At the end of the last session I tried in some haste, as tends to happen in the final minutes of a lecture, to show you how Heidegger's philosophy has a tendency to pass over into or revert to mythology. Now mythology is a very easy word to invoke here, and it is of course a typical expression of the philistine consciousness to denounce comprehensive philosophical reflections which stray too far from the standard or familiar interpretation of reality as nothing but ‘conceptual poetry’, if I may use that fine phrase here. It is not much of a step from talk of conceptual poetry to that of mythology – and there are many who have spoken of the thought of Nietzsche, Hegel, Schelling, and God knows who else, as nothing but mythology. Now if I have described Heidegger's thought as a kind of mythology, I was employing the term ‘mythology’ in a much more precise sense than this. For I mean something much more specific than is conveyed by this general and usually rather subaltern way of speaking, which is adopted by a mentality that is alien or hostile to philosophy itself precisely in order to conceal its own ignorance and unfamiliarity. I believe that it is necessary to distinguish two aspects or moments here. In the first place we have the moment that I have tried to suggest with expressions such as the myth of the nineteenth1 or the twentieth centuries. This is the moment that essentially feigns the idea of breaking out of a rational level of consciousness in order to attain a supposedly immediate consciousness of the Absolute or of Nature as a whole. But then we also have the untruth and questionable character that belong to myth itself precisely where it is genuine, as they say. Now I believe we would be making things too easy for ourselves if all that we had to say against such approaches today is that they are false mythologies; and if we were simply to respond, as it is very easy to do in the German context, by trying to hold on to genuine and authentic myth and glorifying the latter. For the real task is to glimpse the genuine myth itself at the heart of the false one, if there is indeed such a thing as genuine myth. The task is to recognize how the untruth of these mythical formations actually reproduces the old untruth which comes in a very distinctive way to permeate the new one, namely the fiction of a new mythological consciousness that no longer exists. Let me try and show you more precisely why this whole form of thought is to be seen as mythological in a questionable sense. And let me add right away that the criterion here is certainly not the fact that the concepts employed are remote from the immediate appearance of factical life as the latter is generally registered by everyday consciousness. For that is not what is essential here. What is essential is the content of the doctrine itself. When I speak of a reversion to mythology, I am specifically referring to the revocation of freedom, the cancellation of that aspect of freedom through which the subject has wrested itself from the blind, opaque, immediate context of nature, from the sway of fate or destiny. The great religions, and what can be called the general process of European enlightenment in the broadest sense, which ultimately reaches from the pre-Socratics through to the modern age, have striven to bring consciousness to bear on blind compulsion, to save consciousness from the dread which lies in this blindness by showing how the blindness is only produced by the consciousness which experiences the dread. In other words, the context of nature itself, which confronts us as hostile or demonic, is actually an anthropomorphic projection. While the theory of Epicurus was careful not to deny the reality of the Gods, it presented them as utterly indifferent to and entirely unconcerned with human life, as mere spectators of this sorry spectacle. Since the Gods refused to intervene in the world, there is nothing we have to hope for from them, but equally nothing we have to fear from them,2 and in this sense the theory may be regarded as the first self-conscious expression of demythologization in the history of humanity. I do not recall whether Heidegger, who is certainly well versed in classical philology, has ever really talked about Epicurus, but it seems unlikely.3 In this respect, too, the great ‘destroyer’ is of one mind with the official history of philosophy, for the thinkers who have received a bad press in the mainstream tradition (if I may put it that way) either fail to appear in his work at all or are merely treated dismissively. I say this simply in passing to indicate the image of the history of philosophy which you will basically find here.
You may recall the passage that I read out for you last time, and which prompted me to speak of myth in this connection. That which ‘projects’, we were told, is not the human being but ‘being’ itself, and it is ‘being’ which ‘sends [schickt] man into the ek-sistence of Dasein as his essence’. Of course Heidegger intends us to hear the concordance of schickt, ‘sends’, with Schicksal, ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’, for he constantly operates in a mechanical sort of way with pseudo-etymological connections of this kind. The point here is fundamentally to ascribe the same quality to ‘being’ that is usually ascribed to ‘fate’. And we can say that the concept of being which Heidegger develops here – precisely on account of its abstractness, its indeterminacy, its vague self-identity – bears all the features of that concept of fate from which humanity has struggled with such tremendous effort to raise itself. The greatest monument to this process of human emancipation from the blind compulsion of fate is surely Attic tragedy. Here I would just like to draw your attention to certain aspects of this kind in Heidegger's concept of being. In the first place this concept of being involves the concept of hubris, the idea that man fails to know his limits. In this connection this implies that man as a pre-eminent and sovereign being already rises up above this immediate context of nature as in himself a kind of spontaneous natural power. But he thereby actually falls victim to this natural context itself, thus becoming caught up in the guilt context of the living, as Benjamin once aptly and insightfully defined the concept of fate.4 And I would specifically like to point out here that you find this very concept of hubris in the doctrine that what ultimately ‘throws’ or ‘casts’ in the process of ‘projection’ is not man but ‘being’ itself. For you should just reflect for a moment, ladies and gentlemen, about what this really means. For it signifies that thoughts and conceptual constructions like that of philosophical ‘projection’ – for we are certainly talking of a philosophical projection here, namely that of being itself – are immediately treated as if they were direct manifestations of ‘being’. In other words, it is as if the activity of human beings, involved as it is in such ‘projection’, were immediately transformed – without any further reflection or justification – into the objective voice of being itself. The mediating processes of subjectivity which can never be eliminated from the activity of thought are here simply deleted. This is the ultimate consequence of the basic contention of the entire phenomenological school that things present themselves to consciousness purely and simply as what they are – thus forgetting the subject to whom they present themselves, and forgetting the fact that they must presuppose a consciousness in order to present themselves at all. You may recall that early on in these lectures5 I showed how this very concept of being, which is so suspicious of the subject and so ready to relinquish all subjective determinations, actually reveals itself to be an unwittingly self-imposed form of idealism or subjectivism that is blind to its own character. And you can take the passage that I have just discussed as a direct confirmation of this claim. For that which can be conceived only as spontaneity, subjectivity and thought is here relegated at a stroke to the side of being itself simply by appeal to language and the talk of thrown ‘projection’. The subject which is at work here is silenced but is immeasurably intensified in the process, presenting its own work as if it had now escaped the limits of subjectivity, as if it were now immediately the object itself. Thus it is the very anti-subjectivism of this theory, the very claim that it is not some subjective expression of thinking, which inwardly reveals, as I would say, the heinous arrogance of the subject which imagines its own thinking to be entirely free of subjective limitations and acts as if the Absolute itself were speaking through it.
But then I would say that the concept of fate or destiny here ascribed to ‘being’ is that of a blindly entangled will – for what is ascribed to ‘being’ in this context bears all the marks of irrationality. In other words, ‘being’ is characterized as something utterly obscure that may somehow be intimated and venerated, but about which nothing substantive can ever be said. In the first place, you should clearly observe how this very passage moves directly to the concept of Schicksal or fate, and how this concept of fate, even if it is indeed indexed historically, is furnished with that blind and ineluctable character which belongs to the ancient or traditional notion of fate. Heidegger writes: ‘This destiny [Geschick: or that which sends what is the essence, namely ‘being itself which sends the human being into the ek-sistence of Da-sein’] comes to pass as the clearing of being – which it is.’ That this comes to pass as the clearing of being already implies the subordinate clause which follows – which is thus entirely superfluous and tautological, simply a kind of ἑν διὰ δυοῖν [hen dia duoin],6 which mimics a mythological way of speaking. ‘The clearing grants nearness to being.’ But note the aspect of blindness here: ‘In this nearness, in the clearing of the There, the human being dwells as the ek-sisting one without yet being able properly to experience and take over this dwelling today.’ Yet if the possibility of experiencing this is in principle cut off from us, if this is something which is utterly blind, we have to ask how thinking can possibly be justified in talking about it in the first place. In view of the blindness which is ascribed to being, and which requires nothing but what Heidegger elsewhere describes as Hörigkeit, or ‘obedient hearkening’, a hearkening to being which sounds like blind submission, it is not hard to understand why the concept of anxiety becomes such a decisive ‘existential’ in Heidegger. But we must be quite clear that this existential is not actually a fundamental dimension of being itself which is revealed in Dasein, as Heidegger maintains. On the contrary, this anxiety is itself mediated in the sense that it prevails and dominates in an absolute way only when thinking is unable to recognize any authority other than that of blind fate – although in terms of the philosophy of history it must certainly be admitted that the current state of the world and the undeniably increasing impotence of the individual subject actually furnish abundant grounds for such anxiety. And it would actually be commendable if this philosophy were at least courageous enough to express its own anxiety instead of constantly striking a heroic posture, except that the general Heideggerean trick characteristically ensures that this expression of anxiety itself is counted as the truly heroic achievement, specifically in relation to death as the ultimately unconditioned. Yet it was just such anxiety which philosophy and the great religions formerly undertook to dispel. And I am quite unable to understand – though I am hardly qualified to speak for theologians or to talk about theological matters – how modern theology itself, in what can only be seen as a symptom of its current insecurity, has completely failed to recognize this frankly pagan moment of Heideggerean philosophy, which is so fundamentally at odds with its own essential concerns. What we constantly find instead, on the Protestant and Catholic side alike, is a touching and deeply disturbing eagerness to assimilate and respond to this philosophy, without suspecting that such attempts to demonstrate its own contemporary philosophical credentials actually encourage the dissolution of everything that religion once effectively stood for.7
When I speak of mythology and describe it as a reversion to a religion of nature, to a cult of nature, the notion of homeland [Heimat] also naturally crops up in this connection – and indeed duly makes an appearance in the passage which I have just been reading and interpreting for you. For it is an essential characteristic of the religions of nature that the natural divinities are bound up with particular places, and that the sacredness of place, and indeed the narrowly defined place to which the individual is bound by birth and family, appears as a numinous power that is to be venerated. And here again you see how this reversion to the mythical notion that the Absolute is essentially bound up with a natural category such as place is directly connected to a politically regressive mentality, namely to the glorification of our own tribe, of our own lineage, of our own land, where we just happen to find ourselves, as the ultimate and essential thing. Now when Heidegger says at this point that the word Heimat is thought here in an ‘essential’ sense – not in patriotic or nationalistic terms but in terms of the history of being – this is nothing but a captatio benevolentiae, an attempt to win us over. If everything that he here abjures were not really the case, this thinking would surely have the strength to find any other word but Heimat. But that it cannot do so, that it remains so beholden to the characteristic mentality of homely art, reveals only how essentially and intrinsically such mythic notions also involve the regressive dimension of contemporary nationalism, so that these things cannot simply be regarded as external or accidental. In the case of Heidegger's philosophy – and something similar is also true of Hegel – I believe it is impossible to write off what are often described as political eccentricities and aberrations simply as missteps of a thinker who has gone rogue, as it were, and imagine that we can then hold on to the unadulterated wisdom or the purified doctrine that remains. For the very aspects or moments of his thinking which allowed him to identify the Führer with ‘being’8 are already harboured in this concept of being itself, are necessarily involved in the constitution of his thought. You can readily see from this that the whole separation between social-historical categories and philosophical ones, whether these belong to the history of being or represent the kind of epistemological categories which people are once again so keen to instil in us today, is ultimately quite arbitrary and serves merely to reserve a little grove for philosophy, which has nothing to do with the world, on one side, while preserving the social-political sphere from critical philosophical reflection, on the other. Wherever there has been any philosophy which really deserved the name it has never recognized this division between ‘proper’ philosophy on one side and ‘mere’ social philosophy on the other. And we fall below philosophy not when we engage with social thought but when we try and enforce a rigid and mechanical separation of both these two moments. The actual social consequence, as I already pointed out, of this mythological aspect, of this understanding of being, which basically stands in for the kosmos as conceived by the philosophy of nature, is that all we can ultimately do is blindly subject ourselves to something precisely because it is intrinsically irrational and impenetrable. In other words, it effectively demands that we submit to the blind course of history as the unfolding of the history of being. The relationship to history in Heidegger is a complex one. On the one hand – as I think I have already suggested in passing – the concept of history itself is all too quickly sublimated in the sense that real history is replaced by historicity – that is, by history as a structure which arises from Dasein. This is an ‘existential’ which allegedly belongs to Dasein itself and, on account of its essentially ontological character, is not meant to have anything to do with real history in the ontic sense. On the other hand, the way this philosophy constantly changes back and forth between the ontic and the ontological – we could speak of changing outfits here, though I would prefer to describe this as a sort of shimmering alternation – is precisely what lends it the semblance of life. Thus, wherever history proves to be the strongest power in reality, it is easy to interpret this as the power of being and thereby encourage subordination to the course of history. And if you take a look today at the writings which Herr Professor Heidegger published during the early years of National Socialism,9 you will actually find this very argument that the power of being itself is manifest in the historical events of the time and that we are to submit to this power of being in the form of these historical events. We see here how history is ontologized or emptied of substance on the one hand yet also deified as if it were the blind course of nature on the other. There is no longer any question of asking about the rational justification or rational meaning of history, for all we have to do is catch the voice of being at work there and do what it requires of us. Now this very thought (as I am particularly gratified to point out here) has also been very clearly and candidly expressed by a critical and thoughtful former student of Heidegger's, my Heidelberg colleague Karl Löwith, in his essay on this Denker in dürftiger Zeit.10 And I would specifically recommend this piece by Löwith in connection with the critical reflections I have been pursuing. His discussion is particularly instructive because it shows how the independent exercise of thought, even when it originally springs from this quarter, is effectively compelled to draw conclusions which are hardly remote from those I have unfolded here. He also reveals how the generally mythologizing tendency in Heidegger leads to a specific mythology of history.
I have spoken of myth as such and indicated that there is always a certain unrestricted aspect about it. Myth is a world in which anything can also mean anything else, in which there is no absolutely univocal meaning. You have only to take a look at a book such as Zimmer's Maya,11 or at Ovid's Metamorphoses, which basically develops variations of the the inherited myths in a playful Hellenistic way, to see how indeterminacy itself, how the fluid interplay of every conceivable form and shape, how the constant intermingling of everything, plays a central role in all these myths. And this corresponds precisely to the intermingling, wavering and shimmering concept of being as that which is allegedly ἀδιάφορον [adiaphoron], or indistinguishable, with respect to beings and being – and with respect to the conceptual itself, as I should prefer to say. In other words, this mythologizing philosophy – and this is surely part of its suggestive power, part of its theological seductiveness, if I may put it like that – essentially involves a kind of vagueness and indeterminacy which is rooted in its own irrational character, but which it actually ascribes to itself as if it were some special higher quality. Yet this philosophy is essentially abstract. And here you stumble upon something really quite remarkable in the history of this whole cultural and intellectual movement, if that it is indeed what it is, that we have been talking about. If you recall what I was trying to explain to you before about the origins of all those philosophies where you encounter the word ‘existence’ or ‘existential’ in the wake of Kierkegaard, you will also remember that one of the most essential and original motivations at work here was to escape the formalism of Kantian and of all post-Kantian theory. In other words, all of these philosophies can be interpreted in terms of a longing for concreteness. And, if you read Heidegger himself, you will constantly encounter in the language which is deployed here – like that of the short passage which I read out for you earlier – innumerable expressions which certainly aspire to concreteness. Now in Kant and Hegel you will look in vain for expressions such as ‘the clearing of the “There”’ or the ‘sending’ of being or ‘the homeland’, or any concepts of that kind. Yet at the same time, and this is very telling, it must always be added right away – as with the aforementioned passage, which is indeed quite exemplary for this whole philosophy – that it is indeed concrete, but that this concreteness is not concrete at all. In other words, the concrete here is not actually what you conceive it to be but is something ‘wholly other’, and ultimately something abstract. It skims the cream off the concrete and gives us the feeling that we have something really tangible to hold onto and are not just being fobbed off. At the same time, however, it skims the cream off philosophy and tells us that it is not of course talking about that lowly concreteness you had in mind; rather, it is talking about something much higher and more essential, something that is bound up with eternal and immutable being. It thereby perpetuates the gesture of killing two birds with one stone. I pointed out before that this whole movement of philosophy was originally anti-formalistic in character. That is the point where Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel (though he was significantly misunderstood in this regard) essentially converged with Scheler's critique of the formalism of Kantian ethics in his famous early book on the subject.12 For both thinkers claimed that these earlier philosophers remained caught up in the domain of purely abstract concepts without being able to reveal what mattered as far as the real relations and essential interests of the actual human being were concerned. And Scheler sought to counter such abstractness with the idea of a material ethics of value, with a hierarchy of values, which no longer undertook to identify the universal principle of legislation in terms of the categorical imperative for example. His material ethics attempted instead to articulate and systematize, in an extremely precise and almost casuistical fashion, the various values that actually exist, from the very lowest to the highest, so that philosophy might then in a certain sense concretely tell us what is good and what is bad. And the influence specifically exerted by Scheler at the time was due to this admittedly rather dubious claim on the part of his philosophy. Now you should not imagine that this element has simply disappeared from Heidegger. Think of the concrete turns of phrase which I have already pointed out: ‘the clearing’ – who would not love to come upon a clearing in the woods? – or ‘the homeland’ – who would not love to come back home, especially those of us who have actually experienced emigration? Such concrete elements are constantly introduced into philosophy here. Yet in being turned into philosophical elements they forfeit the very concreteness they claim to possess. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that this philosophy, which begins with such a claim to concreteness, ultimately surpasses in abstractness – i.e. in formalism – anything that Kant himself ever accomplished. In Kant's philosophy the highest place is occupied by the Ideas, the most universal concepts of all, and then those synthetic a priori judgements which are actually nothing but propositions under which possible experience is subsumed but which themselves possess no experiential content at all. Now the concept of being you find in Heidegger is just as empty, indeed I would say even emptier, so that at the end of this whole movement of thought we find we are cheated of what we were authentically promised in the first place. This notion of the genuine or the ‘authentic’, of what is truly at stake, of that which previous philosophy failed to give but is now provided for us – this is here accomplished by concepts which are defined or determined no longer in relation to other concepts but simply through themselves, and which finally become little more than constantly invoked and endlessly repeated formulae.
In support of this thesis I think it might be a good idea if I just read out a passage from the essay On ‘Humanism’ and undertook to interpret it for you. But since I want you to understand the method I am actually pursuing and would not wish you to be misled in this connection, I would point out that here too I am not concerned simply with criticizing the formalism or abstractness of the philosophy of being. The real task, as I see it, is precisely to explain the distinctive fact that a philosophy which began expressly as a doctrine of what is most concrete ends up as the most abstract kind of thinking. You can only move beyond these things once you have been inside them, that is, once you have comprehended them. It is not enough for you just to say: I really wanted something concrete, but it turns out that it is not concrete at all. You must understand precisely why this cannot be concrete, for only then is the power of critical thinking which is meant to take you beyond these things truly effective. Now the passage I shall read to you, which incidentally is rather famous, comes from the Letter on ‘Humanism’, a text which, apart from Being and Time, is probably the most fruitful source if we wish to capture the distinctive physiognomy of this thinking. Thus on page 76 of the 1954 edition of this essay we read the following: ‘Yet being – what is being? It “is” It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and to say it.’ Now we would think the claim that being is itself, and therefore pure identity, is not so terribly difficult, and may well feel that we are just struggling to lift a feather here. ‘“Being” – that is not God and not a cosmic ground.’ Here I can only say that Heidegger is quite right, for ‘being’ here is nothing but the utterly blind and indeterminate context of nature as such. ‘Being is essentially farther than all beings’ – now we can certainly say that too, for it is precisely a concept rather than a being or entity – ‘and is yet nearer to the human being than every being …’ There you have the claim to the immediate givenness that belongs to ‘being’ itself: on the one hand it is supposedly pure, universal, free of anything factical, while on the other it is supposedly nearer, more immediately evident to us, than any particular being or entity can be. And now beings or entities are introduced: ‘being’ is nearer
than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from the human being. Human beings at first cling always and only to beings. But when thinking represents beings as beings it no doubt relates itself to being. In truth, however, it always thinks only of beings as such; precisely not, and never, being as such.
Here one would surely like to say that it is hardly possible to think being as such without thinking beings at the same time, precisely because ‘being’ for Heidegger is expressly supposed to be distinct from any pure concept, because it is supposed to involve both conceptuality and beings, and because being as such cannot be thought at all without reference to some determinate filling or content. You cannot possibly think being without beings, any more than you can conceive of time without anything that is temporal or of space without anything that is spatial. And when Heidegger charges thought with a ‘forgetfulness of being’ insofar as it is incapable of thinking in this way, he really goes beyond the limit of possibility for all thought, as Kantian philosophy has so impressively shown.13 ‘In truth, however, it always thinks only of beings as such; precisely not, and never, being as such.’ Now if you take really seriously this expression ‘being as such’, and specifically the ‘as such’ here, then of course it means ‘being’ in opposition to or with the exclusion of ‘beings’. But Heidegger in turn is unfaithful to the claim involved in this ‘as such’, inasmuch as all of the attributes, whatever they may be, which he bestows on ‘being’ are themselves derived from the domain of ‘beings’. He continues:
The ‘question of being’ always remains a question about beings. It is still not at all what its elusive name indicates: the question in the direction of being. Philosophy, even when it becomes ‘critical’ through Descartes or Kant, always follows the course of metaphysical representation. It thinks from beings back to beings with a glance in passing toward being. For every departure from beings and every return to them stands already in the light of being.
Now if we accept that no particular being or entity is exhausted simply in terms of itself, and that every being, as a moment or aspect of a whole, is more than what it merely is as a particular being hic et nunc, then I would agree with Heidegger. But you cannot conceive this ‘Otherness’, this ‘More’ or, as I would put it, this process of transcendence – in which all beings are involved – without reference to beings or entities themselves, any more than you can regard particular beings or entities themselves as something absolute. And in this sense he does indeed appear to take something abstract, namely the concept of being – for this is something abstract – as if it were that which is immediate and the nearest to us. You will recall that he actually explicitly says here that ‘being’ – something mediated, something produced through abstraction – is indeed distinct or separate from all particular content and from all beings but is still what is nearest and most immediate to us. Yet it is not possible for thought to recuperate this thesis of the nearness and immediacy of being in any way. Every attempt to define or determine ‘being’ more closely must inevitably fail, since any conceptuality would either necessarily turn it into something abstract and remote or, if we took the claim to concreteness seriously, simply turn it into a mere being or entity. And this is precisely the reason why all that can ultimately be said about ‘being’ is the tautology that ‘it is itself’. This tautology is not an intellectual mistake, nor is it some vatic palaver without the accompanying religion. It is simply that nothing now remains for thought but the incomprehensible repetition of the same concept, for any attempt to fulfil it would immediately conflict with the concept itself. But this is precisely what we shall explore next time.