way so far off? When Heidegger translates arche
not as principle, but as beginning, control, departure, and having at
one’s disposal [Verfiigung], there is a some justification for that inas­
much as the issue at hand here is the terminological introduction of
the word by Aristotle himself. No terminological fixation can ever
completely sever the semantic ties of a word found in common use.
And the famous catalogue of concepts in Metaphysics shows how very
aware Aristotle was of this himself In fact, one finds in the very first
chapter o f Aristotle’s own linguistic analysis an analysis of not only
the various meanings of beginning but also of the special meaning of
the word as “control” and “execution of an office.” We learn from
this that “principle” is not simply a point of departure (of Being,
becoming, and especially of knowledge) that one leaves; rather, it is
contemporary through it all [ein dutch alles Gegenwartiges]. A being of
nature, which has the beginning of kinesis in itself, does not only
initiate such movements from within itself (without being prodded);
rather it “can” [“kann”] do it. But this includes the possibility that it
may remain at rest, which means that it controls its movement. Thus,
the animal has its own type of propulsion, and the plant has its
“beginning” in itself that allows it to maintain its life. Therefore it
must be granted the status of anima vegetativa. The Being of a being of
nature is its “motility” [Bewegtheit]. This includes movement as well
as being at rest.
It is similar in other cases, such as when Aristotle makes a
specific terminological use of a common word or when, by combin­
ing morphemes, he invents a new word like energeia or entelecheia.
Such new formations of words are then capable of pulling known
words over into the ontological sphere; this happens in the case of
the word dynamis, the “ability” ["Konnen”], which Aristotle defines in
a general sense as “arche kineseoos>} [the beginning of movement].
Heidegger renders it “suitability” [Eignung\, but he even finds this
dangerous because “we are not thinking Greek enough and do not
understand the suitability for . . . as the way of coming forth into
view in which the suitability fulfills itself by still holding back and
within itself”
This certainly sounds a bit Chinese, but that is because his
explication includes a whole series of other translations that Heidegger
had already put forth with physis, logos, and eidos. In these cases
Heidegger is correct. Again it is unmistakable that the new Aristotelean
 TH E GREEKS 147

concept “dynamis” simply cannot be understood as “possibility”; rather

the familiar meaning of the word dynamis, namely, ability, speaks with
it. An ability is motility, which always includes a holding-within-
itself In Aristotle’s terminological usage this gains an ontological
meaning.
The case with physis as coming forth, as “arising” or “coming
up” [Aufgang] is similar. We speak of seeds coming up, and we find a
reference to this at the very beginning of Aristotle’s linguistic analysis
(A 4). Obviously Aristotle still heard such a close association be­
tween “coming up” and the word physis that he would most gladly
have pronounced it with a drawn out upsilon. The same is true for
eidos. Here, too, it cannot be denied that the power of the word eidos,
with its resonance of “sight < o f> ” [Anblick] and “appearance” [Aus-
Sehen], is not exhausted by the logical reference to the species, but
rather “sight” speaks again even in Aristotle (as in Plato, see the
Sophist, 253c3, d5). Thus, in the Physics we have “r| orepT|<XL<; e’iSos
mos 'ecTTiv [the withdrawal is somehow an eidos/form].”1
One could go on endlessly like this in an effort to show that
thinking more Greek-like is not so much thinking differently as it is
thinking-with-an-other—a way of thinking which withdraws from
our thinking because our thinking is completely fixated on objectiv­
ity, on overcoming the resistant character [Widerstandlichkeit] of the
object in a percipient certainty of ourselves. With a reference to only
two words, which Aristotle transformed into concepts and which
seem to have moved into the perspectives of our thinking with irre­
sistible force, a semantic contribution can be brought to light which
works to justify Heidegger’s acts of violence.
One of these words is metabole. It is rightly translated by us as
“<a sudden> change” [Umschlag], and it is actually used in Greek
not only for the weather but also for the ups and downs of human
fate. With Aristotle the word obtains a terminological status. It ex­

1. P h y s is , 193b-d l9. The Greek phrase eTSos ttojs means “somehow,” an e id o s.

Heidegger’s translation is somewhat unfortunate. Incidentally, one senses some le­
gitimate resistance when Heidegger speaks o f the ‘V i5o«? TTpoaipeTov” [preferred
e i d o s / f o r m ] with reference to the case o f tech n e (p. 141)— as if the eidos is “chosen” in
the way that Hercules chose virtue at the crossroads, instead o f the given purpose o f
the affair determining our intentions. This is also apparently the reason why Plato
assumed there were “ideas” o f the artificial things and named them paradeigmata”
[example or model]. This is one case where Heidegger did not think Greek enough.
148 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

presses the formal structure of kinesis, which is found in all types of

movement. This is surprising for us because, according to this, spa­
tial movement seems to lose its essential continuity and sounds like a
pure change or alteration o f place. For us a sudden change is the
opposite of such a movement. The word implies to us first and
foremost the loss of settledness. When we say that the weather sud­
denly changes, we do not mean that the bad weather has ceased but
rather that the beautiful weather has come to an end. That is more or
less self-evident in Greek thinking as well, Parmenides is so settled
on the settledness of Being that he almost reduced it to empty names
when “humans hold as true and ascertain yiyveaQai tc KOti'okkcrBai,
e i v a i tc Kod ovxt, Kod tottov aWacrcreiv 5 ia Te Xpoa 4>avov
'ap-etpeiv.”2’d Obviously, a complaint about the unreliability and
unsettledness of Being is to be found lurking behind this phrase.
When we speak of a movement of place or alteration, we think not of
a sudden change, but primarily of a transition of one into another. So
what does it imply that Aristotelean thinking characterizes all types
of movement with the structure of sudden change, of abruptness?
Here Heidegger seems to be right about the Greeks when he stresses
“that in a sudden change something appears that was concealed and
absent until now.”
This certainly does not contradict the experience of a sudden
change that alters that which was constant—a notion that Eleatic
thinking had revolted against—but the sudden change in such an
experience is obviously a positive experience of Being and does not
simply imply a loss of Being. This is what distinguishes it conceptu­
ally in Aristotle’s Physis. That in which a sudden change takes place is
thought of as Being. This is an opening that leads back behind the
constant Being of Parmenides into the deep dimensions of its ori­
gins, which Parmenides himself did not reflect upon, and this is
what still rings through in Aristotle’s terminological coinage of metabole
[changing, shifting, reshaping]. That natural beings have within them-

2. Fr. B, 40ff. (The fragment number refers to the collection by Hermann Diels, D i e
[Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1951] p. 238.) The
F ra g m e n te d e r V o rso k ra tik er
text o f Parmenides’s poem leaves no room for doubt. I f the color is called “radiant”
(((xxvov), then that means that Parmenides’s keeping its “passing” in view. (In Ger­
man we also have the ambiguous phrase, “Die Farbe ist vergangen” [the color is
gone].)
 T H E GREEKS 149

selves an arche for sudden change is a positive ontological distinc­

tion, not a diminution of “Being.” The other pre-Aristotelean uses of
metabole concur with this. The site in which the sudden change oc­
curs is always mentioned. Therefore, we reach the compelling con­
clusion that everything depends upon what comes out of this, that is,
what this sudden change leads to. The complete confirmation of this
is found in the structure o f unrestricted emerging [Entstehens]. There
we really have the sudden change from “nothing” into Being, which
Aristotle formally characterized as the sudden change K o f t a v T u j x x a i v
[according to its opposite]. Thus, movement does in fact have, to
quote Heidegger, “as a way of Being, the character of coming forth
into the presencing [Anwesung]”
Finally, and perhaps, the most surprising is the word morphe
[form or shape]. With this we hear so clearly the potter’s shaping
hand as it works the malleable material that, without giving it a
second thought, we understand Aristotle’s remark “ K a i t o 8 3 18 0 s t o
K o tT o t t o v \ 6 yov” [and its eidos (form) according to the logos (concept

or reason)] from our own perspective by way of a reference to techne.

And in fact Aristotle himself immediately introduces this analogy
with techne. Physis is self-creating. Then along comes Heidegger, who
teaches that even for Aristotle creating is not simply producing. If for
Aristotle morphe is more physis than hyle [raw material or matter],
then there is only the appearance of an analogy to techne.
In truth, it is much more the genesis, the unrestricted emerg­
ing, that makes the morp/ze-character of physis visible: “Furthermore,
from one human being emerges another human being, but a bed­
stead does not give rise to another bedstead” (Aristotle’s Physics,
1936b). Thus, Heidegger is justified in interpreting the process of
technical production in the following way: morphe is even in this case
“the mustering into appearance” so that “the suitability of those suited
visibly and completely steps out.” Also, in the case of techne the con­
cern is not so much with producing as with emerging and creating—
such as the natural process of self-emerging, like of a corn seed, for
example, which we stick into the earth.
This way of conceptually coining the term morphe actually is
supported somewhat by the natural usage of the word. Even Aristotle
uses the word almost exclusively for living beings that render their
own forms. The verb |xop<|)6 (o [I form or shape] comes on the scene
for the first time fairly late. The earliest use of the word morphe can
150 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A YS

be found in the Odysseywhere it is used to describe a natural forma­

tion and well-formedness, and all later customary linguistic usage
corresponds to this. Morphe is that to which something strives for
completion, it is the “as what” that something presents itself, the “as
what” that something emerges. The appearance of a technical inter­
pretive structure is obviously false.3
But enough of this discussion of semantic voices that accom­
pany the Aristotelean concepts. The lesson it teaches us is clear
enough. That we generally restrict the realm of meaning of the Greek
terms used by Aristotle to their terminological function is not so
much a consequence of the linguistic distance that separates us from
the naturally spoken Greek; rather, it is a consequence of the effec­
tive-historical determinedness of our preunderstanding, which has
been heavily influenced by the Roman-Latin and then more recent
instrumentalistic translations of the Aristotelean world of concepts.
We have become completely incapable of thinking of our fine Ger­
man word Ursache < cause, reason, or motive > as die Sache < thing,
matter, or affair >, which it actually means, the causa, the cosa. We are
able see in it its function only as that which causes [das Verursachende]
or brings about [das Bewirkende]. It seems completely artificial and
scholastic for us to speak of Aristotle’s four causes [Ursachen]; only
the causa motrix seems to us to be correctly called a cause—or we
might be willing to include the frowned upon final cause, but cer­
tainly not form and matter. They are simply not forms of “causality.”
It reverberates with false echos when we try to think Greek.
Erudition or historical learning certainly allow us to sense the other­
ness, but we are simply unable to think anything that does not corre­
spond to something already found in our own thinking. The
conceptual words of philosophy become estranged from themselves
because they have nothing to say about beings; rather they enter into
the compulsion of thought. This is what Heidegger called the lan­
guage of metaphysics. It was first articulated in Aristotle’s thinking, and
it now controls our whole world of concepts. Heidegger’s violent
rememberances against this control are not merely the result of a
refined historical conceptualization and learned historical sense—as

3. In contrast, things are different with the term hyle. This is undoubtedly a “techni­
cal” expression. But this is precisely because h y le is not “Being” in a true sense,
whereas m o r p h e is.
 T H E GREEKS 151

if the past gave itself away to anyone. His thinking was certainly not
called into the arena by a mere historical <historisches> interest in the
“original” Greek thinking. As a man of our century—a century in
which the beginning letters of the words “History” and “Historicality”
have been capitalized with the largest upper-case letters—and filled
with an awareness of the inappropriateness of the traditional philo­
sophical concepts for the understanding of Christian faith, Heidegger
was never satisfied with the traditional understanding o f metaphys­
ics. The return to the originative Aristotle gifted him with a genuine
clue. That uphysis” constitutes the character of Being o f this or that
being, a being that can never be denied its ontological valence, does
not mean that only natural beings possess such an ontological
valence; but it does mean that Being must be thought so that that
which is found in motility [das in Bewegtheit Bejindliche] must be
recognized as being. Physics is not metaphysics. However, the high­
est being, the divine, is itself to be thought as the highest “motility.”
This can be learned from the conceptual connections between “move­
ment” and the guiding concepts “energeia” and “entelecheia.” O ur think­
ing has become receptive to Heidegger’s insight, because it has been
so strongly influenced by the talk of an end to metaphysics and to the
emergence of the a priori character of the “positive” age. Nietzsche’s
metaphysics of value presents us with this most extreme end. At the
peak of modernity, where Being is dispersed into becoming and into
the eternal return of the same, questions could be posed by Nietzsche
that forced their way back behind metaphysics. And this is especially
true of Heidegger. He recognized in metaphysics the fate of our
world, a fate that is being fulfilled by the control of the world through
science—and by the collapse toward which we are rushing. But then
the question concerning the beginning is no longer a historical ques­
tion, but rather a question posed to fate itself Is “Being” still being
kept for us? That the answers given, which are ultimately our fate
and history, could free us to pose the question anew—to which they
wanted to be the answers—this constitutes our way of philosophizing.
It is rather surprising that one of Aristotle’s late text, the
Physics, could be of some help in this regard. Indeed, Aristotle
attempted here—against the Pythagorean thinking o f Plato—to
renew an older way of thinking in which Being is thought as motility
instead of a constant numerical harmony. But it is still astonishing to
see what appears from behind the superficial contradiction between
152 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

physis and techne when we learn to read with Heidegger. Certainly

these are only receding echos, but by comparison our understanding
of nature and spirit, of space and movement, of malleable matter, and
of the eternally unchanging form seems so very superficial. We are
better able to think what “is” when we learn to think of Being as the
arising [als den Aufgang], as that which creates itself and puts itself
forth at any one time as a being—but as something that is more than
that framed in its appearance. Being is not only a showing-of-itself; it
is also a self-retaining, and that can be seen clearly with reference to
motility. What we have to consider if we want to overcome the blind­
ness of our own action and its destruction of the world is sketched
out in this initial understanding o f physis. Heidegger quotes the words
of Heraclitus where he says that nature is accustomed to concealing
itself, and he correctly recognizes that the challenge does not lie in
penetrating nature and breaking its resistance; rather, the challenge is
precisely to accept nature as it is in itself and however much of itself
it displays. Certainly this thinking is no longer Greek; not only is
physis thought of in this way, but Being—-and Being first and fore­
most—is also thought of as aletheia, as the clearing, as that which
comes on the scene prior to all appearing beings and yet remains
concealed behind them. But Heidegger's bold thought experiments
have nevertheless taught us to think the Greeks more Greeklike.
 C h a p t e r T h ir t e e n

T h e H is t o r y of
P h il o s o p h y (1981)

W i t h i n the German philosophical tradition, the history

of philosophy has been considered an essential part of theoretical
philosophy itself since Schleiermacher and Hegel. It is therefore
essential that we keep this in mind when considering the topic
“Heidegger and the History of Philosophy,” which means that the
question to be posed should take the following form: Which aspects
of the basic orientation that has held sway over German philosophy
since Hegel can be found in Heidegger's thinking? The background
that frames this question is clear; it was created by the emergence of
a historical consciousness. The legacy of German Romanticism is
such that, since its advent, the problem of history has affected not
only historical research in general but even the orientation of theo­
retical philosophy as well. Prior to the age of Romanticism there was
no history of philosophy in the fundamental sense that we are using
the term here. What did exist was simply a chronicling erudition,
one that was certainly dominated by definite, dogmatic presupposi­
tions but that did not serve the function of establishing philosophical
foundations. O f course, the situation with Aristotle's famous
doxography was quite different; he had built it into his pedagogical
lectures with very definite pedagogical intentions—different until
this later became a completely distinct branch of scholarly work in

153
154 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

ancient pedagogy [Schulwisseitschqft]. The Hegelian program of a his­

tory of philosophy was itself philosophy in the fullest sense, a special
section within the philosophy of history that, for its part, attempted
to place even reason in history. Indeed, Hegel virtually named the
history of philosophy the heart [das Innerste] of world history How­
ever, the more substantial claim of the Hegelian history of philoso­
phy, that is, to have discovered the necessity inherent in the sequence
of formations of philosophical thought and, thus, to have exposed
the role played by reason in the development of the history of thought,
could not withstand the critique of the historical school for very
long. A good example of such a critique can be found in the orienta­
tion of Wilhelm Dilthey, who can virtually be regarded as the thinker
of the historical school. In spite of all of his openness to Hegel’s
genius—an openness that grew with age—he was always in essence a
cautious follower of Schleiermacher. To bring teleology into the
investigation of the history of thought was not his affair; he saw
himself as adhering to a purely historical method. This was to lead to
the development of the so-called history of problems [.Problemgeschichte]
by the Neo-Kantians, which was the only way to philosophically
investigate the history of philosophy at that time; it dominated the
scene at the beginning of this century. Even if one could not find
some type of necessity underlying the progression of the different
designs of the systems of thought, one could still attempt to uncover
a type of progression within histoiy, thereby raising the treatment of
fundamental philosophical problems to the level of a philosophical
standard. This was more or less the way that the influential textbook
by Wilhelm Windelband, The History of Philosophy, was constructed. It
was in no way devoid of a historical dimension, but in the final analy­
sis it was based upon the assumption of a constancy of problems from
which, depending upon the changing historical constellation, varying
answers followed. In a like manner, the Marburg Neo-Kantians pur­
sued the history of philosophy as the history of problems.
As Heidegger began to make his contemplative way, the tide
had just begun to turn against the history of problems. At that time,
that is, the period during and following World War I, the criticism of
the systematic unity of the Neo-Kantian conceptual system was
emerging, and it also cast doubts on the philosophical legitimation of
the history of problems. The disintegration of the transcendental
framework of the Neo-Kantian philosophy, a framework that alone
was capable of preserving the legacy of idealism, forced the collapse
 T H E H IS T O R Y O F P H IL O S O P H Y 155

of the history o f problems, for it derived its problems from this

legacy. This movement away from the history of problems was mir­
rored in Heidegger's efforts as well At that time he was attempting
to move the systematic, transcendental conception of philosophy
espoused by his admired teacher Husserl, the founder of phenom­
enology, in the direction of the historical reflection found in Dilthey’s
thought. His efforts produced a type of synthesis between Dilthey's
problematic of historicality and the scientific problematic of Husserl's
basic transcendental orientation. Therefore, in Being and Time we
encounter the astonishing combination of a dedication to Husserl
and a tribute to Dilthey—astonishing inasmuch as Husserl's procla­
mation of phenomenology in Philosophy as a Rigorous Science contains
a quasi-dramatic criticism of Dilthey and the concept of Weltanschauung.
When we raise questions concerning Heidegger’s actual intentions
and what led him away from Husserl toward a region proximate to
the problem of historicality, then it becomes quite clear—especially
now—-that he was engrossed not so much with the then contempo­
rary difficulty with historical relativism as with his own interest in
the Christian legacy Now that we know more about Heidegger’s
first lectures and initial thought experiments of the early 1920s, it is
clear that his critique of the official Roman Catholic theology of his
time pushed him closer and closer to the question of how an appro­
priate interpretation of the Christian faith could be possible or, to
put it in another way, how could one ward off the infiltration of the
foreign Greek philosophy—which forms the foundation of both the
Neo-Scholasticism of the twentieth century and the classical Scho­
lasticism of the Middle Ages—“into the Christian message? <There
were several formative elements at work then.> There was [Da ivar]
the inspiration he took from the young Luther; there was his admir­
ing emulation of Augustinian thought and especially his engross­
ment in the eschatological mood fundamental [Grundstimmung] to
St. Paul's Epistles. All of this led him to view metaphysics as a type
of misunderstanding of the original temporality and historicality
experienced in the Christian claim of faith.
The introduction Heidegger wrote for his planned Aristotles-
Interpretationen1 gives a clear testimony to this. The key word that
Heidegger used then when approaching the tradition of metaphysics1

1. Tliis text has not yet been published, but it can be obtained in a publishable
form, and I have been familiar with it since 1923.
156 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

was destruction—destruction above all of the highly conceptual char­

acter of the more recent philosophy and especially of the sheaf of
concepts associated with the ontologically indemonstrable notion of
consciousness, the res cogitans of Descartes. So, Heidegger began with
Aristotle, the first and most distinguished subject in the history of
philosophy. The form that all of his dealings with the history
of philosophy was to take was already sketched out in his early
approach to Aristotle's thought—approached simultaneously with
critical intentions and an interest in phenomenological renewal, this
was destruction and construction in one. Even then he followed the
basic tenant of Plato's Sophist, that is, that one should strengthen the
position of one's opponent. This was an Aristotle that had become
curiously more up-to-date. Heidegger preferred his ethics and rheto­
ric—in short, disciplines of the Aristotelian pedagogical program that
were presented as being clearly detached from questions concerning
the principles of theoretical philosophy Above all, the criticism that
he encountered there of the Idea of the Good, the highest principle
of the Platonic doctrine, seemed to address his own primary con­
cern, namely, the issue of temporal-historical existence and the criti­
cism of transcendental philosophy. His interpretation of phronesis as a
5 \\o etSos yvwcreoos, another type of knowing, was actually a sort
of confirmation < o f the validity> of his own theoretical and exis­
tential interest. This extended to theoretical philosophy and meta­
physics as well, inasmuch as Heidegger already had the “famous
analogy,” as he often called it, in view—although in those years it was
not yet thought out in a sufficiently self-conscious way. This was the
basis within Aristotle's Metaphysics from which Heidegger was able to
put into question in a like manner the systematic derivation of all
value from any one principle, be it Husserl's transcendental ego or
Plato's idea of the Good. Because of this interest, the publication the
Opus Tripartitum by Meister Eckhart in 1923 must have been an in­
spiration to him. Also, when the tractate “De Nominum Analogia)} by
Cajetan fell into his hands, it became the subject of a thorough study
that spilled over into his classes.
Meanwhile, as he became increasingly engrossed in his own
counterproject [Gegenentivurf] to Husserl's transcendental phenom­
enology, a project that first came to light with the completion
of Being and Time, the figure of Aristotelian metaphysics came to
represent unambiguously the point of origin o f all opposing
 T H E H IS T O R Y O F P H IL O S O P H Y 157

positions against which Heidegger sought to develop his own thought

experiments. Thus, the concept of metaphysics slowly developed into
a “code name”; that is, into a word that referred to the conglomerate
of opposing tendencies against which Heidegger was developing his
own question concerning the meaning of Being and the essence of
time, a question motivated by his Christian inspiration. Yet, his fa­
mous inaugural lecture entitled “What Is Metaphysics?” stood in an
ambiguous relationship to metaphysics inasmuch as the concept of
metaphysics was used, or at least it seemed to have been used, in a
positive sense. Later, when he began to formulate anew his own
thought project in complete detachment from Husserl's model—and
this is what we refer to as Heidegger's turn—metaphysics and its
eminent representatives were to function only as the backdrop against
which he critically set off his own philosophical intentions. From
then on metaphysics no longer appeared as the question concerning
Being; rather, it was portrayed as the actual, fateful obscuring of the
question of Being, as the very histoiy of the forgetfulness of Being
that began with Greek thinking and continues through more recent
thought up to the fully developed world-view and belief structures
inherent in calculative and technical thinking, that is, up to today.
From then on the < various > stages of the advancing forgetfulness
of Being and the contributions of the eminent thinkers of the past
were forcibly arranged in a fixed historical order, and this obligated
Heidegger to delineate his project from Hegel's analogous attempt at
a history of philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger always insisted that he
never claimed in his own confrontation with the forgetfulness of
Being and the language of metaphysics that there was a necessary
progression from one stage of thought to the next. But inasmuch as he
attempted to describe metaphysics from the perspective of his ques­
tion concerning Being as a uniform instantion of the forgetfulness of
Being, indeed, of a forgetfulness of Being continually on the rise, then
it was inevitable that his own project have something of the logically
compulsive character that typified the construction into which Hegel's
history of world thought had degenerated. Unlike Hegel's, his was
certainly not a teleological construction beginning with the end; rather,
it was a construction based on a beginning, a beginning that already
held the fate of Being [Seinsgeschick] of metaphysics. But “necessity”
was included, even if it existed only in the sense of e£ c,inro0 5screws
a v c r / K a i o v [something necessary according to a hypothesis].
158 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Thus, it is a good idea to examine how his general project

deviates from that of Hegel’s in order to orient ourselves to his
relationship to the history of philosophy. The first thing one is struck
with is the peculiar place that the beginning of Greek philosophy—
Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus—inhabits in his thinking.
This should not come as a surprise because we had found a similar
privileging of this beginning in Nietzsche, whose radical critique of
Christianity and Platonism had also singled out pre-Socratic think­
ing, the philosophy of the tragic age of the Greeks. In an approach
frequently used, Heidegger attempted to work out this original situa­
tion as a sort of counterimage to the actual fateful way taken by
occidental thought as presented in the history of metaphysics. In his
studies of Anaximander he expounded, in a most original and sur­
prising way, upon elements of his own thinking that dealt with the
character of time and temporalization. The famous solitary extant
fragment from Anaximander’s teaching, which we usually under­
stand as one of the first conceptions of the self-sustaining and self­
regulating unity of Being—referred to in Aristotelean terms as
physis■—displayed to him the temporal character of Being whenever it
is in the process of showing itself: It has the character of tarrying
[Weile], But, of course, more than all else it was the pedagogical
poems of Parminedes and the puzzling aphorisms of Heraclitus that
he endeavored to see in a new light. Both Heraclitus and Parmenides
had served as key witnesses for German idealism, and correspond­
ingly, they played an important role in the Neo-Kantian history of
problems. Parmenides was the man who first brought the question
concerning Being into a sort of identity relationship with the concept
of thinking, or of consciousness (in Greek it was referred to as noein),
and Heraclitus was the profound founder of the contradiction as a
dialectical image of thought, behind which the truth of becoming,
the Being of becoming, could be envisaged. Heidegger thus endeav­
ored repeatedly to overcome the idealistic misconception of the
beginnings of Greek philosophy, a misconception that saw its culmi­
nation in Hegel’s metaphysics—and respectively in the Neo-Kantian
transcendental philosophy, which had disregarded its own Hegelian
tendencies. It must have been the far-reaching problematic of the
concept of identity itself and its internal connections with the con­
cept of difference, which played a central role not only in Hegel’s
Logic but in Hermann Cohen and Natorp’s interpretations of Plato
 T H E H IS T O R Y O F P H IL O S O P H Y 159

as well, that he found especially challenging. Heidegger attempted to

completely rethink identity and difference from the vantage point of
“Being,” as as the “resolution” [derAustrag], and ultimately
as the “clearing” or the “event” of Being, and then to contrast this
with the idealistic, metaphysical interpretation. At this point it could
no longer remain concealed from him that even here, 'with these
early Greek thinkers, Greek thinking was already on its way, so to
speak, to its later development into metaphysics and idealism.
Heidegger saw precisely this as the true fate of our occidental history,
as the fate of Being: Being presents itself as the “essence” of beings,
calling forth the calamity of Onto-Theology—which, in Aristotle,
shows up as the question of metaphysics.
Heidegger’s work with Heraclitus and his concept of logos
was motivated by the same intentions. Today, in the newly published
lecture, we can see the unbelievable intensity, force, and logical con­
sistency present in Heidegger’s attempts to utilize fully Heraclitus’s
aphorisms with reference to his own question concerning Being.
One should not expect to find in Heidegger’s treatment of these
texts a new, historical insight that relates directly to Parmenides’s
pedagogical poems or Heraclitus’s aphorisms. But Heidegger was
able to disclose a primordial experience of Being (and of “nothing”)
lurking behind these works, and his impressive, archaizing interpre­
tations opened up enough space for one to be able to read these
texts—in their darkness and fragmentary shortness—against the grain
of Hegel’s conception of as “reason in the history” of thought.
If like Heidegger, one understands metaphysics as the fate
of Being—fate that finally pushed Western humanity to the extreme
of a complete forgetfulness of Being with the advent the technical—
then all further steps taken within his confrontation with the history
of philosophy will appear peculiarly predetermined. This shows up
in Plato’s case in the most astonishing way. Thanks to his interpre­
tive powers, Heidegger was able to give a very impressive interpreta­
tion of Plato’s Sophist during his formative years, an interpretation
that eventually was to give rise to the motto for Being and Time, But
in his first extensive treatment of Plato, that is, his essay “Plato’s
Doctrine of Truth,” which was published together with the “Letter
on Humanism” in Switzerland in 1947, Plato’s concept of the “Idea”
appeared from the outset under a foreboding auspice, one portend­
ing the subordination of 3aAnf)0eia to op0oTT]s of truth to correctness
160 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

or mere commensurateness with a pregiven being. Seen in this way,

Plato did take another step in the direction of the "forgetfulness of
Being” that led to the stabilization of Onto-Theology or metaphys­
ics. It is far from obvious that this is the only way to read Plato. In
fact, as a result of this reading, all the aspects of the history of
Platonism that had fascinated the young Heidegger, such as Augus­
tine, Christian mysticism, and the Sophist itself, played no substantial
role in his later thinking. Yzt, it is conceivable that one could find
precisely in Platonic philosophy one possible way to get back behind
the question as formulated in Aristotelian and the post-Aristotelian
metaphysics, so that the dimension of self-manifesting Being, the
Being of aletheia that articulates itself in the logos, could be recognized
in the dialectic of Ideas. But Heidegger no longer associated this
perspective with Plato; he believed it to have been maintained only
by the oldest of thinkers.
His later reception of Aristotle was similar in this respect. At
least the peculiar and controversial chapter on the 5ov cos a\T)0 es;
that is, Being as true-Being (Met 0 10) ,astill played a decisive role in
his Marburg lectures, where its portrayal is not without some con­
templative sympathy. But with the formation of the world historical
figure of metaphysics, even that side of Aristotle lost its luminous
power. Being and Time shows how, proceeding either from an analysis
of the concept of time or especially from his need to raise his own
question concerning Being and play it off against this question as it
was raised by metaphysics, he saw both the Aristotelian formulation
of this question and the turn of the modern age—represented by
Descartes—as representing a part of the history of the forgetfulness
of Being. But one text in particular documents Heidegger’s early
ambivalent engagement with Aristotle: It is Heidegger’s interpreta­
tion of Aristotle’s Physics Chapter II, Book 1, a single interpretation
made virtually unique by the power and intensity of his thought.
This is a characteristic example of the ambiguity—but also of the
productivity of this ambiguity-—-that accompanied the dialogue
Heidegger attempted to have with metaphysics. More than all else,
his expose made the two-sidedness inherent in the concept o fphysis
apparent. O f course, Heidegger argues in his interpretation that
Aristotle’s concept of “physis” represents the decisive step taken to­
ward "metaphysics,” but at the same time he recognized in this con­
cept, in this “emergence” [Aufgehen] of beings, a preformation of his
 T H E H IS T O R Y O F P H IL O S O P H Y 161

own concept o f the “clearing” of Being and the “event.” Next to

appendixes to the texts on Nietzsche, Heidegger's treatise on this
chapter o f A ristotle's Physics remains his m ost m ature and
perspectivally rich examination of Greek thinking. In general, his
way through the history of philosophy resembles the trail of a di­
viner. Suddenly the divining rod dips down, and the diviner makes a
strike.
Here one is also reminded of Heidegger's occasional refer­
ences to the intuitions [Intuitionen] of Leibniz—and he was especially
drawn to Leibniz’s bold language. Whereas attempting to regain the
actual metaphysical dimension, a dimension that Leibniz had searched
for in between the modern science of physics and the traditional
figure of the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance—a dimension
Whitehead also attempted to gain in his thought, as is well known—
Heidegger came across the word existiturire in one of Leibniz’s tractates.
This was fascinating to him; the word was not existere, which tradi­
tionally means being present-at-hand, an object-for-a-judgment, or a
being-represented. The linguistic form itself of this Latin neologism
rings of the openness of movement of Being toward the future:
Existiturire is like a thirst for Being. Naturally, given Heidegger's own
philosophical intentions, this worked like a lure—an anticipation of
Schelling.
If we keep our guiding question in mind, that is, how does
Heidegger draw a sharp contrast between his own peculiar, negative
teleology of the forgetfulness of Being and Hegel's teleological sys­
tem of the history of philosophy, then Heidegger’s examination of
Kant must assume a central position for several reasons. For it had
been Hegel's claim that, following Fichte’s initial lead, he had devel­
oped transcendental philosophy to its fullest possible breadth, au­
tonomy, and universality—and Neo-Kantianism took over this
Hegelian agenda without being completely aware of its un-Kantian
beginnings, and this applies to Husserl as well. In contradistinction
to this, Heidegger's early turn to Kant—it was after all the first book
that he saw published after Being and Time—was decisively anti-
Hegelian in its conception. Heidegger was not concerned with real­
izing transcendental thought in the sense of extending this principle
to universal proportions, which was the task first undertaken by Fichte
in his Wissenschaftslehre and which was more recently the goal of
Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Rather, precisely the two­
162 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

sided nature of the two sources of knowledge, precisely the restric­

tion of reason to that which could be given in the intuition seemed
to offer Heidegger a foundation for an alliance <with Kant>. O f
course, his attempt to interpret Kant in light of a “finite metaphysics53
was a highly violent deed, and he did not pursue it for very long.
After his encounter with Cassirer in Davos and, more important,
following his growing insight into the inappropriateness of this tran­
scendental self-interpretation for his own thinking, Heidegger began
to interpret Kant’s philosophy as being more entangled in the history
of the forgetfulness of Being, as shown by his later works on Kant.
Hegel had come into Heidegger’s field of vision quite early.
How could such a gifted Aristotelian like Heidegger not have picked
up on the fascination that emanated from Hegel, this Neo-Aristote­
lian? We can also assume that a thinker like Hegel would have been
especially appealing to Heidegger' due to his dynamic and powerful
language. In any- case, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as well as his
Logic became the subject of one of Heidegger’s analyses in the mid-
1920s. It came as no surprise that he preferred Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit over the Logic. Eventually he could sense, as can we, that the
late Husserl’s “genetic” phenomenology converged roughly with the
earlier Hegelian project presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit. And
his only published analysis of Hegel is dedicated to the “Introduc­
tion” to the Phenomenology of Spirit; this text, which offers a step-by-
step commentary on the development of Hegel’s thought, appears in
Holzwege-—-and is perhaps truer to the title Holzwege than any other
work in the volume. It is a renewed attempt to derive the fundamen­
tal principle of Absolute Idealism from the text of the “Introduction”
to the Phenomenology of Spirit—an undertaking I believe would have
been more suited to the later versions of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.
But, be that as it may, it still documents the continuing challenge and
great fascination that the Hegelian thesis of an universal history of
metaphysics held for Heidegger. He emphasized repeatedly up to his
death that he found the talk of a collapse of the Hegelian system and
Hegelian idealism to be completely inappropriate. It was not the
Hegelian philosophy that collapsed, but rather everything else that
followed, including Nietzsche. This was a statement that he often
repeated. And similarly, he never wanted his talk of an overcoming of
metaphysics to be understood as if he meant that it was possible to
proceed beyond Hegelian metaphysics or that one should pursue this
endeavor for its own sake. As is well known, he often speaks of
 T H E H IS T O R Y O F P H IL O S O P H Y 163

taking a step back [von dem Schritt zuruck], which was to allow the
space of aletheia or the clearing of Being to open itself up in thinking.
Heidegger also saw, in Hegel the final form of modern thinking, a
thinking dominated by the notion of subjectivity. He was not blind
to the efforts made by Hegel to overcome the narrowness of subjec­
tive idealism, as he called it, and to find an orientation that did justice
to the “we,” to the mutuality of objective reason and the objective
spirit. But in Heidegger’s eyes this effort was simply an anticipatory
move that foundered when it came across the force of the Cartesian
concepts and Cartesian method. He certainly must have recognized
that Hegel was one of the masters at the conceptual trade. This could
also be the reason why—in spite of his sympathy for Schelling—he
always chose to examine the issue of overcoming or completing this
Absolute Idealism with reference to Hegel.
Given this state of affairs, Hegel must have appeared to him
to have been the last Greek, as he himself loved to say. It was Hegel
who, as a type of consummator, risked extending the influence of the
true, authentic Greek archconcept, that is, the logos, into the world of
history. For this reason the recently published Heidegger lectures
from 1930 N N 31, which deal with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
are dedicated entirely to the task of contrasting the type of inquiry
found in Being and Time with Hegel’s Onto-Theology, which is ori­
ented toward logic. By comparison, his interpretation of the Intro­
duction (Hegel’s theory of experience), which first emerged in 1942
and was published in Holzivege, was of a completely different compo­
sure. To speak with Heidegger, it was already “tacitly thought from
the vantage point of an event” [vom Ereignis her].
By comparison, Schelling’s profundity must have resembled
more closely his own innermost philosophical motivations. I had
already heard Heidegger read in a seminar on Schelling the follow­
ing sentence from the Freiheitsschrft, “The Angst of life drives the
creature from its center,” and then he went on to add, “Gentlemen,
show me a single sentence out of Hegel’s work that has such depth.”
The later Schelling began to loom larger and larger behind Kierkegaard
and, later, Nietzsche as well. He frequently delved into Schelling’s
The Essence of Human Freedom in his classes. In the end, he approved
the publication of his interpretation < of Schelling>, but, of course,
without concealing his opinion that Schelling was conceptually inca­
pable of doing justice to the depth of his intuitions. Heidegger
recognized in him his innermost problem, the problem of facticity,
164 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

of the insoluble darkness of the foundation—in God as in everything

that is real and not merely logical. This ruptured the boundaries of
the Greek logos.
It was Nietzsche who figured in the final, magnificent, and
ambiguous work that resulted from Heidegger’s confrontation with
the history of philosophy. Following two smaller works, the next
two-volume opus was dedicated to Nietzsche. O f course, it was only
after Being and Time that Nietzsche fully entered into Heidegger’s
horizon, and it is indicative of a complete misunderstanding to
attribute to Heidegger a position sympathetic to Nietzsche. Also,
Derrida’s endeavor to trump Heidegger byway of Nietzsche is in no
way drawing out the true consequences of Heidegger’s approach. In
Heidegger’s eyes, the extreme measure of completely dissociating
opinion from sense or meaning [.Sinn], as Nietzsche does in his
critique of consciousness, could still be understood as belonging
within the framework of metaphysics—as its unessence. The self-
willing will appeared as the last extreme of the subjective thinking of
the modern age, and something that had always been understood as a
mere paradox prior to Heidegger, that is, the coexistence of the doc­
trine of the will to power (or the doctrine of the overman) and the
doctrine of the eternal return of the same, was united in Heidegger’s
thought-—but as the most radical expression of the forgetfulness of
Being that Heidegger was to encounter in the history of philosophy.
The proliferation of notes on the subject that Heidegger added to the
second volume of his work on Nietzsche proves just how concerned
he was with situating Nietzsche in the history of the forgetfulness of
Being; the notes show how interested Heidegger was in retreating
from this path.
Yet, it remains undoubtedly true that Heidegger’s overcom­
ing of metaphysics was not intended to be a triumph over it. Later,
he expressly called it getting over [Vetwindung] metaphysics. That is to
say, when one gets>over an ache or an illness, the achiness and sick
feeling remains there in its entirety—it is not so simply forgotten.
Thus, he saw his own thinking as a continuing dialogue with meta­
physics, which means that he was always speaking, to a greater or
lesser extent, the language of metaphysics. He would have been com­
pletely locked within the language of metaphysics if he had not found,
situated at its pinnacle, a new interlocutor within the history of meta­
physics. This was Hegel’s friend, the poet Friedrich Holderlin.
 T H E H IS T O R Y O F P H IL O S O P H Y 165

Holderlin brought to Heidegger's language a new, semi-poetic

vocabulary. The parallels that exist between Holderlin’s mythical po­
etizing and Heidegger's “back to the origin” is truly astonishing, and
in the final analysis it was the only unambiguous conversation in
Heidegger's thoughtful dialogue with the past. All of his other im­
portant philosophical interlocutors, that is, Heraclitus, Parmenides,
Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche, maintained a peculiar ambiguity in
his readings: In part they spoke for him, but in part they rejected
him, inasmuch as they all worked together to prepare for the fate of
the occidental forgetfulness of Being. One becomes aware with both
Parmenides and Heraclitus that they searched for truth, the "sophon,”
in the experience of Being and, yet, simultaneously pressed forward
to learn about the variety of beings. In this way Being, as the Being
of beings, becomes essence, and aletheia is no longer thought of as
unconcealedness [Unverborgenheit], but rather as the Being of that
which is unconcealed [des Unverborgenen]. And Aristotle’s case is simi­
lar. Even if Heidegger does see in his <Aristotle’s> revival, in the
deepening of his concept of physis, and in his analogia ends [analogy of
Being]ba resurfacing of the illuminating experience of a beginning,
in the end he interprets the multidimensionality of Aristotle's “first
philosophy” as proceeding entirely in the direction of Onto-Theology.
Similarly, Heidegger consciously interpreted Hegel’s philoso­
phy as the completion of this Onto-Theology—in spite of all the
affinities that exist between his own critique of the idealism of con­
sciousness and Hegel’s critique of subjective idealism. When all is
said and done, we are forced to admit that Heidegger’s thoughtful
dealings with the history of philosophy are burdened with the vio­
lence of a thinker who was veritably driven by his own questions and
a desire to rediscover himself everywhere. His destruction of meta­
physics became a kind of struggle with the power of this tradition of
thought. Ultimately, this was to manifest itself in an almost painful
deficiency in language, one that drove this thinker, in spite of his
powerful language, in the most extreme enigmas. This thoughtful
way of metaphysical thinking is really the only one that has, in any
fundamental way, left behind traces of a way [eine Wegspur] in lan­
guage, in the languages with which we are familiar, that is, Greek,
Latin, and the modern languages. W ithout these traces, even
Heidegger, in his effort to question back behind the beginning of
this way, would have been left speechless.
 C h a p t e r Fo u r t e e n

T h e R e l ig io u s
D i m e n s i o n (1 9 8 1 )

l o raise the question concerning the religious dimension

in Heidegger’s thought is to present a challenge or at least to begin a
paradoxical undertaking. One need only to think of Jean-Paul Sartre,
who, as one of his admirers from a Nietzschean perspective, pre­
sented Heidegger as one of the representative atheistic thinkers of
our epoch. In spite of this I would like to show that an understand­
ing of Heidegger as an atheistic thinker can be based upon only a
superficial appropriation of his philosophy.
O f course, it is a completely different question to ask whether
the claims made on Heidegger by Christian theology .are justified—
even though half a century has already passed in which Christian
theologians have been turning to Heidegger’s thought. The question
concerning Being, whose recapitulation became a task that Heidegger
adopted as his in particular [Heideggers eigenster Auftrag], is not to be
understood as a question concerning God, as Heidegger himself made
unambiguously clear. Through the years, his orientation to the con­
temporary theology of both denominations became more and more
critical. But one must ask, Does not the very existence of such a
critique of theology itself show that God—whether revealed or con­
cealed—was not an empty word to him? It is well known that
Heidegger came from a Catholic family and had been raised in the

167
168 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

Catholic religion. He attended a high school in Konstanz that,

although not entirely a Catholic school itself, was nevertheless
located in an area where both Christian denominations—Catholic
and Protestant—had a strong following. After graduating from high
school, he went to stay with the Jesuits in Feldkirch (Vorarlberg) for a
while, although he was to leave again shortly thereafter. Moreover, he
belonged to the theological seminary in Freiburg for a few semesters.
Both Heidegger’s religious involvement and his philosophi­
cal leanings were already very pronounced in his early youth. Even
in the early years, his unchallenged religious affiliation was filled
with a passionate interest in philosophy. His principal at the high
school seminary in Konstanz—Groeber, who later became the bishop
in Freiburg—quickly recognized his brilliant gift and his devotion to
philosophy. Heidegger once related the story to me of how one of his
teachers caught him reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason under his
desk—during a boring class, of course. This was surely a free ticket
to a great intellectual future. After this episode, Groeber gave him a
modern and scholarly, although not very profound, book on Aristotle
to read. It was Franz Brentano’s Concerning the Multifarious Meanings of
Being [Seiende] in Aristotle, In a conscientious analysis, this study de­
velops the variety of the meanings of Being in Aristotle’s philosophy,
but it remains mute before the question of how they are connected—
and precisely this became an inspiration for the young Heidegger,
something he talked about often. Aristotle’s distinction between the
different meanings of Being challenged one to inquire about their
concealed unity, although certainly not in the sense of a systemiza-
tion like what Cajetan and Suarez, the scholastics of the Counter-
Reformation, tried to introduce into Aristoteleanism. But the fact
that Being was not a genus, as in the scholastic doctrine of the analogia
entis [analogue of Being], was a motif that often turned up from that
time on—although not as metaphysical doctrine but as an expression
of an open and pressing question that one had to learn to ask—-What
is this, this “Being?”
Heidegger’s talent brought him quick success. Under Rickert
he wrote his dissertation on the doctrine of judgment in psychologism,
and his minors for his exams were—one would never guess!—
mathematics and physics. He mentioned this work during a lecture
in Marburg with the comment, “When I was still involved in child’s
play.” He received the qualification to be a university lecturer at the
 T H E R E L IG IO U S D IM E N S IO N 169

age of 27, and became the assistant to Rickert’s follower in Freiburg.

O f course, this was Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, from
whom Heidegger learned the ingenious technique of phenomeno­
logical description. Already in these early years as an assistant profes­
sor, Heidegger was an unusual success as a teacher, and he quickly
developed an almost magical influence on those who were younger
as well as those who were his age. Among those, Julius Ebbinghaus,
Oskar Becker, Karl Lowith, and Walter Brocker are now well-known
names. Rumors about Heidegger reached me in Marburg, where I
was preparing for my doctorate. Students were showing up from
Freiburg and, even then in 1920-21, were talking less about Husserl
than Heidegger and his exceedingly unconventional and profoundly
revolutionary lectures. There he used the phrase It is ivorlding [es
iveltet], for example. Now we recognize that that was a magnificent
anticipation of his later and latest thinking. At that time, one could
not hear such things from a Neo-Kantian—or from Husserl. Where
is the transcendental ego? What kind of word was that? Is there such
a word at all? Ten years before the so-called turn, when Fleidegger
overcame his own transcendental conception of self and his depen­
dence on Husserl, he had found here his first word, one that did not
assume a subject or transcendental consciousness at all. Worlding,
expressed like an early herald of the event of the “clearing.”
We have learned in the interim a bit about this first phase of
Heideggerean thought that occurred in Freiburg after World War I.
Poggeler has informed us about some aspects of it. Karl Lehmann
reconstructed the importance of St. Paul to the young Heidegger in a
superb essay. Also, Thomas Sheehan has recently been able to give a
thorough account of Heidegger's course of lectures on “The Phe­
nomenology of Religion” given in 1920, which was accessible to him
via an older transcript.
From these sources one can see that the early Christian
community’s experience of time especially fascinated ITeidegger, the
eschatological instant that allows for neither measurements of nor
“expectations” nor estimations concerning the amount of time that
will pass before the return of Christ—for he will come “like a thief
in the night” (First Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians). Mea­
sured time, calculations about time and the whole background of
Greek ontology, which governs our concept of time in philosophy
and science, breaks down in the face of this experience. A private
170 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

letter Heidegger wrote to Karl Lowith (one of his young students

and friends) in 1921 shows that this was not merely a philosophical
challenge; rather, this was one of the fundamental concerns of this
young thinker. In this letter, Heidegger wrote that it would be “a
fundamental mistake to measure me (hypothetically or not) against
figures such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, . . . or any of the other cre­
ative philosophers. Such is not to be prohibited, but then it must be
said that I am not a philosopher, and I am only deluding myself to
believe that I could be something comparable.” And then he wrote,
“I am a Christian theologian!”
One is not going wrong if one recognizes here the deepest
directive for Heidegger’s way of thinking: He saw himself then as a
Christian theologian. That is to say that all of his efforts to sort
things out with himself and with his questions were motivated by a
desire to free himself from the dominating theology in which he had
been raised—so that he could be a Christian. He received from the
distinguished teachers in the Freiburg Theology Department, as he
later said himself the qualifications needed for this “theological” task,
and more than anyone else it was the young Luther who came to be
of primary importance to him then. But the aforementioned course,
“The Phenomenology of Religion,” shows that he also turned back
to the oldest documents of the New Testament, the Epistles of Paul,
with a real affinity.
Two masters provided him with proper conceptual school­
ing. First of all, there was Husserl’s phenomenological proficiency. It
was characteristic that, as Husserl’s assistant, Heidegger taught not
the Neo-Kantian program found in the Ideen of 1913 but rather the
Logischen Untersuchungen. These investigations had implications that
extended far beyond Husserl’s thinking—especially the sixth investi­
gation, a new revision of which had just come onto the scene at that
time. Here the question of what is meant by is gained an important
place; what kind of “noetic” act is it in which the formal category of
is is intended? The doctrine of the “categorical intuition”—and un­
doubtedly Husserl’s masterful analysis of temporal consciousness as
well (which Heidegger was to publish later)—challenged Heidegger:
What a detailed and analytical craft—and what a deadend road, which
was even farther removed from Heidegger’s question concerning the
Christian faith than from Augustine’s famous despair concerning the
possibility of understanding the puzzle of time.
 T H E R E L IG IO U S D IM E N S IO N 171

It was not the “idealistic” explication o f the Ideas that Heidegger

found attractive. He may well have admired the consistency with
which Husserl worked transcendental subjectivity into this topic,
and it certainly made him immune to feeble attempts to break out to
“reality,” attempts made not only by the “Munich Phenomenology”
but even by Scheler himself But the principle of the transcendental
ego appeared to him to be suspicious from early on. Thomas Sheehan
related the story to me once of how Heidegger had shown him an
offprint of Husserl's essay Philosophy as a Rigorous Science from 1910.
There is a place therein where Husserl says that our method and our
first principle must be “To the things themselves!”-—-and at this place
the young Heidegger had written in the margin, <cWe want to take
Husserl at his word.” This certainly was intended polemically—in­
stead of getting entangled in the doctrine of the transcendental re­
duction and in the search for an ultimate foundation in the cogito,
Husserl should have followed his own principle of “To the things
themselves!”
To gain the needed distance from Husserl's transcendental
idealism without reverting back to the naivete of a dogmatic realism,
Heidegger turned to another greater master: Aristotle. Indeed, he
could not expect to find here someone who would vouch for the
credibility of his own questions—questions with a religious motiva­
tion-—-but returning from phenomenology to his early studies in
Aristotle gave him the chance to discover a new Aristotle, one that
showed a very different side than the one preferred by scholastic
theology. Certainly, he could not deceive himself about the fact that
the Greek concept of time was formed through Aristotle's Physics and
that there was no way to proceed directly from the Greek conception
to a conceptual explanation of the eschatological instant. But the
proximity of Aristotle's thought to the factical Dasein in its concrete
consummation in life and in its natural orientation to the world gave
Heidegger some indirect help. Heidegger presented his studies of
the Aristotelean ethics, physics, anthropology (De Anima), rhetoric,
and naturally, owing to its central role, metaphysics in a series of
lectures that he held in the following semesters. As he informed me
in a letter in 1923, this was to become a voluminous publication in
the Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung. But that
never came to pass; he assumed a position as professor in Marburg,
and the appointment presented him with a new set of tasks.
172 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

However, Aristotle remained one of the focal points of his activities

as a teacher.
How could Aristotle help him? Did he only serve as a con­
trast to the Christian experience of time and the fundamental role
of historicity in the more modern thinking? Was he only a
counterexample?
The contrary is true. Aristotle was like the key witness in the
effort to get back “to the things themselves,” and he testified indi­
rectly against his own ontological biases, attacking with a notion that
Heidegger was later to call Being as present-at-hand. Thus, he became a
critical advisor for Heidegger’s new questions. The phenomenologi­
cal interpretations of Aristotle that Heidegger was then preparing for
publication in Husserl’sJahrbuchj were not really concerned with the
scholasticism that was so dear to philosophical theology, a theology
that found its ultimate basis in the Aristotelian orientation to physics
and in Aristotle’s “moving God” of metaphysics. Rather, the proxim­
ity of Aristotle’s “practical philosophy” and his Rhetoric to the con­
crete, factical consummation of Dasein interested Heidegger; the ways
of “being true” \Wahrsein\ of &X.T|0sueLv, which are discussed in the
sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics, appealed to Heidegger principally
because they marked a site in these texts where the primacy of judg­
ment, of logic, and of “science” in understanding the facticity of
human life met up with a decisive limit. An 3aXX.o yevos yvwaecos
[another type of knowing] is given its due when the effort is geared
not toward cognizing an object and obtaining objective knowledge
but toward gaining as much clearness as possible about the factically
living Dasein. That is why, next to his ethics, Aristotle’s Rhetoric
became important, because it deals with pragmata [ways of acting
or deeds] and pathemata [impressions or sufferings]—and not with
objects.
Moreover, Aristotle was to help the young Heidegger in an­
other, astonishing way. The Aristotelean critique of Plato’s Idea of
the Good offered some substantial support for his “existential” cri­
tique of the transcendental concepts of the subject and object. Just as
the Good is not a highest object or principle, but rather differentiates
itself into a variety of ways of being encountered, “Being” is also
present in all that is, even if in the final analysis there is an eminent
being that ensures the presence [Anivesenheit\ of all. It was the ques­
tion concerning Being as such that Aristotle—and with him
 T H E R E L IG IO U S D IM E N S IO N 173

Heidegger—was attempting to answer. With this in view and with

reference to Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, Heidegger was able to
show that Being in its motility, Being in its unconcealedness, are not
so much areas of objects about which one can make statements;
rather, every understanding of Being is founded on an understanding
of motility, as all statements are founded on unconcealed presentness
[Anwesenheit]—and thus ultimately o n 3ov ccos aXr|0es [the true-Being
or a being as true, unconcealed]. This has nothing to do with realism
as opposed to subjective idealism, nor is it a theory of knowledge; it
describes rather the thing itself, which, due to its “Being-in-the-
world,” “knows” nothing of the “subject-object split.”
But from behind this interest in the “nonscholastic” Aristotle
appeared Heidegger’s old question concerning Christian theology.
Was there no more appropriate way for Christians to understand
themselves than the ways offered by contemporary theology? In this
regard, his new interpretations of Aristotle were just the first step in
a long pathway of thought. That Heidegger consciously chose to take
this step in this way is shown by the introduction to his Aristotles-
Interpretationen, the manuscript that Heidegger sent to Paul Natorp. I
obtained a copy from Natorp at that time; it was an analysis of the
“hermeneutical situation” for interpretating Aristotle. And with whom
did it begin? With the young Luther, precisely the Luther who de­
manded of anyone who really wanted to be Christian that he or she
foreswear Aristotle—this “great liar.” I still remember very clearly
the names that followed:1Gabriel Biel, Petrus Lombardus, the master
of sentences, Augustine, and finally Paul. There is no doubt that
Heidegger’s old, well-documented concern with the original Chris­
tian message motivated his endeavors with Aristotle.
N ot that Heidegger would have expected Aristotle to address
directly his concern. The contrary is true: His awareness that the
theology which he had studied and which found its support in
Aristotle’s metaphysics did not correspond in the least bit to the true
motives of Greek thinking must have been sharpened by his ex­
change with these thinkers. This understanding of time that was so
viable with St. Paul and that Heidegger had rediscovered was not

1. Although the text has not yet been edited, one should be able to obtain a copy o f
it— at least in the form o f a typscript—without the innumerable additions on Natorp’s
copy made in his handwriting.
174 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Greek at all. The Greek concept of time, which Plato and Aristotle
had formulated as the unit and number of movement, held sway-
over all conceptual possibilities of later times, from Augustine through
Kant until Einstein. Thus, the question that plagued him at the deep­
est level, the question concerning the Christian expectation of the
end of time, must have remained viable: Did the force that Greek
thought exerted on the Christian experience of faith distort the
Christian message so much that it was unrecognizable and alienate
Christian theology from its own task? In fact, not only was St. Paul’s
and Luther’s doctrine of exoneration important to him; he also took
up again Harnack’s theme of the calamitous Hellenization of Chris­
tian theology. In the end he not only found justification for his own
perplexity concerning the appropriateness of his theological upbring­
ing, but he also recognized in the Greek legacy, with which all con­
temporary thinking is burdened, the origin of all the confusion
concerning Being and the historicality of human Dasein, a confusion
that dictated to him the epigram for Being and Time.
It was precisely the aporia of modern thought, which he
came across with Bergson, Simmel, Lask, and above all Dilthey, that
weighed heavily on his mind during the most decisive years of his
development, that is, the period during World War I. Therefore, it
was the case for him, as it was for Unamuno, Haecker, Buber, Ebner,
Jaspers, and many others, that Kierkegaard’s concept of existence [des
Existierens] became a new password. Kierkegaard’s writings were just
then coming to have an effect, due to the recent release of a German
edition by Dieterichs. There, in those brilliant essays, Heidegger re­
discovered his own theme. The polemic against Hegel—this last and
most radical Greek, as Heidegger had named him-—must have been
interesting to Heidegger not only because of its religious motivations
and because it pointed out how the either/or character of human
existence had been veiled; the specific countering of the Greek con­
cept of “memory” \Erinnerung\ must have been illuminating as well.
Kierkegaard’s category of repetition was defined precisely by the no­
tion that it would fade into memory, into the illusion of the return of
the same, if it was not experienced as the paradox of historicality, as
the repetition of the unrepeatable, as time beyond all time.
This was the experience of time that Heidegger recognized
in St. Paul; it is the Second Coming that cannot be expected, a
coming that is meant as parousia and not as presentness. Above all,
 T H E R E L IG IO U S D IM E N S IO N 175

Kierkegaard’s religious oration, which became accessible then to Ger­

man speakers under the title Leben und Walten der Liehe, must have
been reassuring to him. There one finds the noteworthy distinction
between “understanding from a distance” and understanding con­
currently [in Gleichzeitigkeit]. Kierkegaard’s critique of the church
pointed out that it did not take the Christian message with any exis­
tential seriousness and that it eased the paradox of concurrence that
is a part of the Christian message. When the death of Jesus on the
cross is understood from a distance, then it loses all true seriousness,
and the discourse about God and the Christian message as pursued
by theology (and by the dialectic speculation of the Hegelians) was
also definitely approached from a distance. Can one speak about God
like one speaks about an object? Is that not precisely the temptation
of metaphysics to lead us into arguments about the existence and
characteristics of God as if we were arguing about an object of sci­
ence. Here, with Kierkegaard, lie the roots of dialectical theology,
which found its beginning in 1919 with Karl Barth’s commentary on
the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans. During the years of Heidegger’s
friendship with Bultmann in Marburg, his primary concern was with
giving an account of “historical” theology and learning how to think
about the historicality and finitude of human Dasein in a more radi­
cal way.
During this period Heidegger referred repeatedly to the reli­
gious historian Franz Overbeck, the friend of Nietzsche. Overbeck’s
polemical essay on the “Christian Spirit of Theology” [“Christlichkeit
der Theologie’] expressed these deepest doubts that animated Heidegger,
and it confirmed completely his own philosophical experience of the
inappropriateness of the Greek concept of Being for the Christian
idea oieschaton [the last or ultimate], which is no way an expectation
of a coming event. When he wrote in a letter to Lowith, “I am a
Christian theologian,” he must have meant that he wanted to defend
the true task of theology, that is, “To find the word that is capable of
calling one to faith and preserving one in faith,” against the appropri­
ated Christian spirit of today’s theology. (I heard him use these words
in a theological discussion in 1923.) But this was also a task for
thinking.
This he had learned not only from Aristotle, but also from
Husserl, whose masterful analysis of temporal consciousness had
formally demonstrated the burden left behind by Greek thinking.
176 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

The schooling by Husserl had made him immune to the danger of

underestimating the solidity of transcendental idealism, and it had
also made him impervious to the temptation of trying to oppose it
with a naive realism using references to catch words of phenomenol­
ogy. Thus, he knew that it would not work to assume a position like
that of Pfander or the young Scheler and insist that things are what
they are and that they are not produced through thought. Neither
the Marburg conception of production nor Husserl’s disputed con­
cept of the constitution < o f the transcendental ego> have anything
to do with Bishop Berkeley’s metaphysical idealism or the epistemo­
logical problem concerning the reality of the external world. Husserl
was intent on making the “transcendence” of things, their Being-in-
themselves, understandable in a transcendental way; he wanted to
give them an “immanent” foundation, so to speak. The doctrine of
the transcendental ego and its apodictic evidence was nothing other
than an attempt at founding all objectivity and validity. But precisely
this attempt became more and more entangled in the detailed analy­
ses of the structure of time in subjectivity The constitution of the
transcendental ego, the disclosure of which was recognized as the
task at hand, lead to paradoxical conceptual formulations, such as the
self-constitution of the stream of consciousness, the self-appearance
of the stream, the primeval presence, and original change. This must
have confirmed for Heidegger that neither the concept of the object
nor that of the subject would be applicable to his problem, that is,
the issue of the facticity of human Dasein. In truth, he had already
begun making his way, starting from the character of the consumma­
tion o f the concern of Dasein [Vollzugscharacter der Daseins--
bekummerung]—later called care■ —-instead of beginning with the
visualizing consciousness and, then, proceeding to characterize exist­
ence in terms of futurity. Therefore, it was byway of his theological
intentions that the historicality of Dasein became an issue for him—
thereby remaining outside the influence of historicism—and this
issue guided his question concerning the meaning of Being.
But how could theology be thought o f as a science
[Wissenschafty without it losing its Christian spirit and without falling
under the spell of the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity again?
As I recall, Heidegger had already begun thinking along those lines
in the early Marburg years. In the Tubinger Vortrag given in 1927, it
was formulated as follows: Theology is a positive science because it
 T H E R E L IG IO U S D IM E N S IO N 177

deals with something as a being; namely, with the Christian spirit.

Theology must be considered as a conceptual explication of faith.
Thus, it stands closer to chemistry or biology than to philosophy, for
philosophy, as the sole science, deals not with beings (that which is
given-—even if it is merely given in faith) but with Being: It is the
“ontological” science.
One can easily see the conscious provocation found in
Heidegger’s hypothesis concerning theoretical basis of this “science.”
In faith, one also encounters that which is believed in faith <i.e., a
content of faith, of belief>—and this can also be given a conceptual
explication, if it is a faith at all. But is the belief an object or a field of
objects like chemical substances or living beings? Or does it not rathr
refer to—as does philosophy—the whole of human Dasein, includ­
ing its world? On the other hand, Heidegger must have maintained
that the ontological base-constitution of human Dasein, as recog­
nized by philosophy, was the corrective for the conceptual explica­
tion of faith. Philosophy, which sees the “existentiell” of guilt as
having its source in the temporality of Dasein, certainly can present
only a formal indication for the sin that is experienced in faith.
Heidegger is using here the well-known concept of the “for­
mal indication” [formate Anzeige] that was often used by him earlier.
It is almost the equivalent of Kierkegaard’s “making one attentive”
[Aufmerksammachen]} and one certainly is not making a mistake to
recognize in this an intention that runs contrary to the a priori frame­
work Husserl’s “ontologies” claimed to provide for the empirical
sciences. With the concept of the formal indication, one recognizes
that a philosophical science can certainly take part in the conceptual
explication of faith—in theology—but it cannot take part in the con­
summation; that is the affair of faith itself And lurking behind this
there must have been the deeper awareness that in the end the ques­
tion concerning Being was no scientific question; rather, it “folds
back into the Existential.”
It is well known that this careful limitation of phenomeno­
logical apriorism has provoked a good deal of criticism. Is the guilt
characteristic of Dasein really independent of and neutral with re­
gard to the history of Christian faith? What about the desire-for-a-
conscience or the advancement toward death? Heidegger would hardly
be able to deny this with reference to himself or his experience-base
[.Etfahrungsboden]; he would be able to maintain only that finitude
178 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

and “Being-towards-death” can be redeemed from any base of hu­

man experience and that this gives everyone some direction for the
conceptual explication of the experience of faith.
O f course, the whole confrontation between philosophy and
theology remains awkward so long as there is an uncertainty about
one fundamental assumption: Is theology a science at all (see
Heidegger, Phanomenologie und Theologiej p. 25)? Indeed, is faith really
to be imposed upon by theology? And even more awkward is the
question: Is the concretization of the factical consummation of Dasein
in the form of “care” really capable—as is claimed—of leaving be­
hind the ontological anticipation [Vorgreiflichkeit] of transcendental
subjectivity and thinking temporality as Being? Care is ultimately a
concern about one’s self, just as consciousness is certainly self-con­
sciousness. Heidegger had correctly accentuated this as the tautology
of Being-a-self [Selbstsein] and care, but he also believed that the
concept of care as the original temporization [Zeitigung] had over­
come the ontological narrowness of “Saying-I” [Ich-Sagens] and
the thereby constituted identity of the subject. Meanwhile, what
is the authentic temporality of care? Does it not appear as a
self-temporalization? “Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial in­
dividualization of reticent resoluteness that exacts anxiety of itself”
(Sein und Zeit} paragraph 64). The later Heidegger made the com­
ment concerning “angst,” “that it is the clearing of Being as Being.”
Would he be able to say that Dasein itself exacts the clearing?
Just as the later Heidegger no longer wanted to ground the
thinking of Being as time on the transcendental analytic of Dasein
and, therefore, spoke of the turn that he had gotten himself into, so
too could the relationship between philosophy and science no longer
be thought of along the lines of the assumption that one was dealing
with a relationship between two sciences. It was already noticeable in
the text of Tubinger Vortrag that theology was characterized not only as
“historical” in a radical sense, but that it was also characterized as a
“practical science.” “Every theological tenet and concept as such re­
peats its contents, and this happens not simply in a supplemental way
in terms of the so-called practical application to the pious existence
of the individual human in the community.” Therefore, it is not
surprising when Heidegger later (in 1964) concludes one of his com­
ments to the essay “Nonobjectifying Thinking and Speaking” with
the negative sounding question, “Can theology still be a science,
 T H E R E L IG IO U S D IM E N S IO N 179

since it presumably cannot be permitted to be a science at all”

(Phanomenologie and Theologie, p. 46).
So, ultimately it was not with the help of theology, but rather
through a turn away from it and the metaphysics and ontology that it
so dominated, that the religious dimension in Heidegger was able to
begin its search for a language. The religious dimension found its
language, inasmuch as it was found at all, via Nietzsche and the
freeing of Heidegger's tongue that occurred as a result of his explica­
tion of Holderlin’s poetry.
It is really misleading to think that Nietzsche was important
to Heidegger because of the atheistic implications of his thought.
The contrary is the case. The radicality of Nietzsche’s thought left
such atheistic dogmatism far behind. Rather, Heidegger was attracted
to the desperate boldness with which Nietzsche questioned the foun­
dations of the whole of metaphysics and with which he recognized
everywhere the ‘'will to power.” N ot the reevaluation of all values—
this seemed to him to be a superficial aspect of Nietzsche—but rather
that human beings in general were thought of as the being that set
and estimated value. This was the birth o f the well-known
Heideggerean expression of “calculative” thinking, which computes
the value of everything and which has become the fate of human
culture in the form of technology and the technological institutions
of Being-in-the-world. What Nietzsche described as the surfacing of
European nihilism was understood by Heidegger not as a process of
reevaluating all values, but on the contrary as the final establishment
of thinking in values—and he called it th.tforgefulness ofBeing.
However, Nietzsche was for Heidegger not simply the one
who diagnosed nihilism—with the surfacing of “nothing,” Being be­
comes visible. This is why Heidegger cites the scene with the mad
man in Holzwege. In this scene the mad man enters the market with
the multitude of people who do not believe in God and screams, “I
am seeking God, I am seeking God!” and he knows that “We have
killed him.” But the one searching for God—and this is Heidegger’s
point—“knows” of God; those who attempt to prove his existence
are those who kill him in precisely this way. Seeking presupposes
measuring, as does measuring knowing—that which is absent, granted,
but that which is absent is not not. It is “there” [da] as absence.
And this is what Heidegger rediscovered with Holderlin: an
ode to the existence [Dasein] of the disappeared gods. For Holderlin,
180 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

the last god of the old world was Christ, the last one to tarry “among
the humans.” All that is left are traces of these gods who have es­
caped, “but of the divine much remains.”
This was the model Heidegger followed as he attempted to
think thinking anew; that is, thinking not in the sense of metaphysi­
cal or scientific thinking. Just as one can know of the divine without
grasping and knowing God, so too is the thinking of Being not a
grasping, a possessing, or a controlling. Without forcing the parallel
with the experience of God or the Second Coming of Christ, which
can indeed be thought more correctly from this vantage point, one
could say that Being is more than simple “presence” [Prasenz] (let
alone a “representation” [Vorgestelltheit])—it is also just as much “ab­
sence,” a form of the “there” [da] in which not only the “there is”
but also withdrawal, retreating, and holding-within are experienced.
“Nature loves to conceal itself”-—-these words of Heraclitus were
often drawn on by Heidegger. They do not invite one to attack and
attempt to penetrate; rather, the invitation is for waiting—and Rilke
was right when he complained in his elegies about the inability to
wait. Therefore, Heidegger spoke of remembrance, which is not only
thinking about something that was, but also thinking about some­
thing that is coming, something coming that allows one to think
about it—even if it comes “like a thief in the night.”
What is prepared for in such thinking is not an ontology and
certainly not theology In spite of this, it should be remembered in
closing that Heidegger once said—when thinking about a poem by
Holderlin—“The question, cwho is God?’ is too hard for human
beings. At most they are capable of asking, W hat is God?'” With this
he hinted at the dimension of the hallowed and the holy and com­
mented, “The loss of the dimension of the hallowed and the holy is
perhaps the authentic unholiness of our age.” What he meant by that
is that we are incapable of reaching God because we speak about God
in a way that can never be helped by the self-understanding of faith.
But that is the affair of theology. My affair, that of the philosopher,
is-—-and this Heidegger could have said with complete justification,
and it would have been valid for everyone, not just for Christians or
theologians—to sound a warning that the customary ways of think­
ing will no longer suffice.
 C h a p t e r F if t e e n

B e in g s p ir it g o d
(1977)

A
M w n .yone who has been touched by Martin Heidegger’s
thinking can no longer read the title of this chapter, these three
words that lie at the foundation of metaphysics, in the same way that
they have been read within the metaphysical tradition. One would
like to find oneself in accord with the claim made by the Greeks and
Hegel that Being is spirit, and we are told by the New Testament that
God is spirit Thus, the occidental tradition [uberlieferung] converged
within the older <way of> thinking to form a self-evident question
of meaning. And yet, this older <way of> thinking perceives a new
challenge; it sees itself as being put into question by the new concept
of knowledge that modern science has developed through its meth­
odological asceticism and new critical standards. Philosophical think­
ing can neither ignore the existence of modern science, nor can it
really incorporate it. Philosophy alone is no longer the whole of our
knowledge, nor is it a knowing whole. Since the cockcrow of positiv­
ism, metaphysics has lost its credibility with many; like Nietzsche,
these individuals tend to view “Hegel and the other Schleiermachers”
as merely delaying the advent of what Nietzsche called European
nihilismMt seemed as though metaphysics had unfurled into a state
of rest, following a path dictated by the way that it had formulated
its own question. Thus, it could not have been expected that

181
182 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

metaphysics would charge itself once again with a new tension, en­
abling it to continue henceforth as a valid corrective to modem think­
ing. All of the efforts made in the twentieth century to renew
metaphysics—as in the long line of concept creators and system fab­
ricators who have been around since the seventeenth century—were
attempts in one way or another at reconciling modem science with
the older metaphysics. But that metaphysics itself could once again
become a question, that its question, that is, the question concerning
Being, which had already been given a 2,000-year-old answer, could
once again be posed as if it had never been posed before—this could
not have been foreseen. And when the uncommon sounds first be­
gan to ring out from the young Heidegger's podium and kindle a
new fascination, they reminded people of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, and all the other critics of academic philosophy. Indeed,
even after the appearance of Being and Time, whose whole orchestra­
tion was expressly geared toward reawakening the question of Being,
people still allied him more with the critics of this tradition than
with the tradition itself
This, however, is not surprising when one recalls that the
young Heidegger himself had turned the phrase destruction of meta­
physics into a password and warned his own students not to put him
in the ranks of the “great philosophers." In a letter to Karl Lowith in
1921 he said of himself, “I am a Christian theologian."
This alone suggested that it was Christianity once again that
challenged the thought of this man and held him in suspense; it was
once again the old transcendence and not the modem worldliness
[Diessetigkeit| that spoke through him. "Yes, a Christian theologian who,
in an effort to do justice to that which is calledfaith, wanted to achieve
a knowledge thereof superior to that offered to him by the then mod­
em theology. But why, in contrast to so many who were driven by the
same desire and who as modem human beings could not turn away
from the foundations of science, did he become a thinker instead of a
Christian theologian? Because thinking was his affair [literally, he was
a thinkinger/Denkender]. Because it was thinking at work within him.
Because the passion of thinking made him quake—stirred as much by
the force exerted on him by this passion as by the boldness of the
questions that this passion compelled him to ask.
N ot a Christian theologian, he did not feel qualified to speak
of God. It was clear to Heidegger that it would be intolerable to
 B E IN G S P I R I T G O D 183

speak of God like science speaks about its objects; but what that
might mean, to speak of God—this was the question that motivated
him and pointed out his way of thinking.
Thinking is reflecting on something that one knows. It is a
movement of thought to and fro, a being moved to and fro by thought,
by possibilities, offers, doubts, and new questions. There were two
offers in particular that,, because he could neither simply accept nor
reject them, Heidegger had to take into consideration from early on:
Aristotle and Hegel. He himself told of how Aristotle gained impor­
tance early on, showing him the way with his explication of the
multiple meanings of being [Seiende] that Aristotle had laid out, a
multiplicity that resisted all efforts geared toward fitting it together
into the unity deemed by many to be necessary. And the conclusion
of his book on Duns Scotus is a testimony to the challenge presented
to him by Hegel’s philosophy, that colossal “system of a historical
world-view [Weltanschauung]” as he called it; Hegel delineated for
Heidegger the tense space between Being and spirit that—as the
young Heidegger put it—“the living comprehension of the absolute
spirit of God” came to inhabit during the age of metaphysics. It was
necessary to take the measurements of this space, not to facilitate his
search for an anser to his own question, but to make a judgment
about what must be asked so that the question itself is not misunder­
stood again, eliciting a false desire to know. This was a questioning
behind the question concerning Being—the question posed by meta­
physics that had then received as its response that Being was to be
conceived of as essence and as spirit—and, like every question that
requires reflection, Heidegger’s question was one in search of itself
The tense space that this questioning behind metaphysics
was to admeasure was itself an oddity: time. N ot the measurable
dimension, that we measure out when we want to determine what
we encounter in our experience as being [seiend\; rather, here the
issue is that which constitutes Being itself: Presence [Prasenz], pres­
entness [Anwesenheit], and contemporariness [Gegenwartigkeit], It was
time that offered the various meanings of being [Seiende], as they had
been differentiated by Aristotle, their true foundation, and by dis­
closing this foundation, Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotle gained
their own peculiar clarity, and Aristotle became a formally pressing
issue for people. These were truly philosophical questions, for they
strengthened Aristotle, strengthened him before the whole tradition
184 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

of metaphysics and, above all, strengthened him against the contin­

ued progression of metaphysics toward the subjective thinking of the
modern era. The truly foundational [das Zugrundeliegende], the per­
manent presence of “substance,” the maintaining-of-itself-in-Being
of "entelechie” the self-showing of truth—all of these articulate the
strength of Aristotle’s answer in which Being is thought as present­
ness. And Hegel’s magnificent effort to think the concept of Being as
spirit—rather than as an object whose objectivity is grasped or con­
stituted by the subjectivity of consciousness—was yet another offer.
The historicality of spirit, its coming down into time, the
disconcertedness of a self-reflective, historical consciousness—all of
this seemed to raise spirit, which knows itself in its contemporariness,
beyond the particularity of the subjective consciousness and then to
bring it together within itself As the last Greek, Hegel thinks Being
within the horizon of time as the all-encompassing presentness. The
logos of Being, about which the Greeks had inquired, and reason in
history, about which Hegel inquired, formed the two great hemi­
spheres of this spiritual whole.
One underestimates Heidegger’s mission, that is, the task of
overcoming metaphysics, if one does not first see how such an in­
quiry into the temporal character of Being furbishes metaphysics
itself with its full strength and raises it above the subjective thinking
of the modern age into a new contemporariness. There was the analogia
entis [analogy of Being] that allows for no general concept of Being,
and there was also the analogy of the Good and the Aristotelean
criticism of the Platonic Idea of the Good, where the generality of
the concept found its essential limit. From early on these were the
key witnesses in Heidegger’s thought experiments. And the onto­
logical primacy of “true-Being” [Wahr-sein} (5ova)s aA/r}0es), of nous
[intellect or spirit, see note a to Chapter 6], that Heidegger derived
from the final chapter of book 0 of the Metaphysics, made Being as
the presentness of that present, as essence, completely visible. This
robbed self-consciousness and its immanent reflection of the pri­
macy it has had since Descartes, and it returned to thinking the
ontological dimension that had been lost in the modem philosophy
of consciousness.
Likewise, Hegel’s concept of spirit regained its substance in
light of this newly reformulated question concerning Being. The
concept also went through a process of “despiritualization.” Through
 B E IN G S P I R I T G O D 185

the process of dialectically unfolding spirit into itself it came to be

thought o f as pneuma in a more original way. It came to be thought as
the breath of life that blows through everything extended and dis­
tributed or, as Hegel put it, as the common blood that holds the
cycle of life together within itself This general concept of life is
certainly thought at the peak of modernity, that is, with reference to
self-consciousness, but it also implies a clear progression beyond the
formal idealism of self-consciousness. The shared sphere that pre­
vails between individuals, the spirit that combines them, is love: I,
the you and you, the I, and you and I—all of these unite to constitute
the we. With his understanding of the objective spirit—a concept
that even today holds sway over the social sciences, regardless of how
it is understood—Hegel not only found access to the existence of the
social reality above any subject, but he also found an authentic con­
cept of truth that, above and beyond all limitations, brought the
absolute in art, religion, and philosophy to light. The Greek concept
of nous—reason and spirit-—remained the final word in Hegel's sys­
tem of science. For him this was the truth of Being, the essence, that
is, presentness, and the concept, that is, the selfness of that present
which grasps everything within itself
The power of this answer by metaphysics, which stretches
from Aristotle to Hegel, is stronger than the flippant calls that people
sometimes make to Heidegger's task of overcoming metaphysics.
Heidegger always took issue with those wishing to interpret him as if
he meant that metaphysics had been overcome and tossed away. Al­
though his question probes behind the question of Being as found in
metaphysics and brings to consciousness the horizon of time in which
Being is thought, it still recognizes in metaphysics a preliminary
answer, a response to the challenge in which Being is presented as
the totality of beings. The question breaking forth in Heidegger’s
thought experiments allows the answer of metaphysics to speak anew..
Heidegger saw in Being and Time nothing more than just
such a preliminary preparation for the question of Being. However,
what pressed to the foreground of his work was certainly something
else; namely, his critique of the concept of consciousness found in
transcendental phenomenology. This meshed well with the then-
contemporary criticism of idealism, which had been formulated by
Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten, Friedrich Ebner, and Martin Buber
and which brought to completion the revival of Kierkegaard’s
186 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

criticism of Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, “The essence ofDasein lies in

its existence.” This sentence was understood to mean that existentia
takes precedent over essentia, and from just such an idealistic misun­
derstanding of the concept of “essence” sprang Sartre’s existential­
ism, an intermediate entity formed by uniting the speculative motives
of Fichte, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger into a new
striking force for moral philosophy and social criticism. In contradis­
tinction, Oskar Becker attempted to play down <the significance
of> Being and Time by reading it as a further concretization of the
basic transcendental-idealistic orientation of Husserl’s Ideas. The
Heideggerian paradox of a hermeneutics of facticity is not, of course,
an explication that claims to “understand” facticity as such—that would
be a true contradiction, to want to understand the “nothing”-as-
factical [Nichts-als-Faktische], which itself is closed off to all meaning.
The hermeneutics of facticity meant rather that existence itself is to
be thought as the consummation of understanding and explication,
and that by way of this consummation existence gains its ontological
distinction. Oskar Becker then coupled this with a transcendental-
philosophical conception of Husserl’s phenomenological program,
thereby reducing it to a hermeneutical phenomenology. But even if
one took Heidegger’s claim seriously, that is, to understand the
existentiell analytic of Dasein as fundamental ontology, the whole
could still be understood within the questioned horizon of meta­
physics. It could be presented at best as a type of counterpart to
classical metaphysics, or as a reconstruction of the same—a finite
metaphysics based on the existential radicalization of historicality. In
fact, Heidegger tried to integrate the critical element of Kant think­
ing—the very element that had blocked Fichte’s attempt to recon­
struct his work—into the formulation of his own question when
writing his book on Kant in 1929.
O f course, this must have come across as a dismissal of clas­
sical metaphysics, for metaphysics is based on the infinity of the
intellects, nous, or the spirit, in which the truth of Being presents
itself as the essence and to which all that is is attributed and arranged
according to its particular sense of Being [Seins-Sinn]. By contrast,
here it seemed that the eternal had been grounded on the temporal,
truth on historicality In this way, the secularization of the Christian
legacy, such as in Hegel’s dialectical synthesis of the absolute spirit,
was outdistanced by the resoluteness of “nothing.” People began to
 B E IN G S P IR IT G O D 187

turn away from the Angst before death and search for more positive,
less unpleasant moods of Dasein, or they tried to smother earthly
despair with a renewed Christian hope. But either way, the thought
impulse that stood behind Heidegger’s effort as a whole had been
misunderstood. For Heidegger, the issue had always been one deal­
ing with the “Da” in the Dasein of human beings; it had to do with
this characterization of existence, this being outside of itself and ex­
posed like no other living being. But this exposedness meant, as
displayed by the “Letter on Humanism” written to Jean Beaufret that
humans, as humans, stand out in the open, that they are in the end
more proximate to the furthermost, to the divine, than they are to
their own “nature.” In the humanism letter, Heidegger speaks of the
“disconcerted of the living beings” and of our “barely conceivable,
unfathomable physical kinship with animals.”
Heidegger’s effort to think this “Da” takes place in a long
history of suffering permeated by philosophical passion. It was a
histoiy of suffering inasmuch as even Heidegger, with his unconven­
tional, originary, bold, and speculative linguistic powers, had to battle
against a resistent language, one whose opposition was constantly be­
ing renewed and was often overpowering. He himself described this
as the risk, the risk that accompanied him every step of the way, even
in his own thought experiments, that thinking might fall back into
the language of metaphysics and the way of thinking delineated by its
conceptual terms. But it was more than that. It was the language
itself, his own as well as all of ours, against which Heidegger raised
his voice, often violently, to wring from it the expression he sought.
It is certainly correct to say that the language and concepts
of metaphysics dominate all of our thinking. This was the way taken
by Greek thinking—the thinking that cultivated metaphysics: To
question the statement or proposition, to query about the objective
content of a judgment, and ultimately to become aware of the Being
of beings, the Being-What or the essence as mirrored in a definitional
proposition. And it was definitely one of Heidegger’s greatest in­
sights to recognize in this early answer of metaphysics the origin of
the type of desire for knowledge that led to occidental science, to its
ideal of objectification and the global technical culture that it founded.
It is also apparent that the linguistic family to which Greek belongs—
and Greek is the language from which European thinking emerged—
functioned like a mold for metaphysics. Because Greek distinguishes
188 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

the subject from its predicates, it was predisposed to the thinking of

substance and its attributes. Thus, the fate of European thinking, that
it develop metaphysics, logic, and ultimately modern science, was
already determined by its ancient linguistic history But the essence
of language itself causes the most confusion. It seems almost impos­
sible to think of language, regardless of which one in particular, in
such a way that it would not perform the function of presencing, and
similarly, it seems intrinsic to reason, regardless of how it is thought,
that it question the present or that made present [das Gegenwartige
oder Vergegenwartigte] and treat everything as if it were held in com­
mon—regardless of whether that occurs in mathematical equations,
in a compelling series of conclusions, in related similes, or in apho­
risms and wise sayings.
It is obvious that even Heidegger’s attempt to raise the event
of the "Da”—which first creates a place for thinking and speaking-—■
into thought was still an attempt to find articulation through a con­
cept, even if it was striving to avoid the language of metaphysics. It is
equally clear that he has no choice but to continue speaking of the
essence of the thing—in contrast to the scientific grasping of the
empirical world-—even though the term essence [Wesen] does not, even
in this usage, carry with it the new verbal accent of “being present”
[Amvesen] that Heidegger’s attempt to think Being as time had con­
ferred upon it. Here, with reference to Heidegger, Eugen Fink’s
observation first made about Husserl, that is, that certain basic concepts
of thought often remain unthematic and exist only in an operative
use, was proved to be correct. Yet, it is no less true that Heidegger’s
whole endeavor during the progression of his thought remained true
to his resolve to resist the temptation to conform to the language of
metaphysics and to endure the ensuing poverty of language, a pov­
erty that he had gotten himself into with the question concerning the
Being that was no longer the Being of beings.
This resolve manifested itself initially in his turn away from
the transcendental constitution of the self found in his fundamental
ontology, an approach that he still adhered to in Being and Time. The
basic structure of temporality fundamental to the human Dasein may
well have been capable of encompassing temporal modes of beings as
the condition for their possibility-—-the contingent as well as the nec­
essary, the passing as well as the eternal-—but, on the other hand,
Being, which itself constitutes Dasein, the Being of this "Da}” was
 B E IN G S P I R I T G O D 189

not a transcendental condition for the possibility of Dasein. Rather, it

was Being itself that occurs [sich ereignet] whenever Dasein is, or, as
Heidegger expressed it in one of his first formulations, “when the
first human being lifted its head.” We spent a week after Heidegger
first used this expression arguing over who was meant by this first
human being—Adam or Thales. You can see that our understanding
left something to be desired in those early Marburg days.
O f course, European thought did not have at its disposal the
conceptual means needed to avoid this transcendental conception of
the self Nevertheless, Heidegger was able to find some articulate
metaphors with whose help he instilled new meaning into the basic
logical and ontological concepts of metaphysics, such as Being and
thinking, or identity and difference. He spoke of the clearing, of the
resolution [Austrag], and of the event. With these metaphors he tried
to grasp that which glimmered through the earliest documents of
G reek thinking, docum ents associated w ith the names o f
Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. These were the first steps
taken on the way to classical metaphysics, and with these steps, these
originative thinkers were trying to meet the challenge put to their
thinking—the great challenge of the Da.
One gets a hint of this from the Judeo-Christian theological
doctrine of creation, for this thinking that had been molded by the
Old Testament, that had heard God’s voice or experienced his mute
refusal, had developed much more of a receptivity to the “Da” (and
its obfuscation) than to the organized forms and the “what-content”
of Da-beings [Was~Gehalt von Da-Seiendem]. Heidegger was thus truly
fascinated when he saw how Schelling had tried to grasp conceptu­
ally the mystery of revelation in his theosophical speculations on the
ground in God and the existence in God. Schelling’s astonishing
ability to verify in and to draw from the human Dasein the basic
concepts of this occurence in God made visible the existential expe­
riences that pointed beyond all of the boundaries of spiritistic meta­
physics. And because it saw the law of the day as being limited by the
passion of the night, this was an area where Heidegger could show
some sympathy for Karl Jasper’s thought. However, freedom from
the language of metaphysics as well as from its inherent consequences
was to be gained from neither Schelling nor Jaspers.
A renewed encounter with Friedrich Holderlin enabled him
to make a genuine breakthrough to his own language. Holderlin’s
190 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

poetry was always close to him, not only because he was a compatriot
of the poet, but also because Holderlin was a contemporary during
World War I (this was, in fact, the period when the later Holderlin
became well known). From then on, Holderlin’s poetic works were
to accompany him as a constant reference point in his search for his
own language. This is shown not only by the fact that, after recog­
nizing his political mistake in 1936, he came forth with his own
Holderlin-Interpretationen, but also by his endeavor in the same year to
understand the work of art as its own eventing [Sich-Ereignen] of
truth and to try to think the tense field spanning “world” and “earth.”
The use of the term earth here as a philosophical concept was some­
thing almost stunningly new. Certainly Heidegger’s analysis of the
concept of world, which he first drew out of the structure of Being-
in-the-World and then clarified as the structure of the worldliness of
the world by way of the referential contexts of ready-to-handness,
brought about a real transformation in the way that this concept is
understood in the philosophical tradition. It shifted the emphasis
from a cosmological problem to its anthropological counterpart. O f
course, there were theological and moral-philosophical precursors to
this; but that “earth” was to become a philosophical theme—this
transfer of a word poetically charged to a central conceptual meta­
phor-—-this really was a breakthrough. As a counterconcept to “world,”
“earth” was not simply referential field related solely to human
beings. It was a bold stroke to claim that only in the interplay
between earth and world, in the shifting relationship between the
sheltering, concealing earth and the arising world, could the philo­
sophical concept of "Da” and truth be gained. This opened up new
ways of thinking. Holderlin had freed a tongue for Heidegger’s thinking.
That was in essence what Heidegger had been searching for
from early on. His concern centered of the question concerning
Being. That the Being of beings was characterized by the Greek
concept of aletheia itself, of unconcealedness or truth, and that its
place was not defined entirely by the way that humans relate to
beings—in a “judgm ent”—this was one of the first points that
Heidegger insisted on as a teacher. Truth was in no way centered on
a judgment. This, of course, implied that the logical and epistemo­
logical concept of truth needed to be deepened, but beyond that it
pointed toward a completely new dimension. This privative concept
of aletheia, this thief which draws that concealed out of the darkness
 B E IN G S P I R I T G O D 191

and into the light—and which ultimately leads to the move of Euro­
pean science toward clarification [Aujklamngszug der europaischen
Wlssenschqft\—requires its countersupport if it is really to make con­
tact with Being. The self-showing of what is, of that which shows
itself as that which is, includes—if it is—a holding within and a self-
restraint. This is what, gives the being that shows itself the weight of
Being in the first place. We know from our own personal, existential
experiences [Existenzerfahrung] of Being how fundamentally inter­
connected the "Da” of human Dasein is with its own finitude. We
know it as the experience of darkness, a darkness in which we stand
as thinking beings and back into which all that we raise up into light
falls. We know it as the darkness from which we come and into
which we pass. But this darkness is not merely a darkness opposed to
the world of light; we are ourselves shrouded in darkness, which
merely confirms that we are. Darkness plays a fundamental role in
constituting the Being of our Dasein.
The earth is not only that which resists the penetration of
the beams of light. This darkness that conceals is also one that
shelters, a site from which everything is brought into brightness—
like a word from silence. What Kierkegaard used to oppose the self­
transparency of absolute knowledge, that is, existence, as well as what
Schelling characterized as the unpreconceivable [das Unvordenkliche],
which lies out in front of all thinking, belonged to the truth of Being
itself For Heidegger, Holderlin’s invocation of the earth came to
symbolize this poetically.
Within the framework defined by the question concerning
the origin of the work of art Heidegger was able to point out for the
first time the ontologically constitutive (and not only privative) func­
tion of the earth. Here it became crystal clear that the idealistic inter­
pretation of the work of art was indebted to the work of art itself for
its own distinguished way of Being: to be a work, either to stand
there or to tower like a tree or a mountain, and yet to be language as
well. This "Da” of the work, which bowls us over with its self-
sufficient presence, does not merely share itself with us. Rather, it
draws us entirely outside of ourselves and imposes its own presence
on us. This no longer has the character of an object that stands over
and against us; we are no longer able to approach this like an object
of knowledge, grasping, measuring, and controlling. Rather than meet­
ing us in our world, it is much more a world into which we
192 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

ourselves are drawn. Thus, the work of art is an exceptionally tan­

gible event of the “Da” into which we are all placed.
From this vantage point, the next two steps that Heidegger’s
thinking must take stand out clearly. The artwork cannot be consid­
ered an object, as long as it is allowed to speak as a work of art and is
not forced into the alien relationships such as commercial trade and
traffic. This ultimately forces an awareness that even the thing [das
Ding], as something of ours, possesses its own original worldliness
and, thus, the center of its own Being so long as it is not placed into
the object-world of producing and marketing. Rilke’s poems on the
thing makes mention of something like this. The Being of this thing
cannot be accessed by objectively measuring and estimating; rather,
the totality of a lived context has entered into and is present in the
thing. And we belong to it as well. Our orientation to it is always
something like our orientation to an inheritance that this thing be­
longs to as an heirloom from a relative, be it from a stranger’s life or
from our own.
Although one may feel at home in these worlds filled with
works and things, this sense of “being-at-home” is by far the stron­
gest when one is at home in the word, this most intimate home for
all who speak. The word is not limited to its function as a means of
communication. It is not merely a gobetween that makes reference
to something else and that one uses as a sign that can be redirected to
something else. As a single word or as the unity of a discussion, it is
an area in which we are so thoroughly at home that we remain
completely unaware of our living in the word. But even there, where
it exist in itself as a work—as in a poem or a collection of thoughts—
it emerges as that which it always fundamentally is. It takes us cap­
tive. To linger immersed in the word means to let it be and to keep
ourself within the “Da” of Being.
This is a far cry from that which prescribes the daily routine
and life-style of today’s human beings. Yet, are these not precisely
the phenomena that, even though they have been pushed to the
fringes of our world and deprived of all legitimacy, display to this
thinking the experience of Being of concealment, revealment, and
sheltering? The world of the work of art comes across like a world
gone by or perhaps one passing away or closed off to the present,
one without a place in our own world. Today’s withering aesthetic
culture, to which we are deeply indebted for the sharpening of our
 B E IN G S P I R I T G O D 193

senses and of our spiritual receptivity, has more of the character a

well-cared-for sanctuary than something that belongs in our world
and in which we would feel at home. It is definitely a fundamental
characteristic of the industrial age that we live in-—-and one that will
inevitably become increasingly more prominent—-that things are
gradually losing their standing in Being and in life, caught up in the
flood of articles of merchandise and the pursuit of the newest fash-
ion. Even language, this most flexible and pliable possession of any
speaking being, grows visibly stiff as it moves toward stereotypes and
adapts to the general leveling of life. Against this backdrop Heidegger’s
orientation, which endowed his question concerning Being with an
identifiable content, may appear to be nothing more than a romantic
evocation of worlds passing away or already gone by.
However, anyone acquainted with Heidegger knows that the
revolutionary pathos of his thinking was directed toward contempla­
tively penetrating the events of our world and was far removed from
attaching any real meaning to the worthy endeavor of preserving that
which is passing away. What distinguishes his thinking is the radicality
and boldness with which he depicted the progression of occidental
civilization into the technical omniculture [Allkultur] of today as our
fate and as the necessary consequence of occidental metaphysics. But
this means that all the benign attempts to slow down this gigantic
process of calculating, empowering, and producing-—which we call
cultural life—did not have a place in his thought. To him, the boldest
and most radical planning and projecting amounted to only what it
was, the fateful answer of our time to the challenge we humans must
face. It < this planning> presents itself to this human race that has
been released into the world [Ausgesetzheit des Menscheus] as a human
endeavor more serious than any other. Heidegger foresaw some time
ago something that is only today beginning to seep slowly into the
general consciousness: With the bold onslaught of technical know­
how, which has forced a realignment of humanity itself, human be­
ings are courting an unavoidable challenge that they have been
subjugated to. Heidegger names this challenge Being, and he calls
this way of humanity, which has been developed under the auspices
of technical civilization, the way to the most extreme forgetfulness of
Being. In the same way that metaphysics oriented itself within the
Being of beings, in the Being-What [Was-Sein] or the essence and,
thus, misconstrued its own character of being-released [Ausgesetztsein]
194 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

into the “D a/} today’s technology penetrates into the fartherest reaches
of the world’s establishments and thereby determines the way that
that which is will generally be experienced.
But naturally the concealed presence of that forgotten is a
part of all forgetfulness. The forgetfulness of Being is always accom­
panied by the presence of Being, sporadically illuminating in the
instance of loss and constantly superjacent to Mnemosyne, the must
of thinking. This is also true for a thinking that holds that this most
extreme form of forgetfulness of Being, the one toward which we
are now drifting, is itself the fate of Being. Heidegger also described
his own thinking-out-ahead [Vorausdenken] into that which is as a
step back, one attempting to think anew the beginning as a begin­
ning. Thinking-out-ahead is not planning, calculating, estimating,
and managing; rather, it is thinking what is and what will be. There­
fore, thinking-out-ahead is necessarily a thinking back to the begin­
ning, for the beginning is ultimately the starting point from which
even the very last possible step originates, and thus, that last step can
be seen as an outcome of the beginning. Thinking is always thinking
the beginning. When Heidegger interprets the history of philosophi­
cal thought as the history of the alterations in Being and as the
thoughtful responses to the challenge of Being—as if the totality of
our philosophical history was nothing but a growing forgetfulness—
he nevertheless knew that all of the great attempts at thinking were
seeking to think the same [das Selbe zu denkert]. They are efforts to
remain proximate to the beginning, to address and answer the chal­
lenge of Being. So, it is not another story that must be told if one
wants to run through the history of remembering Being; it is rather
the same story. The recollection of Being is the contemplative ac­
companiment of the forgetfulness of Being. We are entrusted to the
partnership that unites all thought experiments with one another.
Heidegger saw clearly that we are all bound together by such a con­
versation. It is precisely for this reason that he placed—with a grow­
ing resoluteness—markers in his own contribution to this
conversation. These markers point out the way of the history of
Being, that is, our own fate, so that we are directed in every possible
way to the openness of the one question.
He did not conclude the dialogue, regardless whether it is
named the dialogue of metaphysics, of philosophy, or of thinking.
He also never found an answer to his original and constantly advanc-
 B E IN G S P I R I T G O D 195

ing question; namely, How can one speak of God without reducing
him to an object of our knowledge? But he posed his question with
such breadth that no God of philosophy and perhaps not even one of
theology can serve as an answer, and we should certainly not pre­
sume to have one either. Heidegger considered the poet Friedrich
Holderlin to be his closest partner in this dialogue that is thinking.
Holderlin’s lamentation over the abandonment, his call to the disap­
peared gods, and on the other hand, his awareness that “we still have
access to much of the divine” were like a pledge to Heidegger that
the dialogue of thinking can still find a partner even on the eve of the
world’s complete homelessness and remoteness from the gods. We
all take part in this dialogue. And the dialogue continues, for only in
a dialogue can a language arise and continue to develop—a language
in which we, in a more and more estranged world, are at home.
 Notes

t. Ex i s t e n t i a l i s m a n d t h e
P h i l o s o p h y o f Ex i s t e n c e
a. T h e G reek term pathos is u sed in this text m o re in th e G erm an
sen se, m ea n in g “e m o tiv e n e ss,” w ith m o re o f an em p h asis o n stron g
em o tio n s or passion s p er se and n o t so m u c h in th e m o re restricted sense,
m ea n in g “feelin gs o f p ity or sym pathy,” w h ic h is th e m o re c o m m o n
m ea n in g in E n glish . Perhaps an E n g lish speaker can b est g et so m e fe e lin g
for w h a t is m ean t here b y co n sid er in g w h a t is su ggested b y th e m o rp h e m e
path in th e w o rd apathy.
b. T h e G erm an w o rd that I am translating h ere as “w a y s,” Wege,
has occasion ed m ore co n tro v ersy and d iscu ssio n s than any o th er w o rd in
the text. In itself, Wege is n o t a d ifficu lt w o rd to understand; it corresp ond s
fairly n ice ly w ith the E n g lish w o rd u/ays. M y co n cern w as that th e w o rd way
m ig h t be interpreted to o subjectively, as a m eth o d or m an n er o f b e in g that
is d ev elo p ed by and characteristic o f a certain p erso n — and this especially
becau se the title o f th e b o o k is Heidegger's Ways. T h e o th er o p tio n w o u ld
have b een “p ath s,” so m e th in g that o n e d iscovers or stu m b les u p o n , b u t
d oes n o t create o n e s e lf In a d iscu ssio n w ith G adam er it b eca m e clear that
h e m ean t so m e th in g b etw e en th e se tw o extrem es. H e d escrib ed w h a t h e
m ean t w ith Wege b y w a y o f the G reek term 3aTpcaros, as that fro m w h ic h
o n e can n ot deviate. H e w e n t o n to talk ab out this in term s o f a d irection in
w h ic h o n e is co m p e lle d to go d u e to external circu m stan ces, th e natural
en v iro n m en t, for exam p le. H is sp ecific exam p le had to d o w ith the general
d irection that o n e h ik in g m ig h t b e forced to take b ecau se o f th e shape o f a

197
198 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

certain m o u n ta in range: T h is d irectio n is o n e m o re or less d eterm in ed for

the hiker. Yet, the particular w a y that o n e m ig h t g et th ro u g h th e m o u n ta in s
w o u ld be d ep en d e n t o n d ecisio n s m ade by the in d ividu al. T h u s, Heidegger’s
Ways w ere w ays d eterm in ed in part b y circu m stan ces larger than any
“su bject”; yet, th ey are also inextricab ly b o u n d up w ith and w e r e deter­
m in e d to a certain ex ten t b y an in dividu al person.

2. M a r t i n H e i d e g g e r —7 5 Y e a r s
a. T h e n o u n Anschammg (fro m anschauen, to lo o k at, to v ie w or
ob serve) has p resen te d so m e w h a t o f a p r o b le m fo r th is tran slation . It is
trad ition ally translated as “in tu itio n ,” esp e cia lly w ith referen ce to K ant
and H u sse rl, b u t n e ith e r G ad am er n o r I am v er y h app y w ith th is c h o ic e .
T h e w o rd intuition c o m e s fr o m th e Latin intueor m e a n in g “I lo o k at, I v ie w
or o b ser v e.” B u t as I u n d ersta n d it, intueri m ea n t “to lo o k at” m o r e in a
m en ta l or spiritual se n se , w h ic h le d to its E n g lish c o u sin tak in g o n th e
m e a n in g that it n o w has, nam ely, to h ave in sig h t in to so m e th in g , to grasp
s o m e th in g m en ta lly or b y w a y o f fe e lin g s w ith o u t b e in g able to exp licate
ration ally h o w o n e arrived at th o se in sig h ts. It is p rec ise ly b eca u se it is
associated w ith eith er a m en ta l im age in th e K antian se n se or w ith th ese
in sig h ts w ith h id d en o rig in s, i.e., a type o f in c o m p le te se ein g , that th e
w o r d intuition is n o t en tire ly su ited h ere. W h e n G ad am er talks ab o u t
H e id e g g e r ’s Anschauungskrafth is in tu itiv e p o w e r s or p o w e rs o f v ie w in g ,
h e is talk in g ab out H e id e g g e r ’s ab ility to see s o m e th in g v iv id ly and in its
tota lity and th e n to portray that v is io n in a co n c r e te and graphic lan gu age
so that others co u ld se e it j u s t as vividly. In a d isc u ssio n I had w ith
G ad am er o n M arch 16, 19 9 2 , w e d iscu sse d th is ab ility o f H e id e g g e r ’s at
len gth : th e w o rd concreteness ca m e u p frequ en tly, and G ad am er d escrib ed
this ab ility as H e id e g g e r ’s “p o w e rs o f p lasticity.” W h a t is lo st in th e
tran slation oiAnschauung as " in tu itio n ” is p rec ise ly th is em p h a sis o n
H e id e g g e r ’s ab ility to c o m m u n ic a te w h a t h e sa w so viv id ly ; “in tu itio n s ,”
as in sig h ts w ith h id d e n o rig in s g en er a lly resist this k in d o f c o m m u n ic a ­
tio n . F or various reason s I have d ecid e d to stic k w it h intuition, n o t th e least
o f w h ic h b e in g that th is is an esta b lish ed trad ition , b u t I w a n ted to m ake
th e reader aware o f this d eficien cy.
b. Dasein is a term that, in th e n orm al usage o f G erm an, refers to
ex isten ce in a m ore in form al sen se, su c h as in “D o e s su ch a th in g actually
exist?” or “W e w a n t ou r ch ild ren to have a b etter e x iste n c e th an o u rs.” It is
fo rm ed b y jo in in g da, “th ere,” w ith Sein} th e in fin itiv e o f “to b e .” T h erefo re,
it w as q u ite appropriate for H e id e g g e r ’s en d eavor in Being and Time becau se
it m akes a direct appeal to w h a t is “th e re ,” i.e., ex isten ce. I h ave u sed the
 NOTES 199

G erm an da instead o f “th ere55 in th e translation so that th e play o n w o rd s

w o u ld n o t be lost.
c. T h e G erm an reads, <cWer d en B ereich , in d em D e n k e n u n d
G edachtes allerest als B e z u n g au sein and ertreten, d en k en w ill, sc h e in t sich
in s U n d en k b are zu verlieren .” G adam er m en tio n ed that h e w as referring
here to H e id e g g er’s Austrag (see H e id e g g er’s “T h e O n to -T h eo -L o g ica l
C o n stitu tio n o f M etaphysics45’) , w h ic h D errida later developed into his n o tio n
o f "dijferatxce”

3. T h e Ma r b u r g T h e o l o g y
a. T h e G reek translates: “T h er e is in d eed a fo rg ettin g o f states o f
this sort (i.e., o f reasoned states co n c e r n in g o p in io n ), b u t n o t o f practical
w is d o m .”
b. See Joh a n n es D u n s S co tu s, Super universalia, q. 14, nr. 4.
c. I h a v e d e c id e d to tran slate existenziell as “e x iste n tia l,” and
existenzial as “e x is te n tie ll,” th u s r e v e r sin g th e p r e c e d e n t se t b y J o h n
M acq u arrie and E d w a rd R o b in s o n in th e ir tra n sla tio n o f Sein und Zeit,
H e id e g g e r ’s u s e o f existenziell s e e m s to m e to b e v e r y c lo se to th e
everyd ay u se o f existential in E n g lis h , w h e r e a s th e w o r d existential is a
te c h n ic a l term o f H e id e g g e r ’s; I th o u g h t it le ss c o n fu s in g to r e n d er
existential “e x iste n tia ll” so th at th e r e w o u ld b e le ss ch a n ce o f c o n fu s in g
th e te c h n ic a l m e a n in g w h ic h th e m o r e c o m m o n m e a n in g a sso c ia ted
w ith “e x iste n tia l.”
d. M o re literally, the understanding, th ou gh t, or perhaps, m in d o f
the author.

4. “W h a t I s M e t a p h y s i c s ?”
a. I have translated das Nichts as “n o th in g ,” m o re or less fo llo w in g
the exam p le set b y D a v id Krell. I d o deviate a b it fro m K rell’s translation in
that I have left “n o th in g ” in q u o ta tio n m arks w h e n it refers to {fdas Nichts" to
d istin gu ish the su bstan tive fro m th e in d e fin ite p ro n o u n , i.e., nichts, w h ic h is
also translated as “n o th in g .” (S ee cfW hat Is M eta p h y sics? ” in M artin
H eid egger, Basic Writingsfrom 1927 to 1964, ed. and trans. D a v id Farrell Krell
[ N e w York: H arper and R ow , 1 9 7 7 ], p p. 9 5 -1 1 2 .)
b. I th in k th e essay that G ad am er is referrin g to here w as
actu ally p u b lish ed in 1 931. S e e R u d o lf C arnap, “U b e r w in d u n g d er
M eta p h y sik d urch lo g is c h e A n a ly se d er S p r a ch e,” Erkenntnis 2 (1931):
2 1 9 - 2 4 1 , esp. par. 5, pp. 2 2 9 -2 3 3 .
200 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

6. T h e T h i n k e r Ma r t i n H e i d e g g e r
a. Perhaps o n e co u ld translate vot>s w ith “in te lle c t” or “spirit.” It
stem s from the verb v o e iv , m ea n in g to th in k or p erceive, and th e n o u n
refers to the ability to p erceive in tellectu a lly and to w ill as w e ll as to th e
capacity to have feelin g s and m o o d s.

9. T h e T r u t h o f t h e Wo r k o f A r t
a. S ee Paul E rnst, Der Zusammenhruch des deutschen Idealismus
(M u n ich : G . M u ller, 1918).
b. S ee M artin H eid egger, “U b e r d en U r sp r u n g des K u n stw erk s,”
i nHolzwege (Frankfurt: K losterm ann , 1950), pp. 7 -6 8 .
c. G adam er is referring to th e angel m o tif in R ilke's Duino Elegies.
d. S ee H eid eg g er, Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den
transzendentalen Grundsatzen (T u b in g en : M a x N ie m e y e r , 1962.) E n g lish
translation: What Is a Thing? trans. B arton and D e u ts c h (C h icago: H e n r y
R egenery, 1967).

lO. M a r t i n H e i d e g g e r —8 5 Y e a r s
a. O fte n G erm an verbs that have th e p refix ver have a negative
co n n o ta tio n . T h e verb verheideggert} w h ic h I have translated h ere as
“H e id e g g er iz ed ,” seem s to m e to be fit in to that categoiy; I th in k it is
su g g estin g that the stu d en ts language w as n o t im p roved b y H e id eg g er's
in flu en ce.
b. T h e term Holzivege refers to trails in th e forest, u su a lly b uilt
and u sed b y the tim b er industry, w h ic h n eith er b egin n or en d in any
significant place. In co m m o n usage, Holziveg functions like a “deadend street.”

12. T he G r e e k s

a. T h e G erm an text reads: f(dass das immerAnwesende das am meisten

Seiende ist.”
b. T h e G reek translates: “w h o e v e r is ru lin g as k in g at th e tim e .”
c. T h e G erm an translates: “w h o e v e r is cu rren tly k in g .”
d. T h e follow ing translation corresponds roughly w ith Diels's transla­
tion into German (see footnote 2): “B ecom ing as w ell as passing away, B ein g as w ell
as N onb eing, the altering o f place as w ell as the changing o f the radiant color ”
 NOTES 201

13. T he H is to r y o f Ph il o s o p h y
a. The Greek phrase could also be translated as “a being as true,
unconcealed.”
b. Entis is the present participle in the active voice from esse, the
Latin verb “to be.” Although Gadamer seems to be interpreting it to mean
“Being,” the more obvious translation based upon the grammatical struc­
tures would seem to be (to or of a) “being.”

14. T he R e lig io u s D im e n s io n
a. The German word for science, Wissenschaft, is much broader in
scope than its English counterpart, which usually refers to the empirical
study of natural phenomena. In German, any system of knowledge that has
been acquired through methodological study can be referred to as a science,
including theology and philosophy

15. BEING SPIRIT G O D

a. There is a play on words here that may escape the English-

speaking reader. Schleiermacher was, of course, a philosopher and theolo­
gian who was a contemporary of Hegel, but his name also means a “maker
of veils.” Gadamer mentioned that this was a quotation taken from
Nietzsche, but he was unsure where it was to be found. I have been unable
to find this exact quotation; the closest facsimile that I have been able to
locate is in Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “The Case of Wagner,” par. 3.
 G lossary

die Abwesenheit absence

dasAbwesende that which is absent

abwesende absence, absent

das An~denken rememberance or recollection (Linge)
die Anschauung intuition

anschaulich intuitional
das Ansichhalten holding within
die Anwesenheit presentness

dieAnwesung presencing

dasAnwesende that which is present

dieAnzeige indication
der Apriorismus apriorism
dasAufgehen coming up (with reference to seeds) or arising
dieAuslegung explication

auslegen explicate
der Austrag resolution
berechnen compute
bergen sheltering

203
204 H E ID E G G E R 'S W A Y S

Sich-Bergen self-sheltering
die Bewegtheit motility
die Befmdlichkeit disposition
die Begrijflichkeit conceptuality
der Bildungsidealismus educational idealism
die Christlichkeit Christian spirit
da there
der Denkversuch thought experiment

der Denkentwutf thought projection

diesig hazy
dunstig misty
die Eigentlichkeit authenticity

eigentlich authentic

eigensten innermost or own most

die Eignung suitability
die Entbergung revealment
die Entschlossenheit resoluteness
entstehen emerge
derEntwwf projection or project
der Entzug withdrawal
das Ereignis event, happening, or occurence

ereignen occur or happen

erkenntnis-theoretisch epistemological-theoretical
erklaren explain
erschliessen disclose
die Existenz existence

das Existieren “to exist35

existenzial existentiell

existenziell existential
die Fragestellung formulation of a question
freilegen expose
der Gegenbegriff counterconcept
 GLOSSARY 205

der Gegenentwuif counterprojection

die Gegemvartigkeit contemporariness

gegenwartig contemporary
der Geist spirit, intellect
die Geistesivissenschaften the humanities
das Gemeinte that which is intended or (occasionally) meant
die Geschichtlichkeit historicality
das Gesprach dialogue or conversation
die Geworfenheit thrownness
die Grenzsituation boundary situation
die Grundstimmung basic mood
die Historizitat historicity
das Ich the I or ego
dieJemeinigkeit mineness
dieJeweiligkeit currentness
Machen-Konnen constructive capacity (Linge)
prdgen form or coin (with reference to words)
nebelig foggy
das Nichts nothing or the nothing
die Problematik problematic or difficulty
die Problemgeschichte history of problems
die Prasenz presence
rechnend calculating, calculative
der Ruckzug retreat
die Sache thing, matter, or affair

die Sache des Denkens the matter for thinking

die Sache selbst the thing itself

die Schuhvissenschaft pedagogy
das Sein Being
das Seiende being or entity
sich-Zuruckhalten self-restraint
die Sorge care
die Sprachnot poverty of language or deficiency in language,
linguistic barrier
der Stoss thrust
206 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

die Uneigentlichkeit inauthenticity

die Unuerborgenheit unconcealedness
das Unuordenkliche the unpreconceivable, the unprethinkable, or that
which cannot be prepared for in thought

das Denken des Unvordenklichen thinking of what cannot preconceived

die Verbergung concealment

die Verborgenheit concealedness

die Verdecktheit coveredness, Hiddenness (Kayser)

die Verdeckung covering (over)

die Verfugbarkeit having at one's disposal or availability
die Vergessenheit des Seins the forgetfulness of Being
das Verschliessen closing off
der Vollzug consummation
das Vorausderiken thinking out ahead
die Voreingenommenheit bias
das Vorhandensein being present-at-hand
das Was-S-einWhat of Being
weilen tarrying
die Wirkungsgeschichte effective history
die Widerstandlichkeit resistant character
zeitigen temporalize
die Zukunftigkeit futurity
zumuten exact
das Zurhandsein being ready-to-hand
 In d e x

Actus exerdtus, 33, 35-36 Art, Erlebnis-} 40

Adorno, Theodor, 86,112 experience o f 39-40
Aletheia (unconcealedness), 63, 82, 87, work o f 2 2 ,7 5 -7 6 , 9 8 -9 9 ,1 9 1 -9 2
9 1 -9 3 ,1 1 6 ,1 4 2 -4 5 , 160,163,165, Augustine, Saint, 31, 37, 69, 113,
190-91 1 5 5 ,1 6 0 ,1 7 0 ,1 7 3
private sense o f 106-7
Analogy o f Being (analogia ends), 70, 87, Barth, Karl, 7 ,1 7 5 ,1 8 5
1 6 5 ,1 6 8 ,1 8 4 Bauer, Bruno, 3
Anaximander, 82, 86, 135-36, 141,143, Beaufret, Jean, 187
158,189 Becker, Oskar, 53, 73, 75, 85, 98n.,
Anthropology, philosophical, 23 169, 186
Apriorists, 49,131 Bergson, Henri, 7, 174
Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Berkeley, George, 176
Aquinas. Biel, Gabriel, 31, 113, 173
Arete (virtue), 88-89 Bloch, Ernst, 73
Aristophanes, 62, 116 Brentano, Franz, 83, 168
Aristotle, 7, 26, 31-33, 48, 69, 81, Brocker, Walter, 63,141, 169
1 1 3 -1 6 ,1 4 0 -4 1 ,1 8 3 Buber, Martin, 174,185
definition o f the divine in, 72 Bultmann, Rudolf Karl, 1, 30, 31,
interpretation o f Plato by, 8 8 -89,172, 38-39
184
DeAnima , 140,171 Cajetan, Saint, 156, 168
DeMotuAn , 140 Camus, Albert, 1
Metaphysics, 72, 89, 92, 140,141, 144, Care (Sorge), 127,129, 142, 176
1 4 6 ,1 5 6 ,1 6 0 ,1 7 3 Carnap, Rudolf, 46, 199n.
Nicomachean Ethics, 32, 82, 140,141 Cassirer, Ernst, 30,140, 162
Physics, 82,140,147,151,160,171,173 Celan, Paul, 119-20, 136
Rhetoric, 172, 173 Christianity, Hegel and, 3
207
208 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

Heidegger and, 170, 182 Ernst, Paul, 95,200

Nietzsche and, 95 Exegesis, language and, 42-43
Cicero, 26 o f New Testament, 39-42
Cognition, scientific, 102 Existence, philosophy o f 1 -1 3 ,1 3 0
Cohen, Hermann, 115, 140, “Existentiells,” 9 7 ,1 8 6 ,199n.
158-59 Exbtenz, 96
Concreteness, primal, 54 Exhtiturire, 161
Consciousness, 124. See abo Self-
consciousness, Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 3
historical, 58-59, 184 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 36-37, 49, 52,
philosophy o f 58 161, 186
retentional, 34-35 Wissenschaftslchre, 162
stream o f 34 Fink, Eugen, 188
o f time, 73 Form(s). See abo Eidos (form).
Contradiction, dialectics o f 79 doctrine o f 86-89
Counter-Reformation, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 51
Cultural criticism, 16-17, 193
Geiger, Moritz, 113
Davis, Steven, xii Genius, Classical concept o f 103
Derrida, Jacques, 164 Genus, species and, 79
Descartes, Rene, 31, 156, 160 George, Stefan, 11, 99, 113
Dialectics, 62, 79 “Das Wort,” 24
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 7, 50, 53, 56, 140, Gnosticism, 20-21
142, 174 Gogarten, Friedrich, 185
historicism o f 65 Gogh, Vincent van, 7-8, 19,103
history o f philosophy and, 154,155 Goschen Press, 9
psychology o f 51 Greek language, 25-26, 78-79,
"Directe concept,” 33 187-88
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 8 ,1 9 Greek philosophy, x, 7, 139-52
Duns Scotus, Johannes, 199n. dialects and, 62
Dynamics, 72,147 pre-Socratic, 143-44,158
Greek temples, 24
Ebbinghaus, Julius, 169
Ebner, Friedrich, 185 Hamann, J . G., 37-38
Eckhart, Meister, 26 Hartmann, Nicolai, 30, 89, 102, 115,
Opus Tripartitem, 156 140
Ego, actions o f 52 Hegel, G. W F., 10, 26, 50, 69,181
as highest principle, 49 aesthetics o f 101, 105
transcendental, 52-53, 73, 85, doctrine o f speculative proposition
1 2 7 -2 8 ,1 5 6 ,1 7 6 in, 79
Eidos (form), 84, 146, 149,156 ethics o f 30-31
Einstein, Albert, 174 Heidegger’s lectures on, 118-19
“Ek-sistence,” 74, 76, 126 historical progress in, 71
Eliot, T. S., 74 history o f philosophy in, 153-54
Empiricism, 49, 55 idea o f knowledge in, 78
Erlebnb-art, 40 idealism o f 52, 140 ,1 6 2 ,1 8 6
 IN D E X 209

Kierkegaard’s critique o f 96 “Origin o f the Work o f Art,” 22, 9 5 -

as last Greek, 6 5 ,1 7 4 ,1 8 4 109,117, 132
on Protestantism, 3 P h d n o m e n o lo g ie u n d T h e o lo g ie ,
L o g ic , 158,162 178-79
P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f S p ir it, 162,163 “Phenomenology o f Religion,” 169,
Heidegger, Martin, at age 75, 15-27 170
at age 80, 61-67 T ilb in g e r V o n ra g , 176, 178
at age 85, 111-20 W e g m a r k e n , 46
Catholicism o f 167-68, 170 "What Is Metaphysics?” 45-48, 157
as Classical thinker, 65 Z u r S a c h e d es D e n k e n s , 87
critique o f Husserl, 56 Heraclitus, 82, 86, 106,117, 143, 144,
cultural criticism o f 16-17, 193 1 5 2 ,1 5 8 ,1 8 0 ,1 8 9
existentialism o f 1-2, 9-12 Hermeneutics, 51, 58, 98
Freiburg lecture by, 45-48, 131 o f facticity, 55, 186
gnosticism o f 20-21 language and, 42-43
historical significance o f 121-22 "life world” and, 53
history o f philosophy in, 153-65 universality o f 40
Holderlin lecture by, 112 Historicism, 64-65, 86
language o f 66-67, 113-14, Holderlin, Friedrich, 10-12,21-22,112,
135-36,194—95 118,164-65,179-80,189,195
lecturing style o f 11, 114-15 "Fehl der Gotter, 74
Marburg lecture by, 126,142 poetic faith o f 99
Nazis and, 11, 20, 111-12 vocabulary o f 132
ontology o f 63-64 Homer, O d y s s e y , 150
physical appearance o f 9, 17, 19 Husserl, Edmund, 4, 6, 31, 69, 85, 186
question o f the self 76 phenomenology o f 17-18, 34, 37, 50,
as theologian, 170, 175,182 51-52, 122, 142
as visionary, 17 primal presence in, 73
A r is to tle s -I n te r p r e ta tio n e n , 155, 173 problem o f intersubjectivity in, 127
B e in g a n d T i m e , ix-xii, 10, 20-21, 36, sixth logical investigation by,
53,75, 85, 9 6 ,1 1 1 ,1 2 5 -3 2 ,1 5 6 , 113-14
178,185 Festschrift for, 85
approach in, 99-100 I d e e n , 170, 171, 186
conscience in, 33 K r is is tr e a tis e , 125
prototype o f 30 L o g ic a l I n v e s tig a tio n s , 73, 170
"Hegel and the Greeks,” 118 P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f I n te r n a l T i m e
H o ld e r lin -I n te r p r e ta tio n e n , 190 C o n s c io u sn e s s , 52
H o l z w e g e , 48, 98,117, 132, 162, 163, "Philosophy as a Strict Science,” 155,
179, 200n. 171
"Identity and Difference,” 118
K a n t a n d th e P r o b le m o f M e ta p h y s ic s , Idealism, 140
131 Absolute, 162, 186
“Letter on Humanism,” 2, 12, 39, 48, criticism o f 55
75, 7 6 ,1 3 2 ,1 8 7 educational, 4, 7
M e i n W eg in d ie P h d n o m e n o lo g ie , 86 Fichtean-PIegelian, 52, 140
O n th e E ss e n c e o f T r u th , 74, 76 speculative, 95-96
210 H E ID E G G E R ’S W A Y S

transcendental, 36-37, 56 o f metaphysics, 66-79, 150, 164,

Information theory, 25 187-88
“In-sistence,” 74-76 natural, 27
Internationale, 4 nature o f 75, 79
"Irrationality o f life,” 96 poetic. See Poetry,
religious, 179
Jacobi, Friedrich, 37 stylistic resistance o f 13
James, "William, 51 technical, 78
Jaspers, Karl, 4-5, 1 0 ,1 7 4 ,1 8 9 Lask, Emil, 7, 174
existentialism o f 1-2, 8-9 Latin, for philosophical terms,
Max Weber and, 6 25-26, 150
Man in the Modern Age, 9 Lehmann, Karl, 169
Notizen uber Heidegger, 131 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 10, 26, 48,
Philosophy, 6, 9 69, 72, 161
Psychology of World Views, 5, 6 Liberal arts, 51
Reason and Existence, 2 “Life feeling” (Lebensgefuhl), 100
uReferat Kierkegaards55 “Life world” (.Lebenswelt), 5 3 ,1 2 4
John, Saint, 42 Literature, original, 42
Judgment, thinking and, 61 Logic, speculative, 71
Logos, 33, 84, 86, 89,141, 146,159, 160,
Kant, Immanuel, 4, 8, 10, 26, 31, 49, 1 6 3 ,1 6 4 ,1 8 4
69, 131,186. See also Lombardus, Petrus, 113, 173
Neo-Kantianism, Lowith, Karl, 169,170, 175,182
aesthetics o f 40 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 112
empiricists and, 49 Luther, Martin, 31, 113,155, 174
Heidegger’s examination o f
161-62 Mach, Ernst, 51
moral philosophy o f 50, 57 MacQuarrie, John, xii, 199n.
Critique ofAestheticfudgment, 100 Marburg theology, 29-43
Critique ofPure Reason, 50,168 Marcel, Gabriel, 1
Kierkegaard, Soren, 54—55, 95-96, Marcuse, Herbert, 55
139, 182 Marx, Karl, 3 ,1 2 , 105, 140
critique o f Hegel by, 96 Marx, Werner, xii
critique o f Neo-Kantianism by, 96 Metabole (sudden change), 147-49
existentialism o f 2 -3 , 7 Metaphysics, Aristotlean, 72
Young Hegelians and, 85 “code name” for, 157
EitherlOr, 3 “destruction o f 182
Leben und Walten derLiebe, 175 dogmatic, 49
Kinesis, 141, 148 language o f 6 9 -7 9 ,1 5 0 ,1 6 4 ,
Krell, David, 199n. 187-88
Kruger, Gerhard, 57, 71 “moral,” 50
translations and, 4 5 -4 6
Language, deficiency o f 25-27 o f the will, 72
exegesis and, 42-43 Methexis problem, 89
Heidegger’s, 6 6 -6 7 ,1 1 3 -1 4 , Morphe (shape), 149-50
135-36,194-95 Musce imaginaire, 133
 IN D E X 211

Natorp, Paul, 31, 50, 52, 8 9 ,1 1 3 ,1 4 0 , Pathos, 2, 197n.

158-59, 173 Paul, Saint, 42,113,155,169,173-74
Nature (physis), 82-83, 146-49, 152, Phenomenologists, M unich, 53
158,160 Phenomenology, 122-24
Neo-Kantianism, 63,124. See also Kant, “constitutive,” 51
Immanuel, development o f 51
aesthetics o f 101-2 hermeneutical, 98
aprioristic scheme o f 129 Husserl’s, 1 7 -1 8 ,3 4 ,1 2 2
beginnings of, 49-50 transcendental, 53, 85, 156, 185
history o f problems in, 154, 158 Philosophy, o f existence, 1 -1 3 ,1 3 0
Kierkegaard’s critique o f 96 history o f 153-65
Marburg school o f 52 o f life, 56, 63
precursors o f 95-96 Phronesis (practical wisdom), 32,
rejection o f 29-30 82 -8 3 ,1 4 1 , 156
transcendentalism o f 53 Physis (nature), 82-83,146, 147, 149,
N eo-Platonism , 88. See also Plato. 152,1 5 8 ,1 6 0
Neo-Scholasticism , 55, 155. See also Plato, 26, 31, 69, 70, 8 1 -9 3,144. See also
Thomas Aquinas. Neo-Platonism .
N e w Testament, 39-42, 99 Aristotle’s interpretation o f
Nicholas o f Cusa, 72 88-89, 172
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10-12, 63, 117, N ietzsche’s critique o f 95
1 1 8 ,1 4 0 ,1 4 3 ,1 7 9 ,1 8 1 Gorgias, 92
critique o f Platonism by, 95 Parmenides, 89
existentialism o f 2 Phaedrus, 88
history o f philosophy in, 164 Philebus, 88, 89
influence o f 53-54 Republic, 88
metaphysics o f the will in, 72 Sophist, 83, 8 9-91,156, 159, 160
metaphysics o f value in, 151 Timaeus, 88, 91
N ihilism , 77,179 Plotinus, 72
“European,” 181 Poetry, 67, 135-36
metaphysics and, 139 aesthetics o f 101
“N oth in g” (<dasNichts), 45-46, 48, 72, H eidegger’s language as, 135-36,
9 1 ,199n. 195
Nous (mind), 8 6 ,1 8 5 ,1 8 6 ,199n. as true artistic element, 108-9
Pseudos (error), 90, 92
Old Testament, 189 Psychology, transcendental, 50
Ontology, 73, 97
Onto-Theology, 159,160,163, 165 Recollection, concept o f 77
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 118 Reflexive concept, 33
“Otherness,” in translations, ix-xi Religious dimension, 167-80
Otto, R udolf 30 Reverence (Andacht), 27, 33
Overbeck, Franz, 7, 29, 42 Rickert, Heinrich, 7, 54, 123,
“Christian Spirit o f Theology,” 175 168-69
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 11, 1 2 ,1 3 6 ,1 3 9
Parmenides, 42, 72, 82, 86, 92, 117,143, Duino Elegies, 77, 108
148,158,189 Robinson, Edward, xii, 199n.
212 H E ID E G G E R S W A Y S

Romanticism, 41, 153 task o f 29

Ruge, Arnold, 3 Thinking, calculative, 133
judgm ent and, 61
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 167, 186 language of, 66
B e in g a n d N o th in g n e s s , 1 matter of, 21
Scheler, Max, 18, 23, 5 6 ,1 2 4 ,1 7 6 preschematizing of, 79
dualism of, 73 speaking vs., 42
ethics of, 30 Thomas Aquinas, 10, 55, 69. S e e a lso
N ietzsche and, 53-54 Neo-Scholasticism .
phenomenological critique o f 51 Thurneysen, Eduard, 29-30
Schelling, Friedrich, 72,116,163,189 “Todtnauberg” (poem), 120
existentialism and, 2-3 Trakl, Georg, 11, 118
E sse n c e o f H u m a n F r e e d o m , 163 Translations, o f Heidegger’s language,
Schiller, Friedrich, 101 137
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 42, 153, metaphysics and, 45-46
154, 181, 201 n. “otherness” of, ix-xi
Scholasticism, 155, 168 word-for-word, x
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 53, 72, 182 Tree o f knowledge, 48
Schrem pf Christoph, 2, 54-55 Trendeleburg, Friedrich Adolf, 140
S elf conception o f 73
question o f 76 Ubbelohde, Otto, 115
Self-consciousness, 143. S e e also Unam uno, M iguel de, 174
Consciousness, Unconcealedness. S e e A l e th e ia .
eschatological, 71
grammatical, 79 Van Gogh, Vincent. S e e Gogh, Vincent
transcendental, 142 van.
Self-understanding, 36-39 Virtue (a r e te ), 88-89
Sheehan, Thomas, 169,171
Simmel, Georg, 7, 5 4 ,1 7 4
Weber, Max, 6
Socrates, 62,116
W elta n sc h a u u n g , philosophy o f 54
Sophists, 116
Whitehead, Alfred N orth, 161
Speaking, thinking vs., 42
Will, metaphysics o f 72
Species, genus and, 79
Windelband, W ilhelm, H is to r y o f
Spencer, Herbert, 51
P h ilo s o p h y , 154
Spengler, Oswald, D e c li n e o f th e W est,
Workers’ movement, 4
8, 95
World War 1 ,3 -4 ,5 1 ,6 9 , 95
Stenzel, J., 89
World War II, 139
Strauss, David Friedrich, 3
W o r ld in g , 169
Stream o f consciousness, 34
Suarez, Francisco, 168
Yorck, Grafen, 53
(technical skill), 3 2 ,1 4 9 ,1 5 2
T ech n e
Theology, fundamental, 73 Zeller, Eduard, 140
Marburg, 29-43 Zuckmayer, Carl, 4
 HEIDEGGER'S WAYS
Hans-Georg Gadamer
translated by John W. Stanley
with an introduction by Dennis J. Schmidt

"This volume brings together interpretations of Heidegger's thought by a sympathetic

follower recognized as one of today's greatest living philosophers. Some of the fifteen
essays, written over a period of about 25 years, look back to Gadamer's early days as a
student under Heidegger. These are not abstruse musings over points of interest only
to Heidegger specialists, but are engaging accounts of what Heidegger was up to,
where he was coming from, and whether Gadamer agrees with it. I would say that
Gadamer is reco* i r» i as a definitive German interpreter of Heidegger's thought."
—Richard E. Palmer, MacMurray College

The combination of author and subject matter found here makes an unusually inter­
esting text on the Continental European Philosophy of the twentieth century. As
Heidegger's former student, colleague and lifelong friend, Gadamer offers a particu­
larly insightful commentary on Heidegger's thinking. Not only do the essays focus on
Heidegger's thought, but they also often begin with a description of the philosophical
scene in which he first appeared, giving the reader a genuine feel for the kind of
impact he made. But the essays do not leave off in the past; rattier, they lead into the
present, giving Heidegger a voice which continues to have a revolutionary impact.
The text does not only provide a commentary on Heidegger; it also provides a fasci
nating look at Gadamer himself. The narratives provide us with an intimate look at
both the author and his hermeneutics at work, and his commentary on Heidegger's
thought is a commentary on his own thought as well.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is Professor Emeritus of the University of Heidelberg. He is

well known for his development of hermeneutics in his magnum opus. Truth and
Method, and for his hermeneutical studies of Plato, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.

John W. Stanley is Wissenschaftliche Hilffassistent in the Philosophy Dep i u ent at

Bonn University.

A volume in the SUNY series

in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS