ARTS3374 Heidegger and Metaphysics: Existential

Phenomenology
3 March 2014
This is a third-year course in the history of philosophy in which we
will read a series of texts by the twentieth-century German thinker Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976). Prescribed for this course are the volume Basic
Writings and a course reader that I have compiled: both are for sale in the
UNSW bookshop. By the end of the semester we will have examined
texts spanning four decades and covering many of the facets of
Heideggers philosophical undertaking his confrontation with the history
of metaphysics, his critique of the ways in which time, truth and
humanism are understood, his reappraisal of mood and human finitude,
and his interpretations of German and Ancient Greek poetry. As
Heideggers immense corpus extends to over a hundred volumes in the
Klostermann edition of his collected works, we will not be able to tell
ourselves that we have dealt with him comprehensively. But we will have
made a beginning. By the end of the semester I hope it will have become
clear why Heidegger is accounted one of the most significant philosophers
of the modern period and what challenges he presents for the future of
philosophy.
The texts set for this week are the lecture What is Metaphysics?,
the magazine interview known in English by the title Only a God Can
Save Us and the address The Self-Assertion of the German University.
I have chosen these three texts because they introduce Heidegger the
historical individual and Heidegger the thinker.
Heidegger delivered the lecture What is Metaphysics? in 1929 on
the occasion of his appointment to a professorship at the University of
Freiburg in south-western Germany. Prima facie it is a more accessible
text than Heideggers writings from earlier in the 1920s when he was
engaged in a highly scholarly interrogation of the history of philosophy. It
is not composed in the Byzantine language of Being and Time (1927), the
work for which Heidegger is still best known and which first established
his reputation in Germany. Although Being and Time amounts to a
fundamental contestation of academic philosophy as it was then practised
in Germany, it can hardly be claimed that Heidegger tailors his mode of
presentation so that he might reach a non-academic public. In the lecture
Heidegger articulates in an aggressively direct manner the metaphysical
project to which he sees himself and his age committed. Rudolf Carnap

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published a famous critique of Heideggers lecture from the perspective of
logical positivism, which we will read in week 6.
The less technical style of the lecture is evidence of Heideggers
newfound conception of the public mission of his philosophy. This
conception informs Heideggers subsequent engagement with Hitlers
dictatorship. By declaring his allegiance to the National Socialist regime
in 1933, Heidegger committed what he later called the greatest stupidity
of his life. In the interview conducted by the German news weekly Der
Spiegel in 1966 and published only after his death, ten years later,
Heidegger is asked to clarify details of his actions from the Nazi period. It
is in this text that Heidegger makes his plainest statement regarding his
tenure as head of the University of Freiburg and his interactions with the
Nazi regime. The interview was prompted by a letter that Heidegger
wrote to Der Spiegel to protest inaccuracies in an article on him that the
magazine had printed earlier in 1966. In his responses to the two
journalists, Heidegger is at pains to minimise the extent to which his
political engagement might be perceived to have compromised his
thinking. Nothing obliges us to take him at his word (the biographies by
Ott, Safranski and Farias flesh out and correct Heideggers account). No
doubt we would be right to be on guard against Heidegger. If we reject
the cult of personality that grows up around a famous name, we give
ourselves the chance to enter into a properly philosophical, properly
critical dialogue with the writings signed with that name. But why should
we even bother to read Heidegger? If we want to exercise our critical
faculties in the evaluation of claims and their contexts, why choose this
particular author? If we suspect that Heidegger was implicated in
National Socialism to a greater degree than he is willing to admit, then
what exactly do we stand to gain by a close reading of his works beyond
the inspection of an error? In the interview with Der Spiegel Heidegger
contends in what might seem a self-serving remark that after stepping
down as rector of the University of Freiburg he took issue with the
metaphysical foundations of National Socialism in his lectures. Should we
decide that Heidegger is simply pursuing his self-exculpation with this
remark, then we risk missing what critique of Nazism there is in
Heideggers writings. It is for the sake of this critique and the
perspectives it opens on the history and metaphysics of the West that I
believe Heidegger is worth the study.
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Few readers of Heidegger would maintain that he represents what
might pass for an orthodox Nazi position. He has been charged with
crypto-fascism by thinkers such as Adorno and Lukcs. Is there a
philosophy of Nazism that lies beneath the ostensible critique of the
biologism and the militarism of the regime? If there is, how does it relate
to the historical phenomenon known as Nazism? The third text that I
have chosen for this weeks reading is the text where Heidegger states
the philosophical basis for his decision to assume the rectorship under
Hitler: if we are looking for crypto-Nazism in Heidegger, this address The
Self-Assertion of the German University is the place to start looking.
The lines of Heideggers critique of National Socialism predate his
engagement with the regime. In the writings from the 1920s Heidegger
already voices his stark opposition to the physicalist understanding of
human beings that was to be a mainstay of Nazi eugenics. He reiterates
this opposition in the 1930s and 40s. It is not to the Nazism of breeding
programmes and the pseudo-biology of race that Heidegger declared his
allegiance. Arguably what motivated Heidegger to join the movement
was, on the one hand, a cultural nationalism to which the Nazis were
happy to pay lip-service and, on the other hand, a dissatisfaction with
Western liberal democracy that in Heidegger took the form of a critique of
the Cartesian subject and in Nazism took the form of a suppression of
individual rights.
As a result of his complicity with the regime Heidegger lost his
academic position at the end of the Second World War. This complicity is
real and no one should pretend otherwise. It marks a low point in the
history of philosophy. If we nonetheless choose to read Heidegger, we do
not need to reproach ourselves that we are making light of his error, let
alone of the enormities of the Nazi period. What we should want is for us
to be able to take the measure of this low point, and for this task
Heideggers own radical questioning of the definition of the human
recommends itself. Heideggers political engagement marks a low point
in the history of philosophy rather than its simple abandonment. The
history of philosophy is compromised by it because the history of
philosophy is not altogether removed from its disgrace. The shame of
Heideggers engagement is extreme rather than singular. It is not the
only objectionable episode in the lives of the great philosophers. We
cannot single Heidegger out for unreadability on the grounds of his
political position without asking ourselves why Aristotle and Locke, for
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instance, can excuse slavery without suffering a similar ban. But nor do
we have to adopt the vantage ground of moral relativism with regard to
the history of philosophy and its history of morally reprehensible
utterances. The critique of philosophy is not an enterprise alien to
philosophy itself, since it is philosophy that furnishes the concepts and
criteria by which we may ascertain the deficiencies of Aristotle, Locke,
Heidegger and others on specific matters.
Lets first look more closely at the interview from 1966, as it shows
Heidegger in the act of self-criticism. The German title of the interview is
Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten, which we might translate as Only
another god can save us rather than Only a god can still save us (p.
57). The sentence is an abjuration of human agency as much as of the
deities of Christianity and paganism. As Heidegger immediately
thereafter invokes the absence of the god and the assistance it provides,
we cannot straightforwardly ascribe to late Heidegger the quietism of a
resignation to a new god. Even though Der Spiegels title for the
interview stems from one of Heideggers answers, it reduces his position
to a somewhat unconventional, but not particularly disconcerting
mysticism (it furthermore exposes him to the common caricature of the
members of a failed authoritarian movement: the hopes that had been
invested in a given political leader are spiritualised and the submissive
position is carried over to the relationship with the divine). Heideggers
reference to the absence of the god (die Abwesenheit des Gottes) is an
allusion to the poem The Poets Vocation (Dichterberuf) by Friedrich
Hlderlin (1770-1843) in which the absence of the god (Gottes Fehl) is
itself that to which the poet looks for help. It is an anti-messianism, which
retains the eschatological temporality of a coming event but empties it of
the traditional presence of the deity. Heidegger wrote many hundreds of
pages in commentaries on the poetry of Hlderlin. A portrait of Hlderlin
accompanies the interview in the pages of Der Spiegel. Spliced in among
the pages of the interview are also a couple of advertisements for antiimpotence devices. Are they there to undercut any gravitas that
Heidegger might be held to possess? The incongruity calls attention to
itself. Perhaps no derision was intended; we would then not need to think
that an old man (Heidegger was 77 at the time of the interview) who sees
no remedy besides the advent of a new god or a gods absence is being
told that a solution is indeed at hand and available for purchase by mail
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order. Perhaps a sexualised consumerism is a way to ward off the
spectres of the Nazi past. The apocalyptic register in which Heidegger
pronounces on the course of world history is, if only in its sweep and in its
despair, a throwback to the discourse of Hitlers dictatorship. One of the
ways in which post-war West Germany turned its back on National
Socialism, with many of its citizens dismissing appeals to the nation and
the fate of Europe as bombastic abstractions, was through the
development of a hedonistic individualism and a domestic consumerism
(if this feuilletonistic generalisation is permissible). The Federal Republic
of Germany thereby also cultivated a resemblance to American society
and was able to advance its rehabilitation in the eyes of the West. If
apolitical individualism is a line of defence against a return of the Nazis
politics of the mobilised masses, it is not for that reason intrinsically
unexceptionable. In the 1960s and 70s resistance arose in West
Germany to the prevailing culture of consumerism and apolitical
individualism. The statements of the terrorist Rote Armee Fraktion, for
instance, often dwelt on the oppressiveness of the contemporary state
and the spuriousness of its democratic credentials. A populace that out of
political lethargy and self-absorption leaves the government to pursue its
ends in effect legitimates it (the Latin expression qui tacet consentire
videtur one who keeps silent is seen to agree enjoys the status of a
procedural principle).
In the interview with Der Spiegel Heidegger situates his analysis of
National Socialism in the context of his reflections on technology.
However, during the early 1930s, in the period of his term as Rector of the
University of Freiburg, Heidegger does not treat technology with the
explicitness and animus of his later writings. By criticising National
Socialism as an aggravated expression of the general evils of technology,
Heidegger can be said to blunt the edge of any denunciation he might
have to make of the regime the world at large is not in a position to
condemn the Nazis because the world at large is complicit in the
technological civilisation of whose destructiveness the Nazis were simply
the most legible manifestation (and Heidegger has nothing to apologise
for). Insofar as Heideggers position amounts to self-righteous
apologetics, then we should find fault with the mans moral blindness and
weakness of character. Yet insofar as it throws a different light on the

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structures and practices of our age, then it should be assessed on its
descriptive merits.
What Heidegger addresses under the name of technology is not the
totality of gadgets and machines, but rather a way in which the world is
disclosed. Technology is a mode in which beings are shown as what they
are. The successes of technology presuppose the dominance of this
mode of disclosure and do not call it into question. The world of
technology is a world that gives itself up to be manipulated. It is a world
in which we recognise beings as material and employ them in our projects
and designs. It is a world in which beings are judged as present, as
objects either determinate or determinable and to be found in specific
times and places. It is a world that gives itself up to human control. More
precisely, as Heidegger refines it, it is a world that gives itself up to being
controlled at the same time as human beings are given up to a definition
of themselves as controllers. Heidegger is sceptical of what human
agency might achieve in the face of technological civilisation because
human agency is constitutive of the problem of this civilisation. And it is
not just a problem with human agency. An abdication of human agency
to the new god that will come would be an abdication of a particular
agency and would not confront the issue of agency itself. The absence of
God, as an absence of the very prototype of agency, is here an occasion
for neither the believers despair nor the atheists jubilation.
During the interview (pp. 45-46) Heidegger refers to the
compromises he made while serving as rector. One of these compromises
is the extravagant statement that identifies Hitler with the law and reality
of Germany. We do not have to accept Heideggers remark to Der Spiegel
in which he backs away from the statement, dismissing it as a strategic
concession to the regime. We might conjecture that Heidegger is more
concerned with his post-war reputation (if he revealed himself to be an
unrepentant Nazi, he would have to forget about being taken seriously as
a philosopher) than with a truthful confession of how he judges the
continuity and cohesion of his utterances. Yet for this to be more than a
conjecture, we would have to construct an interpretation of Heideggers
thought in which the statement regarding Hitler would be of a piece with
the life-long reflections on the question of being (I am not confident that
such an interpretation is feasible). Heidegger declares that he stands by
the rectorial address The Self-Assertion of the German University among
his public pronouncements from 1933. In terms of the trajectory that
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Heidegger traces in the interview, the continuity of his thought is not
interrupted by the political misadventure with Nazism. In this text,
following the Heidegger of 1966, we might expect to see how close
Heidegger the thinker came to the regime, which is also to say, what
distance Heidegger the thinker preserved between himself and the
regime.
The Self-Assertion of the German University is not a manifesto in
which Heidegger champions academic freedom in the face of government
interference. Heideggers counterintuitive claim in the address is that the
university can first properly realise its academic mission under a National
Socialist government. The claim is counterintuitive not just in retrospect,
since already by 1933 the Nazi Party had given clear indication of its
disregard for the protocols of intellectual debate and the verification
procedures of the sciences (the most infamous case would be Philipp
Lenards disputing of Einsteins theory of relativity on the grounds that its
author was Jewish). Corresponding to Heideggers enthusiasm for the
new regime is his discontent with the nature of the German university
under the Weimar Republic. We need not be so generous to Heidegger as
to suggest that his discontent with the old university was so great that it
blinded him to the realities of the Nazis education policies. What is the
problem with the university as Heidegger sees it? It stands apart from the
life of the nation. Heidegger does not propose that it throw over its
commitment to science for the sake of a more practical engagement. It is
not a matter of making a choice between the two, for according to
Heideggers definition of science if we stand apart from the world and
from the existential thickness of history, we forego the pursuit of
knowledge. In his objections to the abstractness of modern science
Heidegger may seem to tack perilously close to the Nazi slogan True is
that which is useful for the people. But the people cannot function as
the extrinsic measure of the worth of the university because, as
Heidegger queries at the very start of the address, it is uncertain that the
Germans know who they are. The German university, as Heidegger
conceives it, will not become a centre for technical training in the service
of the National Socialist regime so much as a site where the selfcertainties that the modern sciences had attained through their
abstractness are plunged back into the questionability of the people. The
disintegration of the university into distinct faculties and disciplines will
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be reversed, not by a unifying set of objectives imposed from without by
the government, but rather by the questionability that inhabits every
discipline and that has been by and large repressed. Knowledge,
inasmuch as it is bound up with comprehensiveness, cannot draw back
from a confrontation with the existential thickness of the world. In Being
and Time Heidegger argues that the modern sciences rely on a flattening
of the world. Space as a mensurable continuum is substituted for the
lived experience of the world around us and the success of modern
physics plays itself out within the restrictions of this abstract space.
Heidegger exhorts the sciences to push beyond the constructed domains
over which they are sovereign to an encounter with fate. It could be said
that Heidegger adheres to the motto of Husserls phenomenology, To the
things themselves! (Zu den Sachen selbst!). Unlike Husserl, Heidegger
depicts the undertaking as tragic. The encounter with fate, to which the
inmost essence of the sciences binds them, will not turn out well. At
stake is not an extension of the scope of the sciences. The sciences are
to fail. In the interview with Der Spiegel Heidegger expresses dismay that
his address was not better received. Otto Wacker, the education minister
of the state of Baden, for his part, considered the address something of a
missed opportunity, commenting on its private, i.e. unrecognisable
National Socialism (Hitler goes unmentioned, for instance).
Heidegger invokes the failure of the sciences. It is a failure,
however, that will come as the reward of their exertion in the pursuit of
knowledge. It is through failure rather than through resignation and
surrender that the sciences will arrive at the truth of the entire might of
the concealedness of what is (p. 31). The concealedness of beings (die
Verborgenheit des Seienden) is a recurrent question in Heideggers
writings: as we will see, it plays a pivotal role in the treatment of truth in
the essay On the Essence of Truth. In taking up the concealedness of
beings in the rectorial address Heidegger establishes the text in the
continuity of his philosophical enterprise. Having been appointed the
head of the university, Heidegger seeks to win over his colleagues for his
own thinking. Is this a resurgence of that dream of philosophys
supremacy in the university which Kant touches upon when he calls
metaphysics the queen of the sciences? Is it yet another of those
attempts, criticised by Jean-Franois Lyotard, in which philosophy sets out
to install itself as the master narrative over the other disciplines?
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Heidegger, however, is not laying claim to a discursive truth to which the
other disciplines must subordinate themselves and by which their own
findings are to be evaluated. The overarching frame that he introduces is
the failure in which all the disciplines, philosophy included, might
participate.
What could have induced Heidegger to imagine that the Nazis
seizure of power presented the conditions for this reshaping of the
vocation of the university? Heidegger was susceptible to the martial
rhetoric of the movement, to the idea that everything is at stake and that
everything should be at stake, even if it means defeat. The idiosyncratic
translation of Plato with which Heidegger ends the address inserts a
reference to the storm an orthodox Nazi image where Platos word
episphale would be translated more conventionally as precarious,
unstable or in danger.
The third text that I have set for this week is the first written of the
three, the lecture What is Metaphysics? from 1929. In the lecture
Heidegger laments that the sciences are drifting apart. Heidegger cites
this lecture in his interview with Der Spiegel when he names the
disintegration of the university as the fundamental motive behind his
decision to accept the rectorate of the University of Freiburg (p. 43).
What is Metaphysics? is one of Heideggers most famous texts. It is
somewhat of a taster for Heideggers writings of the period, offering
abridged treatments of dread (Angst) and boredom (Langeweile) where
Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics are more
expansive. In its employment of the term metaphysics the lecture
marks itself as belonging to Heideggers early period. From the late
1930s on Heidegger no longer sees himself as endeavouring to revive and
reinvent metaphysics; instead, he is committed to its critique and
exhaustion. This difference should be borne in mind throughout the
semester. In the writings from the 1920s and early 30s, when Heidegger
refers to his own project as metaphysics, he is not claiming that it
complies with the conventional, modern understanding of metaphysics
(Being and Time is anything other than business as usual). He wants to
indicate that his own thinking is in dialogue with the primordial
questioning of ancient Greek philosophy. His later pejorative use of the
term does not entail a repudiation of the questioning of the ancient
Greeks as such. It is the rigidification of metaphysics in the succeeding
centuries that Heidegger now employs the term to denote.
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Heideggers lecture departs markedly from the norms of academic
discourse. It does not flout these norms from ignorance. This willingness
to reinvent the style of philosophy is commonly regarded as a
Nietzschean legacy. Philosophy has come to a dead end. It is only by
redefining itself that it might hope to remain in contact with its original
questions. On a feuilletonistic level, Heidegger won for himself a
readership among the broader public by his analyses of such phenomena
as anxiety and by his disenchantment with the status quo. He seemed to
speak to the times. But even if his hymn to nothingness does not appear
at odds with the pessimism prevailing in Germany in the wake of its
defeat in the First World War and in the grip of economic depression and
political instability, it is conceived with an ontological agenda. The fear of
nothingness is, in a certain respect, grist to the mill for Heidegger, since
his reflections on it are contributions to his larger, life-long undertaking,
which is the question of Being (behind the German Expressionist in
Heidegger there is a pre-Socratic).
Reading What is Metaphysics? and The Self-Assertion of the
German University together, we might tell ourselves that the 1929
lecture furnishes us with another way of understanding the failure to
which the 1933 address pledges the sciences. The disintegration of the
university with which both texts begin is countered in the 1929 lecture
with the proposal that the sciences, however different in their methods
and avowed objects, all share a relationship to the nothing. But the
nothing is not the common ground on which we might rebuild a unified
edifice of the sciences. In a substitution that Heidegger makes more than
once in his writings, it is an abyss (Abgrund) rather than a ground
(Grund). This abyssal common ground will be the occasion of the
common failure of the sciences. In the 1933 address Heidegger speaks of
fate (Schicksal) rather than the nothing as that on which the sciences are
to founder. The term fate is not a concession to the terminology of the
Nazi regime (Hitler, in his megalomania, was wont to identify himself with
providence). 74 of Being and Time already discusses fate at some
length. It is hard to believe that Heidegger intends fate and the nothing
to be convertible, although both terms operate in a discourse on the
nature of human finitude (both terms signify the limits of human agency).
Heidegger argues that the nothing contaminates all of human
endeavour. He denies that this is to be understood in the logical sense by
which Spinoza and Hegel, for instance, understand negativity. The Latin
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phrase of Hegels that he wrongly attributes to Spinoza reads omnis
determinatio est negatio (all determination is negation). Whatever
distinctness an entity possesses is through a negative relation to other
entities. A tree is recognisable as a tree because it is simultaneously
recognisable as not-a-walrus, not-a-preposition, not-a-gesture, etc. The
negativity that Heidegger declares permeates beings does not originate in
the human mind as a linguistic act that we have at our disposal. It is not,
in Hegels sense, the power of Spirit. For Heidegger, the nothing precedes
and enables/disables the negations in which the human mind finds its way
among entities. Heidegger and Hegel agree on negativitys saturation of
the world, but Heidegger diverges from Hegel in holding that negativity is
not the power of the human spirit, but rather that which overpowers
human existence. In writings in the 1930s and 40s Heidegger takes
issue with the way in which Hegel understands finitude. He censures the
earlier thinker for dodging the challenge of finitude, translating the
nothingness to which we are exposed as existing beings into the power of
negativity of human thought.
All the sciences brush up against the nothing, which is not simply
their respective determinations, the limit beyond which they are not
themselves. In order to grasp themselves in the specificity of their fields
and procedures, the sciences use the nothing to mark off their
jurisdictions. The nothing is constantly invoked but as soon as we ask
what the nothing is, we find that our question is inadequate because the
question is directed towards the comprehension of an entity (What is
x?), which the nothing is not. Heideggers disagreement here with the
normal approach to figuring out the nature of the world (we ask what
something, standing over against us, is) is a disagreement with the
understanding of the world as a collection of objects standing over
against a subject. By stressing the primordiality of the nothing,
Heidegger wants to upset the schema according to which negativity
occurs between entities as a proof of the power and independence of the
human mind. Heidegger raises up nothingness at the same time as he
appears to downgrade human beings. The apparent misanthropy of this
move attracted criticism from all sides, from among Nazi enthusiasts and
from migr intellectuals such as Ernst Cassirer. For Heidegger, it is the
insight into finitude rather than any decadent misanthropy that is behind
his reassessment of humanity. A proper understanding of finitude is
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needed in order to make sense of the nature of time and Being. Being
and Time, from which we will read excerpts starting in week 3, is a book
on finitude.

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