13 

Is Philosophy Partly to Blame
for the German Catastrophe?
Heidegger between Fundamental
Ontology and History of Being

No one concerned with German intellectual history can avoid confronting the question as to why precisely this culture is responsible for what are probably the most atrocious crimes of the modern age. How could this people of poets and thinkers so quickly come to be seen by its neighbors as a people of mass murderers and accomplices? It is absurd to maintain that the study of Germany has to concentrate on the period between 1933 and 1945. To the contrary, the Nazi terror is so enigmatic because it was supported by a culture that had made great and unique intellectual achievements, also and precisely during the Weimar Republic. The abundance of first-rate German scientists, artists, and philosophers during the first three decades of the twentieth century is astonishing, as the last two chapters have demonstrated. And it is above all for that reason that we find ourselves facing the question as to whether the “German spirit” contributed to the resistible rise of National Socialism. It is hard to answer this question in a systematic way, because the manifold factors that play a role here can hardly be weighed against one another; indeed, it is even a matter of debate whether ideas exercise a causal effect at all. But anyone who maintains that they do can hardly avoid looking around for the ideas that promoted the advance of National Socialism or at least hindered the opposition to it—even while keeping always in mind that other factors were far more important: the military defeat of 1918, which the country had still not gotten over; the lack of acceptance of the republican form of government amid widespread crises in long-standing views of political legitimacy and in the Weimar institutions themselves; the internal and international tensions that arose partly from the emergence of the Soviet Union, and the economic depression that began in 1929. But even if fascism was not confined to Germany, National Socialism was so different from fascism’s other forms that it is natural to seek in it a connection with specific German traits, among which, along with thoroughness even in evil, are also philosophical ones.

Anyone who wants to answer the question as to why so many Germans followed Hitler would do well to distinguish three levels of followers. First, there was a relatively small minority that supported the National Socialist policy of annihilation out of deep conviction. Second, there was a large group that did not approve of mass murder as a political means, but in 1933 was willing to bring to power a government from which every kind of brutality could be expected, so long as it could be hoped that it would make Germany strong again, ward off the communist threat, avenge the country’s defeat at the hands of France, and destroy the British hegemony that Germany had observed with increasing envy ever since its unification in 1871. Third, there was a large number of people who did not vote for Hitler, but nonetheless obeyed him, not only because they did not want to take any risks, but also because they were convinced that they owed obedience to the legal government.

The last group followed an old German tradition in which Luther and Kant are the central figures. A plausible theory of resistance was hardly offered by German philosophy, and the disappearance of the doctrine of natural law did not make it easier to reformulate such a theory. The second group had lost the belief in the intrinsic worth of the rule of law, as well as in the moral command to avoid war as much as possible; it was, like Spengler or Carl Schmitt, for example, fascinated by power politics and thus as far distant from Kant as could be imagined. The decline of Enlightenment ideals was connected with the limit-experience of attrition warfare of the First World War, which mocked the early modern state’s promise to keep violence within bounds. This was in no way limited to Germany. In Germany, however, nationalism could pride itself on an exceptional culture that had to be protected against being infested by Western European values. “The Destruction of Reason” (to borrow the title of György Lukács’s [1885–1971] well-known book of 1954, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft) took place in the 1920s on various levels. Universalist ideals had been undermined by Nietzsche and the anti-democratic right, but Logical Positivism (which was situated on the political left) also argued that ethical propositions were only subjective, and thus made its contribution to weakening, within the history of German consciousness, the conviction that people are bound to an ethical order that transcends their self-interest. The Marxist alternative was no more attractive; and Lukács’s book suffers from the fact that he sees continuities from Schelling to Hitler, because for him anything that is not Marxist is irrational; indeed, for him, even intuitionism is suspect. Lukács was an important aesthetician (his 1916 Die Theorie des Romans [The Theory of the Novel] is still a classic), but as an epistemologist he is irrelevant, and his polemic against unreason contradicts both of reason’s first commands, namely to listen and to criticize immanently. A conversation was thus no longer possible—and in fact one of the reasons for the fall of the Weimar Republic was its inability to converse. So far as the first group is concerned, Nietzsche had justified the killing of people “unworthy of living”; he was followed by the Darwinian biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), whose monism was, however, rejected by the Nazis. Finally, in the 1920s there was fateful debate among penologists and psychiatrists regarding this subject. This does not mean that any philosopher deserving to be taken seriously urged or condoned the murder of the Jews and Gypsies (though the German tradition of anti-Judaism is certainly ancient, and the successful emancipation of the Jews at the end of the nineteenth century had set in motion a verbally eliminationist anti-Semitism). But Nietzsche contributed like no one else to the moral cynicism without which this enormous rupture in civilization would hardly have occurred, because he made it intellectually and stylistically acceptable. Moreover, he accelerated de-Christianization, which had gained far more ground in Germany, even before him, than it had in Great Britain, for instance. Without this de-Christianization, it would have been nearly impossible to establish a totalitarian state that was based on power and that promised to fill the void of meaning in which people cannot live for long. Not only did the genocide of the Jews involve breaking a taboo, but this taboo was broken through actions against the religion that had prohibited killing more strongly than had the pagan cults.

It goes without saying that the Nazis’ “philosophy,” in so far as it can be determined from the writings of Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, is beneath the intellectual and moral level of this writer. But it would be false to exclude for that reason all philosophers who were not, like the majority of German university professors, simply fellow travelers, but for a time lent National Socialism enthusiastic support. Moral cowardice, malice, and even partial intellectual blindness are compatible with great intellectual achievements. We cannot deny the value of Konrad Lorenz’s (1903–1989) biological discoveries, even if there are obvious links between his biologism and his commitment to National Socialism (and in general the biologistic form of naturalism is more dangerous than the physicalistic one, because physicists, thanks to their mathematical training, prize logical clarity, whereas the biologist may be fascinated by the brutality of the struggle to survive). Lorenz has to be mentioned because in 1941, when he was a professor of psychology in Königsberg, he reinterpreted Kant’s transcendental epistemology in a biologistic way and conceived the a priori as innate structures that can be traced back to phylogenetic experiences. This does not allow the solution of the problem of validity, but his book Die Rückseite des Spiegels—Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens (Behind the Mirror, a Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge, 1973) remains one of the best introductions to the evolutionary theory of knowledge, whose basic ideas go back to Darwin himself.

Thus we cannot dismiss Husserl’s most famous student by pointing to the speech he gave as a National Socialist university rector in 1933. Anyone who compares Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) with Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) will immediately see that of the two philosophers of existence Jaspers was an outstanding philosopher of psychiatry, a diagnostician of his time (Die geistige Situation der Zeit [Man in the Modern Age, 1931] remains diagnostically relevant, precisely because Jaspers did not foresee National Socialism), a cultural philosopher with a sense for the dawning global dimension of philosophy, and a public intellectual in the young Federal Republic who was aware of his responsibilities, and who had behaved impeccably during the Third Reich. Heidegger, on the other hand, who had already become a Nazi sympathizer shortly before Hitler took power, pathetically failed to lead the Leader as he had intended, and became entangled in the guilt of the National Socialist state. And yet it is—unfortunately—Heidegger, and not Jaspers, who deserves to be called a “philosophical genius.” Anyone who maintains that he is a moral and intellectual disaster has a duty nonetheless to understand his central importance in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. The decoupling of phenomenology from rigorous reflection on validity, such as also occurred in France, was begun by Heidegger. And as a teacher in Marburg and Freiburg he soon showed himself capable of attracting, through the originality of his questioning and his magnetic personality, outstanding students, four of whom were liberal or left-wing Jews: Karl Löwith (1897–1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Hans Jonas (1903–1993), and Hannah Arendt (1906–1975).

Creative achievements seldom consist in discovering entirely new elements, but rather, for the most part, in bringing together different currents—with a resulting synthesis that is something absolutely new. Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), although it was never completed, is just such a path-breaking book. It integrates into a single, unified conception five tendencies that at first glance seem very different from one another. As the title indicates, Heidegger seeks first of all to ask anew the question as to the meaning of Being; with his commitment to ontology he turns against Husserl’s transcendental idealism. Second, an approach to Being is supposed to become possible through an analytics of human existence. This is essentially temporal—and thus Husserl’s legacy continues. But third, Heidegger uses the theory of the temporality of existence to present one of the most intensive analyses of mortality since the ancients, for which there was no place in Husserl’s theory, since the interruption of the stream of consciousness can hardly be explained idealistically. Furthermore, he sets out to base the German discipline of hermeneutics on the life-world. It is not only Schleiermacher’s subtle interpretations of Plato that are hermeneutic achievements, but existence itself is, as such, a form of understanding. Finally, Heidegger built the bridge between temporality and historicity that had been a very important German theme since the eighteenth century, although it was only seldom connected with the temporality of our consciousness. However, since Nietzsche’s and Dilthey’s historicism represented the position opposed to Husserl, this synthesis arouses the suspicion of some inconsistency.

Nonetheless, it is not only this connection of lines of thought that made Being and Time explode like a bomb; the mood of the book was right. The First World War had made death very present to people’s minds, but unlike literature (especially Tolstoy, to whom Heidegger owes more than he acknowledges), philosophy had largely ignored it. The association of temporality and historicity suited the period’s sense that it was witnessing a major break in world history; and the book’s unique language, full of German chauvinist neologisms, as well as its revolt against the anonymous “they” (das Man) in the name of resoluteness had resonance for the generation that fought in the trenches. The search for a life-world foundation for the sciences, which for the most part confused genesis and validity, mirrored the petty bourgeois anxiety aroused by a science and technology that were understood by fewer and fewer people, especially since this archaism, like that of the Nazis, was accompanied by a highly modern trait, which was however easily overlooked because it consisted in an absence: the book has no concrete ethical content to offer. Now, in itself that is not a reproach. A philosopher is not required to express himself on every subject. But the insidious thing about this work is that it undermines, through its redefinition of terms such as “conscience” and “guilt,” the traditional moral sense and very clearly suggests that resoluteness, no matter what for, is the only thing that matters. One might, like Scheler, accuse Kant of formalism, but the Metaphysics of Morals is certainly not as formalist as Heidegger’s anti-ethics. Even if the book intends only a destruction of the history of ontology, it offers no less a destruction of ethics. However, since Heidegger’s language is much less clear than Nietzsche’s exemplary prose, which was honed on the French moralists, and because he throws around watchwords of the tradition, such as “Being” (Sein), and makes no bones about his antipathy to modernity, he is much more dangerous than Nietzsche. Generations of Christian theologians of all confessions have absorbed him with a good conscience. The end result is a postmodern theology that no longer sees the rational clarification of the concept of God as its task, congratulates itself on the confusion of hermeneutic standards because that is a way to put Bible criticism in its place, looks down on the natural sciences because they all emerged historically, and rejects any normative ethics as no longer in tune with the times. It is appropriate to doubt whether this remedy benefits the intellectual status of theology or is in keeping with the theological tradition of the Enlightenment or even the Middle Ages.

Heidegger’s rapidly acquired and pervasive influence on the theology of the twentieth century was made possible only by the fact that he himself was reacting to Søren Kierkegaard’s theological and philosophical revolution, which led, immediately after the First World War, to the so-called “dialectical theology.” The name is peculiar when we consider that the central idea of the movement is the opposition—and precisely not the mediation, as in Hegel—between the finite and the infinite. I have already mentioned that Hegel’s rationalism undermines traditional Christological orthodoxy. In contrast, Kierkegaard wants to maintain the latter at any cost, and since he clearly recognizes that Jesus’s unique status, and his radical difference from Socrates, cannot be rationally grounded, he rejects any attempt at a rational justification of theology. We can grant him that the moral appropriation of the Christian message transcends speculative understanding, and we can certainly grant that progressive Hegelian theologians’ feeling of superiority over earlier, existentially deeper appropriations of the Christian message was unjustified. But if Christianity can be grasped only through a leap of faith, if it is not only paradoxical in the original sense of the Greek word—that is, because it collides with common opinion—but is in fact absurd and prides itself on its absurdity, then we must ask a simple question: how is a reasonable person supposed to accept it? On the one hand, traditional Catholic theology had sought a rational justification of the belief in God, and on the other had offered historical arguments for the validity of what was accepted as revealed truth. Kierkegaard rejects both paths (the latter, because he had studied Lessing in depth); indeed, he does not even have a fully elaborated intuitionist epistemology. Therefore he can ultimately appeal only to a subjective decision. While we can certainly find Biblical passages, for instance in Paul, that refer to the irrationality of belief, there is, already in the Old Testament, a whole tradition that identifies God with wisdom, and Kierkegaard broke with it long before Heidegger and his epigones. But in this connection he analyzes subjective mental states with enormous precision and a—dialectical—sense for how they can flip over into opposed psychic conditions. But this is a tack that turns theology into the psychology of the religious, and one that can be grounded on atheistic foundations as well.

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is based on an existential analytics of existence. In his work, “existence” (Dasein) does not refer simply to the human mode of being, for the analytics of existence is irreducible to anthropology and psychology. Moreover, it stands in opposition to the philosophical definitions of the human being in the Greek and Christian tradition as a rational being or an image of God. It is true that of all entities that we know Dasein is realized only in human beings, who not only have a special ontic status, but are also ontologically oriented—Dasein comports itself toward Sein (Being). But Heidegger subsumed under the concept of Dasein a plenitude of traits that could in principle also be found in unknown species, whereas at the same time he left out essential characteristics of human beings, ranging from sexuality to religiousness. Against Husserl’s eidetic orientation, Heidegger emphasizes that the essence of Dasein lies in its existence, which is precisely not characterized by specific properties, but is instead in each case mine (jemeinig): Dasein is concerned with its own Being. Thus Dasein is not part of what is present-at-hand (vorhanden); it is to be grasped through so-called existentialia, not through categories. Heidegger’s fundamental existentiale is Being-in-the-world—a determination that turns Husserl’s transcendental reduction on its head, so to speak. In knowing, for example, Dasein does not reach out from its inner sphere; instead, it is always already “outside”—and with that the epistemological problem is supposed to be solved.

In sharp distinction to Descartes, but drawing on a suggestion made by Husserl, Heidegger works out worldhood, which according to him is originally characterized by readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), the mode of being of equipment such as pencils and desktops, hammers and nails, each of which forms a context of assignments or references. This sounds like pragmatism—knowledge is first formed on the basis of our dealings with things. Heidegger rejects the notion “as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were ‘subjectively colored.’” Instead, presentness-at-hand is a deworlding [Entweltlichung] of an original readiness-to-hand. Later in the book he tries to show that modern natural science could be successful only in the light of a mathematical projection of nature: the science of facts became possible only because researchers understood that there were no mere facts. In the original Being-in-the-world, space is not an abstract three-dimensional framework, but rather place is the “there” of an item of equipment’s belonging-there. “From already being in a ‘familiar’ world” Dasein orients itself through circumspect de-distancing (Ent-fernen). The world is neither in space, nor is the latter in the subject—rather, space is in the world, since only Being-in-the-world discloses space. In a similar way Dasein encounters others, for instance those who provide equipment. Others are precisely not what is opposed to me, but rather those among whom I also am. Their Being is Dasein-with (Mitdasein), while Being-in is Being-with-others. These others cannot be taken care of (besorgen) like equipment, but instead are objects of concern (Fürsorge) that can paternalistically leap in or leap ahead of the Other, in order to return to him care (Sorge) as such. Analogously, the circumspection (Umsicht) with regard to equipment corresponds to considerateness (Rücksicht) and tolerance (Nachsicht) with regard to others. The existentiale of the they (Man) is central; Dasein is subject to it. This is certainly also an unburdening—we will encounter this determination again in Gehlen—but being authentically oneself consists in a modification of the they. Dasein experiences itself as “thrown” (geworfen)—it is subject to attunements and moods, such as fear, for instance; equiprimordially it is understanding. This does not refer to an intellectual operation that is opposed to explaining; rather, it refers to a basic mode of Dasein, namely the disclosing of world. The ready-to-hand is explicitly understood and explained as something; and once again mere staring is a no-longer-understanding, that is, a privation of understanding, and in no way more primordial. Only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless, depending on whether it understands its own Being and the disclosed world or not. There is a circle in understanding, but it is a question of getting into it “in the right way.”

Heidegger then tries to interpret the elementary logical concept of the statement as a derivative mode of interpretation. In his analysis of language we must emphasize especially his judgment that language is not a means of conveying experiences (passing on information, for instance, presupposes Being-with), and also his interpretation of keeping silent as an essential possibility of speech. Returning once again to the they, Heidegger introduces idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity as forms of the falling prey of Dasein; there had been no equally sharp critique of existential superficiality since Pascal. In his profound observations on Angst—which unlike fear is anxious not about something within the world, but rather about Being-in the-world as such, and thus reveals partly the freedom of choosing oneself, and partly falls into the mode of not-being-at-home—the influence of Kierkegaard is obvious, but it is deprived of its theological and moral substance. As often happens in Heidegger, theologoumena are so skillfully secularized that they do not lose their electrifying effect. Finally, the structural whole of Dasein is conceived as being-ahead-of-oneself-already-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered). But that is the essence of care, in which the possibility of project (Entwurf) is grounded. The idealism-realism problem can be solved only by recourse to the care-structure of Dasein; and it is not a scandal in philosophy, as Kant thought, that no proof of the reality of the external world has yet been achieved; the scandal is that such proofs have been repeatedly attempted. We should not take any more seriously the “formal-dialectical efforts” to catch skepticism unawares: according to Heidegger, all truth is relative to the Being of Dasein, and therefore the claim to eternal truths is only a not-yet-eliminated residue of Christian theology (which is seldom a good argument, and is positively tasteless in a work that is so parasitical on the Christian fund of ideas). The propositional concept of truth is said to be derivative with respect to an ontological concept of truth as discoveredness.

The temporality of Dasein is central in the second section of the work. Heidegger begins with existential-ontological reflections on death, which can be experienced only in regard to the other, whose corpse is an object to be taken care of. However, no one can relieve the other of his dying, at most one can die for him; one has to relate to death as the ownmost, nonrelational possibility that cannot be bypassed. The they sees to it that there is an evasion of death that covers it over, it does not allow the courage of developing Angst in face of death to arise. But authentic Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) consists in an anticipation of this possibility (Vorlaufen; literally “running ahead toward”), and in this freedom toward death a detachment from the illusions of the they is achieved. Once again we see the marketable secularization of theologumena by the Catholic sacristan’s son who no longer believes in eternal truths. (Rainer Maria Rilke proceeds with similar skill, but in a lyric poet such a procedure is unassailable.) The memento mori is a central Christian practice, and the expectation of Divine Judgment certainly has a purifying effect. But since in Heidegger there is no longer any talk about the immortality of the soul, one wonders what this running ahead toward death, which once took place in every Ave Maria, might now be. The serenity of the Epicureans seems wiser: If I am, then death is not, and if death is, then I am not. It cannot be understood what this anticipation is supposed to produce other than a cheap thrill that gives one the feeling of being more authentic than others, because one embarks heroically on nothingness.

With the concept of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), Heidegger develops the ethical heart of his work. First of all, it is striking how he completely formalizes and subjectivizes the concept of conscience, which is to be understood neither theologically nor biologically. It calls, but it says nothing (Heidegger acknowledges no ideal truths); instead, it speaks in the mode of silence. If we interpret conscience as an objective power, we only subject ourselves to the they, whereas the call asks us to choose ourselves. Still more irritating is the reinterpretation of the concept of guilt, which consists in the fact that as “thrown,” one is not one’s own ground, and in the existential project we inevitably forego some possibilities. This ontological interpretation of conscience and guilt is distinguished from the “vulgar,” that is, ethical, which moves under the spell of an ontology of the present-at-hand. But we are well advised when we, despite the predicate “vulgar,” defend the stubborn feeling that someone who foregoes the possibility of a career as the commander of a concentration camp is less guilty than someone who plans such a career for himself. However, Heidegger’s resoluteness, like that of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, which is so different in kind politically, is empty. “Resoluteness is certain of itself only in a resolution.” Granted, this does not necessarily lead to National Socialism, but it also has to be granted that it does nothing to block the road that leads in that direction—and in general it encourages a radicalization of irrational convictions.

The anticipation of resoluteness heralds the theme of temporality, which lends unity to the structure of care: the being-ahead-of oneself [Sich-vorweg] is grounded in the future, while the already-being-in (Schon-sein-in) manifests having-been (Gewesenheit, Heidegger’s equivalent for Vergangenheit, i.e., past), and being-together-with is made possible by making present. What is crucial here is the priority of the future. All existentialia are now revisited and deepened with regard to temporality; in fact, even the spatiality characteristic of Dasein is supposed to arise from temporality. Out of the temporality of Dasein its historicity finally arises. Here Heidegger is writing in the wake of Dilthey’s historicism, which is, however, valorized in terms of existential philosophy. The movement away from the individualism of authenticity to concepts such as destiny, community, and people is striking. The resoluteness of a whole nation is not discussed, but one senses its possibility. Heidegger’s concept of world history has nothing to do with Kant’s or Hegel’s constructions in the philosophy of history; there is no talk of either progress in history or the formation of a world-historical consciousness. Heidegger’s observations on history reject efforts at “objectivity”—he is concerned with the potentialities of existence, of Dasein that has-been-there, and in no science is universal validity less at home than in history. The historian’s choice of materials arises from the existential choice of Dasein’s historicity. We will see that Gadamer’s founding of hermeneutics is based on a similar idea, which however rejects, through the extension of reception history, the provinciality of Heidegger’s suggestion, to which any chauvinistic cobbled-together historical construction can gratefully appeal. The work concludes with reflections on the constitution of public time through time measurements and on the genesis of the vulgar—that is, the scientific—conception of time. Time is said to be more objective than any possible object, because it is found in the psychic as well as in the physical; and it is more subjective than any possible subject, because it makes the latter possible in the first place. Given the broad identification of time and being, one wonders what kind of ontic status timeless entities like mathematical structures or values have; in the latter, Plato—and metaphysics after him—saw the paradigmatic existent; and we are painfully touched to find the natural sciences and ethics, to whose grounding Kant devoted his magnificent work, now both considered, in the twilight of the state based on the rule of law, as “vulgar.” Shouldn’t we rather describe as vulgar the phasing out of the best heritage of the West?

Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger reconceived his philosophy in a radically new way. In the 1930s there occurred what he called a Kehre, or “turn,” which took shape, for example, in his Beiträge zur Philosophie. (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy [Of the Event]), first published in 1989. But unlike Wittgenstein, Heidegger was no longer able to work up his new conception into a classic text; instead, he published a large number of articles and essays, all of which revolve around a few interconnected themes, but whose level differs greatly. Anyone who reads the collection entitled Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track, 1950) is disturbed to find a text like “Der Spruch des Anaximander” (“Anaximander’s Saying”), which mocks all hermeneutic standards, placed next to two undeniably brilliant articles—”Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (“The Origin of the Work of Art,” 1935–36) and “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (“The Age of the World Picture,” 1938). It is unlikely that there has ever been an important thinker who was less capable of self-criticism than Heidegger—he produced important and confused works alongside one another and was himself not able to distinguish between the two. The crucial basic insight of the Kehre consists in a retreat from the residual transcendentalism of Being and Time: not Dasein, but Sein (Being) is now the decisive fundamental notion—the human being is the “shepherd of Being” (note the plagiarism of the Bible). But this is not for all that a return to the metaphysical tradition, first because, like Spinoza, Heidegger conceives Being in a fully amoral way, and second because he only elevates metaphysically Dilthey’s historicism: Being manifests itself in different periods in entirely different forms, and between these no continuous, that is argumentative, transitions are possible. The history of Being, which is supposed to be essentially a history of the various conceptions of Being, is thereby understood as a history of decline and withdrawal, because Being increasingly conceals itself; and with his turn away from metaphysics to the philosophy of history of metaphysics, Heidegger seeks to contribute to the “transformational recovering” (Verwindung) of this misleading metaphysical tradition that is characterized by its oblivion of Being. However, given Heidegger’s own oblivion of the logos, there can be no method of recovering his own claim to validity, because Being is opposed to all conceptual structures, as it is not in the tradition from Plato to Hegel. How, after two and half millennia of decline, Heidegger’s sudden insight is supposed to have become possible, is not conceivable—and it ought not to be. Against Hegel’s progress-schema, Heidegger sees an ever-increasing estrangement from the original unconcealment that is supposed to have been approached most closely by the pre-Socratics—the philosophical interest in the latter had begun with Nietzsche, whereas classical German philosophy had given priority to Plato. Thus, with the passing of time, we reach further and further back. Plato already put Being under the yoke of the Idea, and the Middle Ages paved the way for modern rationalism. “The Age of the World Picture” is a crudely simplifying, but nonetheless splendid analysis of the transformation of the world by the concept of the picture, as it underlies modern metaphysics. Modern science, which culminates in machine technology, the aestheticization of the work of art, the interpretation of human activity as culture, and finally the loss of the divine, are all offshoots of this will of modern metaphysics to make the world available; and indeed objectivism and subjectivism are only two sides of the same epochal upheaval that culminates in the gigantic. “Die Frage nach der Technik” (“The Question Concerning Technology”), a lecture first delivered in 1949, deepens this stance and offers one of the most brilliant analyses of modern technology. Thus Heidegger rightly rejects the thesis that technology is something neutral; it is not a mere means; instead it makes manifest a way of relating to the world. Whereas the wooden bridge is built in the Rhine river, the river is dammed up into the modern hydroelectric plant, and the Rhine itself is “an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.” Heidegger calls modern technology “enframing” (Ge-stell), for which everything is standing-reserve (Bestand), and thus usable; this is already inherent in modern natural science as its secret telos. And the danger of this technology—which one could at most encounter by bringing its essence into view—in no case consists only in the “potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology,” but rather in the change in the human essence. In the context of his philosophy of history, which sees history as a decline, Heidegger also made room for the National Socialist will to power—already in the 1930s, because he soon distanced himself inwardly from the NSDAP (though he remained a member to the end). That was an achievement considerably diminished by the fact that he considered the Nazis’ techniques of mass murder to be in essence the same as motorized agriculture—neither before nor after the Kehre did Heidegger have categories that would have allowed him to move beyond “ontological statements about essences” so as to note the morally relevant differences.

Heidegger’s rejection of subjectivist aesthetics enabled him to make the ontology of the work of art central once again. The work of art is not about beauty or even eliciting experiences, but rather about the setting-into-work of truth [Ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit]. Unlike equipment, the work of art sets up a world. Here, truth is not understood as mimesis, and that is why Heidegger analyzes a Greek temple as one of his examples, in addition to Vincent Van Gogh’s “Still life, a Pair of Shoes.” The essence of truth includes concealment; and yet the work of art founds community. It should surprise no one that Heidegger’s late philosophy often consists in interpretations of poetry, most of which slap the methodology of literary studies in the face, even if he rightly saw in Hölderlin a predecessor, in tune with his critique of modernity. An idiosyncratic form of polytheistic pseudo-religiousness, a philosophy of language that subordinates the autonomous will of the individual to the happening of language, and finally a quietist ethics of “releasement with regard to things” (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen) as a “simultaneous yea and nay to the technological world” characterize the late work. To be sure, it remains Heidegger’s world-historical achievement to have been one of the first to conceptualize the increasing discomfort with modern subjectivity and with unbridled technology, even if he lacked any ethics such as might have allowed him to propose a therapy once he had diagnosed the disease.