In the last session, after discussing the problem of the ontologization of the ontic at some length, I also spoke about the moment of objectivity that is involved in subjectivity. And in this regard I would call your attention once again to the way that here fundamental ontology in a sense unfolds something that was already implicit in subjectivist and idealist philosophy. For all the approaches which were concerned with analysing the so-called mechanism of knowledge (of what Kant calls ‘cognition’), even that of the British empiricists, were not primarily interested in this field from the perspective of what we would describe today as cognitive psychology. Rather, what they really wanted to do was to discover how we get to knowledge at all and, by more or less assuming the validity of objective knowledge, to learn something about how objective valid knowledge comes about in the first place. Or we could put this the other way around and say they wanted to show that, by analysing the connection between the claim to objectivity that knowledge involves and the mechanism through which this knowledge arises (and this was also David Hume's principal intention), this claim to objectivity is unjustified. To show, in other words, that this claim is conventional in character and is not grounded in the nature of things themselves. To this extent, therefore, we can say that the traditional idealist philosophies were animated by an interest in objectivity. Now in Heidegger – for whom every objective interest is tacitly synonymous with an ontological interest, that is to say, with an interest in being – this comes to mean that this interest in objectivity, in a philosophy such as Kant's, is already precisely an interest in being rather than an interest in knowledge. And here he can certainly appeal to certain formulations on the part of Kant himself, where Kant explicitly talks about his objective interest, emphasizes that he is actually interested only in the question concerning objectivity, that the subjective perspective adopted by the Critique of Pure Reason is only a vehicle for bringing out the objectivity in question. And Heidegger has certainly performed a very considerable service in having emphasized this moment so strongly – although it is hardly that new or strange to anyone who has seriously engaged with the Critique of Pure Reason. This work does claim to show the possibility of objectively valid knowledge – that is, of truly necessary and universal knowledge – and thus to ground ‘experience’. And in this very claim the interest in objectivity certainly prevails over any interest in the merely subjective mechanisms that may be involved. And this is naturally also closely connected with the anti-psychologistic approach that Kant emphasized in his revision of the first edition of the Critique, and which formed the basis for the second edition. The necessary priority of this objective interest springs from the central intention of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is precisely to justify – rather than, with Hume, to put in question – the objectivity of that knowledge which he thinks has actually been demonstrated ad oculos by the sciences. But Kant's ruse, as it were – or, since I have spoken of Heidegger's trick, we might also say Kant's trick – in his attempt to provide a stringent justification of this objectivity is to use the same analytical means which Hume himself, the man who crucially roused him from his slumbers, had expressly used to do the opposite, namely to dissolve this objectivity. Behind all this, of course, we can basically recognize a moment that goes further than this, and which can be formulated in general terms: if the interest of philosophy in this borderland between metaphysics and epistemology, where all of the questions we are talking about actually reside, were indeed merely an interest in subjectivity, then epistemology would simply amount to the tautology that the subjectively constituted aspect of our knowledge is, precisely, subjective. But it is just here, I believe, that we find the source of what I would call a misinterpretation of Kant. We must certainly concede Heidegger's claim that Kant's perspective is ontological and, indeed, in a certain sense metaphysical. The Critique of Pure Reason, to the central problem of which Heidegger actually dedicated a substantial book,1 and which is in fact undeniably relevant to all of the questions that we are discussing here, is ultimately a work of vindication. And it is actually very hard for us today to grasp how this work originally produced the very opposite impression on so many readers beyond the narrowest sphere of so-called professional philosophers. For they specifically enrolled Kant under the name of the ‘All-Destroying One’,2 as those of you who are pursuing German Studies or are particularly interested in literature will immediately be able to understand from the fate of Heinrich von Kleist.3 Now the situation which confronted Kant was one of radical nominalism, for which the claim that concepts can articulate intrinsic reality had disintegrated, while this nominalism also sees that, once this claim is completely abandoned, something such as knowledge and truth, and all of that, could no longer really exist, even though the latter nonetheless appeared in its eyes – and this is the relevant thing here – to be vouchsafed by the rigour of mathematics and the natural sciences and also of logic (even if this was known only in its imperfect older form). And this is why Kant attempts – and this is a problematic which indeed returns throughout the subsequent history of German Idealism – to rescue or vindicate the moment of realism (in the sense of conceptual realism) or the moment of the objectivity of knowledge precisely by recourse to subjectivity. What Kant envisages here is indeed something like a kind of ontology – I have to concede this to Heidegger – albeit one that is subjectively mediated, precisely because the subjective critique of ontology, or in other words the entire prehistory of Western nominalism since William of Ockham, cannot simply be erased at the stroke of a pen. But this interest in vindication, or what could also be described to some extent, namely from a theological point of view, as an apologetic interest, that we find in Kant is still an interest that is mediated with the critical or subjective element that is characteristic of nominalism. And this is precisely the problematic that governs the entire history of German Idealism which takes Kant as its point of departure, and which you may even take as the formula that opens up a way for you into these thinkers, and especially into Schelling and Hegel. For while they all seek a certain absolute, a certain objectivity, namely the absolute as spirit, they discover this objectivity within themselves, so to speak; they encounter it within the realm of subjectivity upon which the increasingly subjective and self-reflective thought of the modern age has been thrown back. I should also point out, incidentally, that this conception of the subjectively mediated character of objectivity can indeed still be traced, albeit in an extremely attenuated form (as I would put it) in Being and Time, for here too it is the analysis and understanding of Dasein – in a certain sense a subjectively oriented analysis – which is supposed to provide the categories that then prove decisive for the analysis of being. It is this very moment that Heidegger later abandoned, even though it cannot be banished or thought away from the genesis and thus also from the inner structure of his philosophy all the same.
Now the ψεῦδος [pseudos] or mistake in his ontological interpretation of Kant, it seems to me, and the thing which also reveals the problematic character of his own way of doing philosophy, is precisely the moment that I would describe in Hegelian terms as the subjective mediation of objectivity. And this is why at this point I wish to say something further about such interpretations of the history of philosophy. What we find in Heidegger (as I believe I have already indicated) is that subjectivity has become the scene or arena, as it were, of ontology. And this kind of thinking, for which being appears or manifests itself only in Dasein, naturally still harbours something of that earlier subjective moment. At the same time it loses what was so decisive for this earlier form of thought – that is, for this earlier form of modern subjectively directed thought. In other words, it loses that moment of subjectivity which appears in Kantian philosophy under the name of spontaneity and in Hegelian philosophy under the name of labour. For now – and this is the phenomenological legacy of the doctrine that Husserl had already developed, namely the idea of the pure intuiting of the thing in question – subjectivity is actually introduced as a kind of pure receptivity. And that is what I meant here when I spoke of a ‘scene’. Subjectivity becomes that to which being manifests itself, yet without that moment of activity, or that ‘function’, as Kant also occasionally puts it, properly being acknowledged at all. Now of course this remarkable reduction or denigration of the concept of subjectivity, which incidentally has unfolded rather gradually and step by step, is by no means merely contingent or just the expression of a passing mood, something that might simply be traced back to an exaggerated claim to objectivity on the part of ontology. On the contrary, this reflects something more – and this should reveal the full gravity of these things to you, should reveal to you how the mistakes involved in a significant contribution are also themselves deeply motivated – and goes back to the way in which, historically speaking, the subject, the human person, has already lost to an enormous extent that spontaneity and freedom that actually characterized the age in which the bourgeois assumed a position of power, which was that of the French Revolution,4 the age to which Kant the Enlightenment thinker indeed belongs and to which he expressly committed himself. Now the age in which Heidegger's philosophy is conceived is one marked less by the power than by the powerlessness of the subject. And one of the functions served by this philosophy, and not indeed the least, is to transfigure this powerlessness, as it were, inasmuch as the latter here appears as the reflection of something higher and better. For this is the objective truth which appears to the subject, and is none other than this: the now powerless subject, which has long since forfeited its capacity to determine itself by appeal to its own reason, has been brought down in the most literal sense, has been reduced simply to a site of reception or registration which duplicates what has objectively come to pass. Karl Löwith has said that Heidegger's thought is in thrall to history in a peculiarly abstract way and in an extremely formal sense bows to its verdict.5 And, to that extent, this thinking is in fact appropriate to history and in a certain sense capitulates before it. Yet once again it is utterly characteristic of the internal character of this thinking that here too – and this is the underlying structure I am trying to bring out for you – we see how this defect, namely the way the subject renounces the task of thinking itself through and thus also the task of thinking through what confronts it, is chalked up as a credit, and a dearth is made to yield to a metaphysical profit (if you will allow me such a common mode of expression). In other words, this dearth – the fact that the subject really no longer has the strength to think through the world and its contradictions and to think through itself – is turned to advantage through a kind of fraudulent bookkeeping. The subject is thereby vouchsafed a higher truth which can only be distorted and obscured by thinking, but which ‘gives itself’ purely and immediately as such. I believe that you must bear this dimension in mind all the time if you are really to understand the way that ontology occupies this peculiar intermediate position between subjectivity and objectivity. For ‘being’, since it already involves Dasein, is also characterized – if we may employ an expression such as ‘characterize’ here, which I emphatically doubt – by the fact that it is ἀδιάφορον [adiaphoron] – in other words, ‘being’ is indifferent to the distinction between subject and object, and these two moments cannot really be distinguished within it. And this inseparability, if you want to put it like that, this indifference of subject and object within ‘being’, is indeed specifically claimed by this philosophy, like every other lack or στέρησις [sterēsis], as its unique prerogative.
I believe that this more or less effectively concludes the preliminary observations which I wanted to make in advance regarding the philosophy of being, even if this has taken me rather longer than I had originally intended, which is certainly the fate of a lecture series, if not exactly the fate of being. Now my intention here – as I said at the beginning of these lectures and might also repeat at this crucial ‘turning’ on our path – is not simply to try and convert you, as it were, by indulging in polemics against ontology or lining up arguments to counter it. For there is something precarious about the process of argumentation itself in this sphere, as the phenomenologists and ontologists have in part quite rightly seen. And in fact people generally proceed according to the rules of a logic which itself stands above everything, although it needs to be justified in the first place6 – not indeed in relation to ‘being’, but certainly in relation to the whole field of considerations in which this philosophy – and what I think as well – is rooted. My intention, therefore, is to lend greater weight to this engagement with Heidegger, to save it from what we might describe, with an expression of Kafka's, as an ‘empty happy journey’,7 precisely by addressing a range of problems connected with the so-called ontological need. In other words, I shall try and bring you closer to the questions under discussion here by exploring the needs which have inspired them. I may thus be able to free you, at a rather deeper level, from the suggestive power that emanates from these things by prompting a certain self-reflection on your part with regard to these needs. This seems better than just presenting you, within the sphere of these already constituted needs, with various counter-arguments which a dialectically accomplished opponent might then simply meet in turn with new counter-arguments. But I would not wish you to misunderstand me here. I believe I certainly owe it to you to present fully developed analyses of the decisive concepts which are involved, and thus above all of the concept of being itself. I have already thought about these analyses and can only hope we shall get to the point in the semester where I can present them properly for you in detail. But I feel it is preferable here, in order for you to understand the functional role of these analyses, if I begin by exploring the entire complex of this ‘ontological need’ – or, if you are uncomfortable with this expression, of those specific needs which have inspired the effect that has been produced by these philosophies, and thus also in a certain sense these philosophies themselves.
There can be no doubt that such a need does exist, and also exists specifically amongst young intellectuals, and indeed re-emerges with every new generation which has grown up over the last forty years or even longer – since the time of Scheler's book on formalism,8 let us say. Now it is quite evident, if you will allow me a sociological interjection here, that this need is by no means a pure and spontaneous one, for what sociology today so variously describes with the expression ‘compulsion to consume’ also extends to the concept of being. And the fact is, to tarry in this domain a little longer, that in the German universities at least we are faced with a kind of exclusive offer, for in Germany there are now hardly any responsible academic positions or professorial chairs in philosophy that do not feel obliged at least to show that they are somehow worthy of what has been achieved by Heidegger and Jaspers. And even those thinkers who for political and other reasons are extremely critical of both philosophers, but especially of Heidegger, still appear to be captivated – in a way I find really hard to understand since I have never experienced this spell myself – by this kind of thinking and seem unable to sever the umbilical cord entirely in this regard. This became especially clear to me in relation to a work by Löwith, which I have already mentioned, and which is actually very rich in particular critical insights, namely his book Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit [Thinker in a Barren Age].9 The question is whether it is really the time or the thinker that is so barren. Here I am simply anticipating these critical issues in order to go on and discuss the question of this need with you in all its significance. Now the need in question also certainly involves a certain degree of imitation. And this charge of imitation is indeed raised in relation to every new current of thought. One always speaks of fellow travellers in this regard, and through my own experience in matters of art I am all too familiar with the way in which people who dislike new and radical art on the basis of traditionalism and academicism attempt to discredit such art by claiming that all those involved with it are duped by those in charge,10 or by describing them as nothing but fellow travellers who fall in with the ruling fashion – as if the poetical products of a Carossa or a Weinheber by contrast were actually above fashion rather than beneath it. We should thus be rather sceptical about such suspicions towards alleged fellow travellers and generally be very careful about entertaining them. Yet I believe in the case of the philosophy we are talking about here that these suspicions mean something rather different. Thus a young sociologist11 may deck out some otherwise quite primitive and indeed trivial and innocuous reflections on the housing situation and the position of the family in this regard with a whole battery of categories from Jaspers – such as the concern for human existence and similar things – and we find that all of this, along with the simplest questions, such as the way that landlords try and charge the highest possible rent to ensure that they themselves do not go without, gets sanctified under an ontological halo as a concern for existence. Then I believe that the notion of the fellow traveller assumes a very different meaning than it does when a writer12 – who receives far less recognition in this regard – attempts to learn from Joyce and perhaps even surpass him in terms of artistic technique. The formal similarity in the role of fellow traveller here should not simply lead us to overlook the significant differences of achievement and other substantive differences that come into play in such a case. For it is a very popular trick in contemporary cultural life to try and defame intellectual and cultural attitudes that we find uncomfortable by characterizing them formally in the same terms as the position they wish to contest. And this effectively serves to devalue them, so that anyone who criticizes the concept of Bindung – of a certain ‘commitment’ or ‘attachment’ – for example, is immediately accused of speaking from an ‘engaged’ position too, and thus of being equally ‘committed’ in turn. Yet the crucial difference in this regard is silently ignored: namely whether this engagement is an engagement on behalf of autonomy, or whether – as the concept of Bindung already implies – it is the moment of heteronomy that essentially predominates. Now I would like to immunize you against such insinuations, and against the analogous ones which suggest that the non-conformism of today is simply another kind of conformism,13 and against this whole style of argument by which obscurantists of every description attempt to present themselves as modern and progressive too. As I say, I would like to try and immunize you against this whole approach, and thus encourage you to be rather careful when you come across such things, even in your own student newspapers, and not to give immediate credence to narratives of this kind.
But now I come to the ‘need’ which I have mentioned. But when we think about this need, and especially about the negative side of which I have just spoken, I believe you must also recognize a specifically German aspect that is relevant here, and particularly important for those who have blindly submitted to a certain fascination with language in particular. And this is the fact that Germany never really arrived at Enlightenment and that, even when it finally began to approach it, this Enlightenment was immediately commandeered by a movement that describes itself as counter-Enlightenment – and indeed it also makes sense to ascribe existential ontology to this movement. What I mean by this can be explained as follows. Even in a historical situation where theological ideas are no longer really experienced as authoritative, but where people still see themselves as belonging to a particular positive religion, it is impossible to say anything or talk about anything unless it is dressed up and sanctified as something more than it simply is. This hallowed thinking par excellence, this thinking that promises at every moment to be more than it is, although it requires no more actual content from anyone than could be required of any lively young man in enlightened times, furnishes as I believe one of the essential moments which many people find so alluring about this philosophy. And if we wish to talk of fellow travellers or imitators in this connection, this has a quite specific meaning which goes beyond the very general and questionable one which I talked about before. For here, with very little effort, we can invest ourselves with the semblance of something higher, of something metaphysical, without really needing to transcend the merely factical conditions to which we are bound by the nature of our own work. Thus we might well come to think that the influence exerted by the new ontology, and the ontological need in the somewhat primitive form in which I am introducing it here, is the perfect complement to positivism. In other words, we can see on one side how people are compelled through the reification and objectification of the world to deal with nothing but facts, while separately and independently of this they nonetheless possess what we could call, in a rather crude way, a sense for ‘higher things’. And the most felicitous way of combining this sense for something higher with the fetters of facticity, with a sober reality devoid of imagination, is for mere facticity, without intrinsically changing at all, to be presented in a manner which creates the semblance that it is more than it is, that it is already ‘possessed of meaning’. Now I believe – and you will allow me to speak quite openly to you here – that if you examine this need, which is so deeply rooted in all our German culture and education, you will probably find one of the reasons why you, or at least quite a few of you, feel so ‘addressed’ by this philosophy, if I may use its characteristic language here. Indeed I can say – for I by no means exclude myself in this regard, even if I never fell under Heidegger's spell – that in my own book on Kierkegaard, written over thirty years ago, I find there are certain aspects of the language employed which certainly belong to this same dimension. And I would also like to add that we should not make things too easy for ourselves here. When Heidegger resisted the appalling pedantry and pseudo-scientific thoroughness of the philosophies which flourished in the neo-Kantian atmosphere of Marburg and Heidelberg, but also amongst those influenced by Dilthey, and reminded us that what Kierkegaard called the ‘how’ of communication14 is itself essential to its truth, and when he thereby emphasized the crucial significance of language for philosophy, this certainly performed a major service, at least for those who were still quite unaware of these things. And the fact that other people, such as Karl Kraus, actually did this better and more radically cannot be held against Heidegger. It is also quite clear that it is undeniably essential to philosophy that it can never be exhausted by confining its attention to the merely factical. For everything merely factical and particular is always more than merely itself precisely because it is also a moment or aspect of some further context that extends beyond it – and it is certainly the task of philosophy to remind us of this moment, as Heidegger rightly recognizes. But the mistake, if I may use this rather pedantic expression once again, lies as it seems to me in the following. What I have just described as a ‘moment’, as this philosophical moment of transcending the particular, consists for philosophical reflection in the way the merely factual is never merely itself, is also always more than it merely factually is – but this is now immediately conferred upon the factual particular itself, and its own merely factual character is expressed in a way that makes it appear as if it were already more than it is. In this connection it is entirely characteristic that words which in the first instance point towards the sphere of mere factuality – such as the substantivized form of the copula ‘is’ or the expression Dasein – come to play such a distinctive role in this philosophy, and indeed make it possible in the first place. Now I have to say that this always reminds me (if I may be so frivolous in this last lecture before we break for the vacation) of something I experienced as a child with regard to a very old great-uncle of mine, who was as rich as he was mean. When he wanted to present my grandfather, his brother-in-law, with a gift, he would take out a single orange wrapped in fancy paper and, holding it between his fingertips, would offer it with an elegant gesture and simply say: ‘Valencia!’ And I always sense something of this gesture ‘Valencia’ when I hear this philosophy dispensing its primal Orphic words.15 And I think you should be on your guard in this respect. It is a crying shame that the completely disordered chronology of philosophy has ensured that Nietzsche rightly broke off all communication with this world as early as he did and never had the opportunity to read Being and Time or even The Essence of Ground. For he alone would have known how to call these things by their proper name. I believe that if you look at the writings expressly directed against Wagner, and especially The Case of Wagner, you could readily extrapolate what he would have said against Heidegger. And I think that if you could actually perform this feat of imagination that I am proposing to you, and envisage such a Nietzschean critique of Heidegger, then for penetrating insight it would surpass anything which I can offer you with my modest powers in these lectures. Yet it must also be added that the ontological need is an index of a lack. And it would be a shameful forgetting of what we have learnt from Hegel if we simply tried to dismiss all this in ways that might amuse and gratify me, and perhaps you as well, but without recognizing that moment of objectivity and that element of necessity which is involved in it. One can and must say that philosophy – at least here in Germany, and I harbour the persistent suspicion that this holds for other countries too – or at least that academic philosophy after the time of Hegel, has failed to offer what those who engage with philosophy actually expect of it. And within the academic sphere it was indeed fundamental ontology which first began to speak of such things once again, and that is surely the legitimate and entirely understandable reason for the influence which this philosophy has exercised. For philosophy that was simply pursued as a special branch of study has in fact hardly been able to touch anyone seriously any more. And in many respects such philosophy lagged behind the current state of society, and behind its current level of consciousness. And I believe that what proved so fascinating and alluring about this whole new philosophy for those who had not become intellectually dulled is precisely that it appeared at least to have overcome this lack of contemporaneity, this seeming indifference and irrelevance, through the dignity of the matters which it undertook to address.