HElD EGGER AND METAPHYSICS

Walter Biemel

In speaking about a thinker we always run the risk of substituting a simplification for the rich variety of his thought, of replacing the exciting efforts of his thinking and the uncertainty of his path with some tedious review of issues which seem to have been so easily mastered. What was in flux becomes rigidified, and issues that fired the imagination and swept one up with enthusiasm seem from a distance tame and innocuous. When we talk about them, the changes, indeed the revolutions, that his thought effected appear to have come to rest and in the long run to be rendered dull and harmless.

But I have not yet mentioned the greatest danger in speaking about a thinker, viz., that we will translate his language back into a language familiar to us in order to make it understandable. But what we really do is mutilate what is proper to the thinker, because he is present and functions and lives in his language. His language is his thought, and if we give up his language, we give up his thought. Yet we may think we can express what he said better and more clearly and make it more accessible, so we insinuate that he intentionally expressed himself in a difficult way in order to stand out and make some kind of impression. This reproach is as old as thought itself. It was lodged against Heraclitus, who was called the "Obscure," and today it is made against Heidegger. But to talk that way is to not know what one is saying. To try to understand Heidegger by giving up or avoiding his language is like trying to swim without water. The task of speaking about a thinker cannot

.mean.some attempLt J::.e.pla.~e_bis_tang\l~ e for that is absurd but rather to lead oneself towards his language. It should not be a speaking about but a speaking to.

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If we keep in mind all the difficulties that weigh down our attempts to speak about a thinker, what can we do at all? I will select one question and through it explain why Heidegger is the thinker who has initiated, in the first half of this century, a revolution the consequences of which we can hardly visualize even today.

Just as the nineteenth century stood under the sign of Hegel (and of course this does not mean that other important philosophers had no influence), so we may say that the twentieth century stands under the sign of Heidegger's works, without in any way meaning to deprecate

the significance that belongs to phenomenology and Husserl or to a philosopher of the rank of Wittgenstein. No one can avoid confronting Heidegger, whether positively or negatively, whether the emphasis be put on Being and Time (1927) or on the later works with the "turn" that is connected with them. (By this phrase "the turn" we mean that Heidegger devoted himself more radically and exclusively to his basic question about "Being" in such a way that those trained in traditional philosophy and thought find it quite strange and difficult to accept.) His influence has spread to all European countries where philosophy is done, and it is especially evident in France where the so-called existentialist movement (let me mention only Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) arose out of Being and Time. Early on, Heidegger's influence was already felt in Japan, and in recent years translations of his work have appeared in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. In the United States Heidegger stands in the center of philosophical discussion in a very significant way, and for a long time the philosophical interest of Latin America has been bound up with him. This is not the place to show how Heidegger's thinking has had influence on the most diverse sciences, from psychiatry, medicine and psychology to philology, art, history, and theology. Rather, what will let us see the uniqueness of his thought is the question: What is Heidegger's position on metaphysics? And linked with this first question there is a second: What does Heidegger mean by saying that, in the future, thinking will no longer be philosophy?

Heidegger's epoch-making work Being and Time appeared in 1927 in Husserl's Jahrbuch fur Philosophic und phiinomenologische Forschung, and it was dedicated to Husserl. At first it might have seemed that another important work was being published under the aegis and in support of the new movement started by Husserl. Husserl himself 'set about reading this work in hopes of finding in it an. extension of

Iif- his own doctrine to the area of historYI whi<:_h he himself had ne_glected. 'The marginal notes he made in his own copy, now preserved- in the Husserl Archives at Louvain, show the consternation this book caused

Heidegger and Metaphysics/51

him. He did not find what he was looking for. What had happened? A new way of questioning, searching, and investigating came to light. The phenomenological reduction was not mentioned, the transcendental ego, the final ground of the phenomenological search, was nowhere to be found, and the word "phenomenology" took on an interpretation that was tied into Aristotle more than Husserl. At the very center stood the question which, in this fOTlTI, had remained foreign to Husserl: the question about the meaning of Being.

Already in secondary school Heidegger had come upon this question when he was given Brentano's work On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle+ But at that time no one, not even the man who gave him the book (he later became Archbishop Grober of Freiburg) could imagine how this question would lead to an upheaval in twentieth century philosophy. What happened here was not simply the influence of a certain book on a philosopher, but an encounter with a question that has no equal in its radicalness. That does not mean that Heidegger threw overboard all philosophy heretofore and began to do philosophy from the ground up, that he saw his philosophizing as an absolute beginning. That is what Husserl did, and that is why he ended up with what is fundamentally a very narrow knowledge of the history of philosophy. Husserl wanted to establish philosophy anew, and that is why the Cartesian doubt was for him the model, but one which had not yet been carried through radically enough.

For Heidegger it was entirely different. (We shall return presently to his position on Descartes.) He did not jettison the tradition like excess ballast but rooted himself in the tradition and conceived of it as what has to be mastered. Someone who has not read Heidegger can hardly imagine how thorough is his knowledge of the history of metaphysics, and only when the unpublished lectures come out (I am thinking especially of his lectures on Aristotle and on Schellingjwill it be possible to form an approximate idea of how much Heidegger has stood in constant dialogue with the tradition. But even the works already published on Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche and his interpretations of the early Greek thinkers show how his thought spans the arch from the beginning of Western thinking up to the fulfillment of metaphysics, I do not mean to say that Heidegger has simply accumulated a vast quantity of knowledge such as we might expect from an historian of philosophy. No, Heidegger is not concerned with a history of philosophy. What he has attempted

- is unique rn-ita-leineh-a newunderstanding of.metaphysics in.its totality. __ Heretofore the history of metaphysics had been seen as a succession

of different theories and systems where each new system or doctrine

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f

hoped to render the previous ones superfluous, and where in the long run the decisive factor in this history seemed to be accident or caprice. But Heidegger has sketched out a new plan with a new clue, a new horizon of understanding which suddenly reveals the inner sense of this history and transforms it from a chaos of mutually contradictory opinions and views into a coherent self-unfolding. What made it possible for Heidegger to offer this new interpretation of the whole of metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche was the understanding which opened up to him along with the question about Being. The passage from Plato's Sophist with which Being and Time begins shows what the book is about: "It is obvious that you have long known what you really mean when you use the expression 'being' (seiend). But whereas we once thought we understood it, we now find ourselves in difficulty" (Sophist, 244a). This difficulty did not pertain only to Plato. It is just as distressing jn the present age, even though we may not care to admit it. Heidegger takes it seriously as the fundamental difficulty of all metaphysical thinkers-that is, in each of the great projects of philosophy he sees an answer to the question, What does 'being' (seiend) mean? Metaphysics then becomes the arena in which, up to our own time, we have played out possibilities for answering this question.

In this way the unifying horizon of metaphysics is staked out. But Heidegger's project does not stop there. The next task is to show whether the series of answers is haphazard or forms a meaningful whole. To anticipate his general solution we may say: the several answers to the question of the meaning of 'being' form the horizon for a possible history made up of corresponding epochs. This history is not a matter of some obscure theories but rather of a fundamental sustaining insight which defines the structure of an historical epoch. To avoid the danger of hazy generality into which such assertions can dissolve, let us discuss the modern period as a concrete example of what all this means.

What happened in the modern era was shaped by the change in the meaning of beings as contrasted with the medieval understanding of beings as created. The immediate expression of this change was the new conception of the essence of truth. In Husserl's and Heidegger's explanations of Descartes we can see clearly the difference between respectively the phenomenological interpretation and the interpretation in terms of the history of Being. For Husserl Descartes was the exemplar, the forerunner, the liberator, because he dared to question ~ver thing~nd _ tQ_J2_ut_ his methodi~Uoubt at ~J:!.~ center of ~i~p~~-=-_ losophizing. But in Heidegger's contrasting interpretation we see that with Descartes man comes on the scene with the claim of becoming

Heidegger and Metaphysics/53

sure and certain of his Being amidst the totality of beings. The holy no longer lies in the beyond, but "in man's free self-unfolding of all his creative powers."3 The reason why method acquires such significance is that it is grasped "as the way to determining the essence of truth, which is grounded exclusively by the powers of man."4 The basic question now becomes: "By what means can man, of and for himself, attain a first and unshakable truth, and what is this truth?">

At the same time the question about beings is tied up with the question about truth. Man himself becomes the real subjectum, the "thatwhich-underlies," for he alone is capable of reaching a guaranteed truth, i.e., he alone can provide the guarantee for truth. This change in the meaning of truth, whereby truth no longer has anything to do with the G-!:eek aletheia, unconcealment, nor with revealed truth, but simply is truth-become-certitude-this change is.in turn the presupposition for the exact sciences' investigation into the given. Only at this moment can there be exact natural sciences because, with this new conception of truth and of the subject as that-which-underlies, all beings which are not subjects become objects of a pro-posing thinking and must be able to be fixed and defined in an unequivocal way. Only this scheme' of beings creates the arena for the exact sciences of nature, which could not have existed among the Greeks or in the Middle Ages because these two conceptions of truth could have' no room for nor interest in such sciences.

This transformation of truth into certitude is so familiar to us that we have difficulty bringing about another possibility of interpreting truth (although that is precisely what Heidegger does). And with the transformation of truth there occurs another basic change whose clearest expression is found in the fact that modern history is a history of power. Let us cite Heidegger again: "This freedom [of modern man] everywhere entails his own domination over the determination of the proper essence of man, and in a profound and explicit sense this domination requires power. Therefore in the history of the modern period for the first time power takes on essential authority and is capable of becoming fundamental reality. This in fact is what modern history is."6 Consequently there is power as Will to Power only in that epoch of history where man as subject makes himself the center of beings and refers all other beings to himself and measures them in relation to himself.

In such a moment and situation the preconditions are created for

=-the-emergence of-.teGRBGlo-g:y-,- wholGh-H€lidagg€lr-.r:eads.-a.s OT.l.€! oLthe. _

most visible forms of the Will to Power. His concept of technology is

so broad that it encompasses "objectified nature, the business of cul-

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ture, manufactured politics, and the gloss of ideals overlying everything."7 To understand this situation more clearly, let us again let Heidegger speak for himself:

The need to secure the supreme and unconditioned self-development of all the powers of mankind towards the unconditioned domination of the whole earth is the hidden spur that goads modern man on to ever new convulsive changes, and forces him into binds which guarantee for him that his procedures are secure and his goals safe. These scientifically established binds appear in many forms and guises. The bind can be human reason and its law (the Enlightenment) or the realities and facts that such reason arranges and organizes (Positivism). The bind can be humanity with all its structures harmoniously integrated and shaped into beautiful form (the humanitas of classical thought). The bind can be the unfolding of the powers of a nation dependent only on itself, or it can be the "proletariat of all lands," or it can be individual peoples and races. The bind can be the development of mankind in the sense of the progress of world-wide rationality .... 8

Descartes' metaphysics is the decisive beginning in laying the foundations for the metaphysics of the modern age. He conceives one being as subject and all the rest as objects, viz., as what can be pro-posed or put in front of a pro-posing thinking, hence as what can be posited and furthermore disposed over. Therefore in Descartes the seed is already planted for the prospect of the interpretation of beings in terms of will. In the sequel this interpretation is carried on by Leibniz, with his conception of the monad which is determined by strivings and represented as a center of power. And it is continued by Kant, who. through the transcendental turn or Copernican Revolution conceives of the subject as in fact totally open as that which makes experience possible, so that if we want to make a priori assertions, those whose validity cannot be put in doubt, we must know the conditions of the possibility of experience. We can get to these conditions only by investigating the subject and its powers of knowing. Descartes already made a start in that direction when he demanded in the first rule of Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Regulae ad directionem ingenii) that knowledge must begin with a knowledge of the power of the subject.9

Kant still posited the subject as finite, and for him finitude was the

t- basic.presnpposition in Ger:man_Id.e.alism,..howe.v:er.,-it_was_abandone.d

, Now a metaphysics of the absolute was to be created, first in Fichte, then in Schelling and finally in Hegel. Fichte started out from the

Heidegger and Metaphysics/55

absolute ego, Schelling took nature as unconscious Spirit, and Hegel "Pre-Socratics." But this title is already an evaluation which usually

thought the absolute as absolute Idea, as absolute Spirit coming to suggests that these early thinkers did not get as far as Socrates, Plato

itself. The moment of the will always remained operative. Finally in and Aristotle. Heidegger overturns this evaluation. In these primor-

Nietzsche, the last phase of modern metaphysics, the will itself became dial and original thinkers, Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus,

the foundation. "With Nietzsche's metaphysics," Heidegger writes, the question of Being broke out for the first time. So decisive is this

"philosophy reaches its fulfillment, that is, it has completed the circle event that with it the historicity of man properly begins. As he says

of its prescribed possibilities."lO Nietzsche thought of himself as the in "On the Essence of Truth": "History begins only when beings them-

adversary of Plato. Whereas Plato had located true Being in the Ideas, selves are expressly drawn up into their unconcealment and conserved

in reason, Nietzsche wanted to take it back into life, conceived as the in it, only when this conservation is conceived on the basis of ques-

Will to Power. tioning regarding beings as SUCh."13 The Greek word aletheia is usually

This excursus should have shown, if only by way of intimation, how translated as "truth," but the translation that gets to the essence of

Heidegger conceives and lays out the development of metaphysics. aletheia is "unconcealment" or "unhiddenness." Heidegger has shown

He is the first and only person to carry out such a project up to the that it is not legitimate to always use the same term for what the

present. But so far we have explained only one side of the question Greeks thought of as aletheia, the Romans as veritas, and moderns as

about Heidegger and metaphysics, namely, how he interprets the "truth" or verite or Wahrheit. "Truth originally means something

history of metaphysics comprehensively as a unified development. wrested from a state of concealment."14 That is the Greek experience

But Heidegger does not rest content with that much, as a quotation of truth, and it is an illusion to think that concepts have always had

will immediately illustrate: "Metaphysics is in all its forms and the same meaning in the various periods of history, as if they were an

historical stages a unique, but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and expression of a trans-worldly truth. That is an ahistorical, inadequate

the presupposition of its planetary dominance."ll In order to under- conception of truth, one which overlooks the historical character of

stand this claim we have to back up a bit. So that he might be able to human being.

interpret the whole course of metaphysics, Heidegger had to find a But what happens in Plato, the philosopher with whom metaphysics

place which was no longer located within metaphysics, he had to stand begins? In his interpretation of Plato Heidegger has shown how the

at once within metaphysics and outside it. But we should not misunder- meaning of truth as unhiddenness gets transformed. Plato" defines

stand this "outside." It cannot mean a dismissal of metaphysics, for true being as the Idea and thinks of the Idea as what invests things

to do that is to be lacking in any understanding of metaphysics. There with appearance and form, and so the Idea is already properly related

are positions, especially in Anglo-American philosophy, in which to possible, indeed to correct, perception. Plato still retains the char-

metaphysics is rejected out of hand as nonsense. Here there is no pos- acter of truth as unconcealment, but at the same time he also intro-

sible appreciation for the power of metaphysics in shaping history, duces the transformation of truth into correctness. There is a similar

and it is dismissed as a mistake and a dead end. ambivalence in Aristotle, who on the one hand thinks of truth as un-

But Heidegger-and this is decisive for his procedure-seeks the hiddenness, and on the other says, "True and false are not in things

ground of metaphysics. In "The Way Back into the Ground of Meta- but in the understanding."15

physics" he recalls a letter in which Descartes compared philosophy These references mean to suggest that the original conception of

to a tree whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and the truth in the Greeks-as uncovering, as snatching something from the

branches which stem from the trunk are the other sciences. Heidegger hidden-is changed. For Heidegger this change means that something

comments: "Sticking to this image, we ask: In what soil do the roots f fundamental happens which may be briefly sketched as follows. What

of the tree of philosophy have their hold? Out <?~ what ~round ~o ~he 1. ,,:as at stake in th.e original thin~ers was t~e experience, for the first

roots-and through them the whole tree-r recerve their nounshmg f time, of what Bemg means. This got lost in the metaphysics which

juices and strength? What element,. concealed in the ground, enters t· followed, because metaphysics no longer asked the question about

__ -.and-li.v€ls.in- tha.roors, that.support, an cLuour:islLthe_t:Le.e:"~ .In.order .. . . B ein.gL4.G.~e.inLb.ll..tQUly-ab'O-uLb-e.iugs-as-a..wwle-(.das Seiende: i.m_Gan;_e.n)

to experience this ground he goes back to the begmmng of meta- r The return into the ground of metaphysics is for Heidegger likewise

physics, to Plato and further back to the thinkers we usually call the the return to Being. The further he got with his own thinking, the

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Heidegger and Metaphysics/57

clearer it became to him that metaphysics was not capable of thinking of Being itself. Metaphysics gives various interpretations of beings: as idea, as energeia, as created being, as subject or power or spirit or Will to Power, but it is incapable of thinking back into its own ground and asking where these interpretations get their authority and what they are grounded on. So we touch on one of the ~most difficult points in Heidegger's thinking, namely, that the history of metaphysics as a whole corresponds to the forgottenness of Being. Metaphysics constantly speaks of beings without questioning back into what supports and happens in these interpretations. That is why Heidegger says, "Metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique, but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance. "16

Through his interpretation of metaphysics Heidegger wants to lead us back to the original thinkers and their experience of Being, arid this he understands as the overcoming of metaphysics. Metaphysics is not to be surmounted or transcended by a meta-metaphysics; rather, by thinking through metaphysics we should be brought to the point of thinking upon Being. Hegel demanded that philosophy give up-its title of "love of wisdom" in order to become actual wisdom and knowledge. Heidegger does not demand this change but rather that philosophy itself should be transformed and become "thinking." And that means no less than preparing a new relation to Being itself, a relation which no longer allows beings as a whole to become objects and no longer understands the pro-posing subject as all-powerful and able to get everything into its grasp, but rather sees man as the open place for Being. Being itself is thought, by way of suggestion, as the clearing which man stands into and must guard and tend. When Heidegger says that, and when he surveys the development of metaphysics from a unified viewpoint, he also envisages a period whose time of arrival no one can predict. We seen then that Heidegger does not just face what already was, but that he also looks ahead into what will and can be. Such a look into the future may appear to be audacious, but no philosopher of our century has so much perceived and understood

and branded audacity as the sign of the growing power of subjectivity Walter Biemel, ~ormerly a student of Heidegger's, is currently professor of philos-

as has Heidegger. He likes to cite the saying of Heraclitus that hubris op~y at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, West Germany. He has edited

is more to be extinguished than a conflagration.t? various volumes of the Husserliana series, and most recently a volume in Heidegger's

We who stand within the era when metaphysics is fulfilling itself Gesamtausgabe (d. note 2 below). Besides numerous articles, his publications include

must feel like strangers when faced with Heidegger's vision. Even if I Le concept du monde chez Heidegger (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1950) and Martin Heidegger:

An Illustrated St~dy, tuns. J. L. Mehta (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

-_we_hav.:e..not...gotte:tLindefiniteJ.y_fa.L,_iLwaSJ1o-tlong_agQ_thaLt.kha_u:U.Y- If------T-k-hll pl:€!s,mt-a1'tU',le-hr-st-appen-pecl-as-"Heiciegger-ullcl-die-M-etaphys1k"-n: Sym-pomlm""---

imaginable event actually happened: that man landed on the moon He,degger: Omagzu romanesc lui Martin Heidegger, ed. George Uscatescu (Madrid:

and photos were transmitted from Mars. But all these undoubtedly Destin, 1971), pp. 42-55.

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magnificent achievements of technology only show that all is well with technical knowledge and control-one of the consequences of modern metaphysics. They cannot give rise to reflection on how it is going with man himself, understood as the one who sustains the openness of Being. That is why it is only natural that there are so many opponents of Heidegger's thought, although at the same time it mtlst be added that such opposition is incapable of touching what Heidegger's thought has striven to open up. Until now there has not yet been a true dialogue or discussion with Heidegger's thinking, because the partner for such a dialogue is lacking. One could say of Heidegger what Kant once said of his own philosophy: I have arrived 150 years too early.

But early and late meet in Heidegger's thought. As we saw, his r~turn to the pre-metaphysical thinkers of the origin at the same time gIVes. access to metaphysics and shows the destiny which, in meta?hYSICS, has been allotted to Western man. For this metaphysics is not Just any achievement; in it Being shows itself, although as forgotten.

In contrast with Hegel, who intended to reveal the movement of absolute Spirit, Heidegger was no prophet. He did not see himself as the peak of a development, as its fulfillment or end, but on the contraryas a possible beginning, a possible shift in direction. His admiration and concern for the poetry of Holderlin had their foundation in t~e par~llelism of the experiences of both men. Holderlin brought hIS era mto poetry as the time of the flight of the gods, the time of need, and likewise the time of awaiting the God who was to come. Poetry and thinking stand in an essential nearness to each other, and this consists in the fact that in the final analysis both are related to and show Being itself. To show this referral to Being, to make man attentive to it-that was the one concern which moved Heidegger in everything he said and did.

Translated by Thomas J. Sheehan

Notes

Heidegger and Metaphysics/59

1 Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles ,(Freiburg: Herder, 1862; reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960). Eng. trans. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle by Rolf George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

2Heide?;?;er's lecture course from the summer of 1936 has been edited by Hi ldegard Feick as Schellings Abhandlung Ueber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), (Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 1971). His 1925/26 course which treats of Aristotle is published as Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1976), Gesamtausoabe, vol. 21.

3Heidegger, Nietzsche~ vol. II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 133. +Ibid.

nua; p. 134. nu«. p. 144.

7Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze, 3d ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967), "Ueberwindung der Metaphysik," p. 80. English trans., "Overcoming Metaphysics" in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), P: 93.

BNietzsche, II, 145,

9Rene Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, trans., Laurence J. Lafleur (In-

dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), pp. 3-5.

lOVortriige und Aufsatze as above, p. 83; English trans., p. 95, here slightly revised. »tus, p. 77; English trans. p. 90.

12"Einleitung zu: 'Was ist Metaphysik," Wegmarken (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1967), p. 195; 2d ed., p. 365. English trans. "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics" in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: World Publishing, Meridian Books, 1956), P: 207.

13"Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" in Wegmarken, 1st ed., p. 85; 2d ed., P: 190. English trans. "On the Essence of Truth" by John Sallis in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), P: 129.

14"Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit" in Wegmarken, 1st ed., P: 129, 2d ed., P: 223.

English trans. "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," trans. John Barlow in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. William Barrett and Henry D. Arkin (New York: Random House, 1962), vol. III, 261; here slightly revised. In the second edition of Wegmarken Heidegger glosses "Wahrheit" ("truth") with "im Sinne des Wahren" ("in the sense of the true") and glosses "Verborgenheit" ("state of concealment") with "Verbergung" ("concealing").

15Metaphysics E, 4, 1027 b 25 f. 16Cf. note 11 above.

17Diels, Fragment 43.

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