Heidegger S Question of Being Dasein Truth and History PDF

Heidegger’s Question of Being
Studies in Philosophy and the

History of Philosophy
General Editor: John C. McCarthy
Volume 59
Dasein, Truth, and History
Edited by Holger Zaborowski
The Catholic University of America Press

Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2017
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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Libr a ry of Congr ess Cata logi ng-i n-Pu blication Data

Names: Zaborowski, Holger, 1974– editor.
Title: Heidegger’s question of being : Dasein, truth, and history / edited
by Holger Zaborowski.
Description: Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University of America
Press, 2017. |
Series: Studies in philosophy and the history of philosophy ; Volume 59 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009725 | ISBN 9780813229546 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. | Ontology.
Classification: LCC B3279.H49 H46 2017 | DDC 193—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009725
Contents
Abbreviations vii
Holger Zaborowski, Introduction 1

1. Daniel Dahlstrom, Rethinking Difference 8
2. Richard Capobianco, Reaffirming Heidegger’s “The Truth
of Being” 26
3. Rudolf Bernet, Heidegger on Aristotle: dunamis as Force
and Drive 49
4. William McNeill, Tracing technē: Heidegger, Aristotle, and
the Legacy of Philosophy 71
5. Rudolf A. Makkreel, Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading
of Kant: A Kehre about Judgment 90
6. Richard Polt, Drawing the Line: Political Thought in
Heidegger’s Lecture Courses and Seminars of 1933–35 106
Richard Velkley, Political Philosophy and the Ontological
7.
Question: Preliminary Remarks on Heidegger and Strauss 143
8. Holger Zaborowski, Technology, Truth, and Thinking:
Martin Heidegger’s Reading of Ernst Jünger’s The Worker 165
9. Theodore Kisiel, How Heidegger Resolved the Tension between
Technological Globalization and Indigenous Localization:
A Twenty-First-Century Retrieval 184
10. Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Poetic Measure: An Ethics
of Haunting 207
Selected Bibliography 225 | Contributors 233
Index of Names 235 | Index of Subjects 237
Abbreviations
Abbreviations
The following list of abbreviations refers to volumes in the complete works

of Martin Heidegger: Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klos-
termann, 1975– ).
GA 4 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (ed. von Herrmann)

GA 6.1/6.2 Nietzsche I/II (ed. Schillbach)
GA 7 Vorträge und Aufsätze (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 8 Was heißt Denken? (ed. Coriando)
GA 9 Wegmarken (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 10 Der Satz vom Grund (ed. Jaeger)
GA 12 Unterwegs zur Sprache (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 13 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976 (ed. Heidegger)
GA 14 Zur Sache des Denkens (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 15 Vier Seminare (ed. Ochwadt)
GA 16 Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (ed. Heidegger)
GA 18 Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (ed. Michalski)
GA 19 Platon: Sophistes (ed. Schüssler)
GA 22 Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (ed. Blust)
GA 23 Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant (ed. Vetter)
GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 25 Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen
Vernunft (ed. Görland)
GA 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz
(ed. Held)
GA 27 Einleitung in die Philosophie (ed. Saame)
GA 29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit
(ed. von Herrmann)
vii
viii Abbreviations
GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie

(ed. Tietjen)
GA 33 Aristoteles, Metaphysik Theta 1–3. Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit
der Kraft (ed. Hüni)
GA 34 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet
(ed. Mörchen)
GA 39 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (ed. Ziegler)
GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik (ed. Jaeger)
GA 45 Grundfragen der Philosophie (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 52 Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” (ed. Ochwadt)
GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (ed. Biemel)
GA 54 Parmenides (ed. Frings)
GA 55 Heraklit (ed. Frings)
GA 56/57 Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (ed. Heimbüchel)
GA 62 Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen
des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik (ed. Neumann)
GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 66 Besinnung (ed. von Herrmann)
GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns (ed. Trawny)
GA 70 Über den Anfang (ed. Coriando)
GA 73 Zum Ereignis-Denken (ed. Trawny)
GA 76 Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen
Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik (ed. Strube)
GA 77 Feldweg-Gespräche (ed. Schüssler)
GA 78 Der Spruch des Anaximander (ed. Schüssler)
GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (ed. Jaeger)
GA 86 Seminare: Hegel—Schelling (ed. Trawny)
GA 88 Einübung in das philosophische Denken (ed. Denker)
GA 90 Zu Ernst Jünger (ed. Trawny)
GA 94 Überlegungen II-VI. Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938 (ed. Trawny)
GA 95 Überlegungen VII-IX. Schwarze Hefte 1938/39 (ed. Trawny)
GA 96 Überlegungen XII-XV. Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941 (ed. Trawny)
GA 97 Anmerkungen I-V. Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948 (ed. Trawny)
Holger Zaborowski
Introduction
Holger Zaborowski
Introduction
Martin Heidegger is one of the most important twentieth-century

phi-
losophers. His works are widely read and discussed not only in philoso-
phy, but also in theology and in the other humanities, in the social and
natural sciences, in medicine, particularly in psychiatry, and well be-
yond the academic world. It goes without saying that there are not many
thinkers who influenced the course of contemporary thought to a com-
parable extent. Heidegger research is, therefore, not just of interest to
highly specialized students of his philosophy. There is a more general in-
terest in the key ideas of his philosophy, in their presuppositions, impli-
cations, and problems, and in the reception of his thought.
The number of open and controversially discussed questions in con-
temporary Heidegger research is very high. There are important ques-
tions that concern the development, as it were, of his thought and the dif-
ferences and similarities between his early main work, Being and Time,
and his later so-called
being-historical thought, the thinking of the event,
or appropriation, of Being. There are questions that focus on his relation
to important figures in the history of ideas such as the Presocratics, Plato,
Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, the German Idealists, and
Nietzsche. Other questions, particularly after the recent publication of a
number of his Black Notebooks, focus on his biography, on his rectorate,
on his relation to politics in general and to National Socialism in particu-
lar, on his anti-Semitism, or on his influence on subsequent philosophers.
The contributions to this volume, written by leading scholars in the
field of Heidegger research, address many of these questions in close read-
ings of Heidegger’s texts and thus provide sound orientation in the field
1
2 Holger Zaborowski
of contemporary Heidegger research. This volume shows how the differ-

ent trajectories of Heidegger’s thought—his early interest in the meaning
of Being and in Dasein, his discussion of, and involvement with, politics,
his understanding of art, poetry, and technology, his concept of truth and
the idea of a history of Being—all converge at one point: the question of
Being. All differences notwithstanding, Heidegger thus followed one very
consistent path of thinking.
The volume is based on the 2011 lecture series “Heidegger” in the
School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. This lecture
series was made possible by a generous grant from the Franklin J. Mat
chette Foundation and the support of the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey
Foundation and the George Dougherty Foundation. I would like to ex-
press my deepest gratitude to these foundations for their support and to
the late Fr. Kurt Pritzl, OP, then dean of the School of Philosophy, for
asking me to organize the lecture series and to edit the present volume.
I also would like to thank two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript
for their helpful comments, and John B. Martino, Theresa B. Walker, and
Paul Higgins from the Catholic University of America Press for their
help and cooperation in bringing this book into print.
In the first essay, “Rethinking Difference,” Daniel Dahlstrom fo-
cuses on Heidegger’s understanding of the ontological difference, that
is, the difference between Being and beings. He argues persuasively that
Heidegger at first understood this difference with respect to the tran-
scendence of human existence. Humans can ask for the sense of Being
in general. This, Heidegger held, is grounded in the kind of timeliness
that characterizes Dasein. In his chapter Dahlstrom states that Hei-
degger considered his early understanding of the ontological difference
to be provisional. He goes on to show how he significantly transformed
the early question of being and how he transitioned to thinking about a
more primordial difference, that is, the difference of Dasein from histori-
cal Being. Dahlstrom thus introduces Heidegger’s early phenomenology
of Dasein, his later thought of the history, or destiny, of Being, and the
complex relation between the former and the latter. He also examines
Heidegger’s contribution to ontology and the philosophical claim of this
thought.
Richard Capobianco, in “Reaffirming Heidegger’s ‘The Truth of Be-
ing,’ ” continues some of these concerns and pays particular attention to
Introduction 3
what he considers the “core matter” of Heidegger’s way of thinking. This

matter is the question of truth, that is, the relation of the truth of Being
to Dasein (or the question of how “Being truths”). Capobianco provides a
close and compelling reading of key texts by Heidegger on truth, Ereig-
nis, Lichtung, and the forgetfulness of Being. He shows to what extent al-
ready the early Heidegger’s philosophy differed from Husserl’s and how
he transformed the question of Being as “truthing,” i.e., as the temporal
opening of all beings. Capobianco follows Heidegger’s reading of the his-
tory of philosophy and the development of his own thought until the ear-
ly 1970s to show how Heidegger then understood Being itself as the clear-
ing, as the event, and how he invites his readers to think about the truth
of Being—or Being as truth—in a new and still largely underappreciated
way.
Rudolf Bernet provides a close reading of Heidegger’s lecture courses
on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics in “Heidegger on Aristotle: duna-
mis as Force and Drive.” Bernet explains why Heidegger was so particu-
larly interested in Aristotle’s concept of dunamis. His understanding of
movement and its structure, Bernet convincingly argues, provided Hei-
degger with the basis for his understanding of human existence. Bernet
begins by examining Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s view of the
structure of movement in terms of making something and of the par-
ticularity of natural movements, the movement of living beings that has
both its origin and its end in their life. He then goes on to focus on Hei-
degger’s reading of Aristotle’s analysis of dunamis as the double force
of the living being that integrates in itself a tension and an opposition,
that is, the poles of activity and passivity, of resistance and unforce. Hei-
degger thus found a new understanding of dunamis. He applied this un-
derstanding, as Bernet shows, not only to the movement of living beings
in general, but to the movement of human beings in particular such that
he could develop a new understanding of human life. This new under-
standing, Bernet demonstrates, focuses on logos the “having” of which is
a distinct feature of human existence. Their movement is, therefore, ex-
posed to, and revealed by, logos.
The next contribution also focuses on Heidegger’s reading of Ar-
istotle. In “Tracing technē: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Legacy of Phi-
losophy,” William McNeill explains how his attentive and original read-
ing of Aristotle helped Heidegger to formulate key insights of Being and
4 Holger Zaborowski
Time. McNeill situates Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the context of

his destruction of the history of metaphysics in the 1920s. Greek ontolo-
gy (and, therefore, the whole history of metaphysics), Heidegger thought,
understood human existence in terms of human works, that is, in terms
of technē. McNeill discusses Heidegger’s retrieval of Aristotelian praxis
(i.e., human action) and phronesis (i.e., authentic self-understanding) as
disclosing a more original horizon and the specific kind of temporality
of human existence (as different from the time of natural things). He thus
shows how Heidegger could question, and break with, the interpretative
horizon of technē. This perspective also allowed Heidegger to develop his
insight into the primordial meaning of truth as unconcealment. McNeill
goes on to examine Heidegger’s retrieval of Aristotelian technē from the
late 1920s throughout the mid-1930s
against the background of his phe-
nomenological interest in the question of world, its happening, and its
poetic dimension. McNeill’s discussion makes Heidegger’s interest in the
work of art and his being-historical thinking understandable—not as a
radical break with his previous interests, but as a continuation of them.
Rudolf A. Makkreel discusses “Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading
of Kant: A Kehre about Judgment” in his contribution to this volume.
As Makkreel points out, Heidegger was critical of the second edition
of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and did not consider it an improve-
ment. The reason is that Kant, so Heidegger argued in his famous book
about Kant’s philosophy, overemphasized in the second edition the sig-
nificance of timeless concepts of understanding in comparison to the
temporal schematization of the imagination and also made imagina-
tion completely dependent on understanding. The second edition thus
pointed toward German Idealism and the epistemological focus of the
Marburg neo-Kantians.
According to Heidegger, however, schematizing
imagination plays an important role in the human access to the world as
an ontological access. Therefore, his reading of the first edition focuses
on such an access that provides the ground for intellectual representa-
tions of it. Makkreel also discusses Heidegger’s later reading of Kant’s
first Critique and provides a compelling account of his reassessment of
the second edition. Heidegger now admitted that the second edition clar-
ified what Kant said about the function of judgment. Makkreel thus dis-
cusses Heidegger’s multifarious relation to Kant’s philosophy and also
examines forcefully the limits of his interpretation.
Introduction 5
Richard Polt focuses on Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s and on

its political dimension. This topic is particularly important with re-
spect to the ongoing debate about Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the
anti-Semitic dimension of his thought. In his contribution, entitled

“Drawing the Line: Political Thought in Heidegger’s Lecture Courses
and Seminars of 1933–35,” Polt provides an in-depth analysis of key ideas
that Heidegger developed during his time as rector of Freiburg Univer-
sity and immediately after his resignation. He focuses particularly on the
1933–34 course “On the Essence of Truth” which is based on an earli-
er lecture course on Plato’s allegory of the cave (a very political topic,
of course) and his Theaetetus. Polt discusses the deeply ambiguous and
problematic character of these texts and argues convincingly that Hei-
degger, in his understanding of the Heraclitean polemos as Kampf, for
example, made a philosophical and at the same time deeply troubling
political statement insofar as he provided the outline of an anti-liberal
philosophical foundation of Nazi politics. Polt goes on to show how Hei-
degger abandoned concrete politics and became increasingly critical of
Nazism and totalitarianism. However, he also rightly raises the issue as
to whether Heidegger’s understanding of humanity is not too schematic
and oversimplified after all. In his concluding remarks, Polt provides a
persuasive critique of Heidegger’s thought and its political implications
that takes human finitude and freedom seriously and avoids, and dis-
tances itself from, the weak and problematic elements of his thought.
Richard Velkley’s “Political Philosophy and the Ontological Question:
Preliminary Remarks on Heidegger and Strauss” also addresses the ques-
tion of the political dimension of Heidegger’s thought. Velkley points out
that although there is, strictly speaking, no political philosophy in Hei-
degger, his thought has a considerable political dimension insofar as he
dealt with, and criticized, the crisis of the West. Velkley first examines
Heidegger’s philosophy of Being in its relation to politics and his under-
standing of Western metaphysics and its completion in the metaphysics
of the will to power. He then shows that Leo Strauss was aware of this
special kind of political dimension and that Heidegger’s understanding
of the crisis of the West was the very starting point of his own attempt
at renewing Socratic political philosophy. Velkley argues convincingly
that Strauss’s key problem with Heidegger was not, as is often thought,
the problem of relativism. It was the question whether Socratic skepticism
6 Holger Zaborowski
could offer the best response to the crisis of the West. This was, indeed,
Strauss’s view. Heidegger, however, as Velkley argues, remained a “dog-
matist of sorts” because he did not draw the skeptical conclusions of his
student. He did not, in other words, have a sufficient understanding of the
intrinsic limits of philosophy.
In his contribution to this volume, Holger Zaborowski focuses on
Heidegger’s interpretation of Ernst Jünger’s influential book The Worker
and provides a close reading of Heidegger’s numerous notes on Jünger
(and briefly comments on their later dialogue about the fate of modern
nihilism). He argues that Jünger, who used an almost phenomenologi-
cal method in describing the Gestalt, or form, of the worker, exercised
a particular influence on Heidegger in the 1930s. His initial reading of
Jünger’s book was positive as is shown by its resonances in some of the
texts that Heidegger wrote during his rectorate. He could use The Worker
both to understand the political situation of the early 1930s and to politi-
cize his own philosophy. During the 1930s, Heidegger’s reading of Jünger
became more critical. Now, Jünger’s phenomenology of the worker no
longer provided for him the solution to the problem of the completion of
metaphysics in modern nihilism. It was part of it insofar as it stood, as
Heidegger argued, in the same metaphysical framework as Nietzsche’s
thought. Nevertheless, Heidegger attributed to Jünger that he reformu-
lated Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in a way that took prop-
er notice of the inevitable impact of modern technology such that his
interest in the essence of modern technology finds an important root in
Jünger’s analysis.
In the next essay, Theodore Kisiel analyzes “How Heidegger Re-
solved the Tension between Technological Globalization and Indigenous
Localization: A Twenty-First-Century Retrieval.” Kisiel shows conclu-
sively how Heidegger’s ideas about technicity and the essence of mod-
ern technology can also be applied to the technological development of
the twenty-first century. For Heidegger, the essence of technology is what
he calls Gestell. Kisiel translates this word etymologically as “syn-thetic
composit[ion]ing” and discusses the different dimensions of Gestell. It re-
veals nature, for example, as “storage place of energy”; everything turns
into a standing-reserve and becomes disposable; things are no longer ob-
jects, but “consumer goods”; Being is increasingly forgotten or under-
stood as mere will to power. Kisiel points out that Heidegger does not at
Introduction 7
all reject modern technology. He knew that such an attempt would have
been impossible. Technology, he held, is our destiny. Instead, Heidegger
is looking for a new kind of thinking that focuses on the meaning, the
Sinn, of technology that is not made by human beings. Kisiel thus shows
how Heidegger’s thought remains important for the contemporary age
in providing a framework not only for an understanding and critique of
the present situation, but also for a more mindful (besinnlich) relation to
what is and for dwelling humanly, locally and in a rooted manner in a
time of increasing alienation, uprooting, and globalization.
The last essay of this volume, written by Charles Bambach, is enti-
tled “Heidegger’s Poetic Measure: An Ethics of Haunting.” Like Theo-
dore Kisiel, Bambach shows that Heidegger’s philosophy is neither un-
nor anti-ethical. Heidegger, he argues, provided important insights into
what ethics could mean after the death of the moral God. In his reading
of Hölderlin’s poetry, Bambach argues, one can find important thoughts
about a “poetic measure.” This measure, however, does not serve as a
standard for moral or legal rules. Who takes measure poetically—par-
ticularly poets such as Hölderlin—does not take anything, but rather re-
leases what cannot be thought of prior to its being given. This kind of
measure-taking is difficult and strange; it is the thinking of the event of
Being, the dwelling in the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mor-
tals. These considerations led Heidegger to a new understanding of “jus-
tice,” of dike, too. In his dialogue with the Presocratics Heraclitus and
Anaximander, Heidegger conceives of time itself, or even Being, as dike,
as fittingness. As Bambach shows, Heidegger’s understanding of ethos
further focuses on letting-be
(Gelassenheit) and on human dwelling as
Aufenthalt, as abode or sojourn. The volume thus concludes with con-
tributions that particularly emphasize the contemporary significance
of Heidegger’s thought for ethics and political philosophy—without ne-
glecting its limits or intrinsic problems.
Daniel Dahlstrom
Rethinking Difference
Daniel Dahlstrom
1 S Rethinking Difference
According to Heidegger, the difference between being and beings is the

most essential difference of all. Not surprisingly it is a constant in his
thinking from beginning to end. Yet in the course of his work, he rethinks
this difference fundamentally, recognizing its at times ambivalent sense
and even insisting on the need to abandon various versions of it. Indeed,
consideration of Heidegger’s rethinking of the difference between being
and beings provides a valuable lens on his thinking as a whole, through
all its twists and turns. In particular, this rethinking plays a crucial role
in his attempts to clarify what he dubs the basic question (Grundfrage), a
question that calls for a different, nonmetaphysical sort of thinking. The
aim of the following paper is to explain his rethinking of the ontologi-
cal difference at this juncture (1935–38). The first part of the paper sets the
stage by reviewing how Heidegger first thinks of the ontological differ-
ence in terms of the distinctive transcendence of human existence (Das-
ein). The second part then attempts to explain how and why he rethinks
the ontological difference in terms of a more primordial difference.
The Ontological Difference

Whatever we are dealing with, whatever we find in our path, by the very
fact that we deal with it, we take it as something rather than nothing. It
may be a friend, a number, a problem, something natural or something
artificial, but whatever it is, we take it to “be” in some sense. Of course,
there are other ways of construing it just as there are other things that
8
Rethinking Difference 9
we take to be. Saying that something exists is by no means all that can
be said of it. Still, we regularly distinguish between an entity’s being and
other things that we may say of it. In a way, when we say that something
exists, we pass over anything and everything else that may be said of it,
we move beyond whatever else it is, and, in that sense, we may be said
to transcend it, particularly since, in much the same way, we may say of
something else that it exists. But if so, then the question presents itself of
what it means to say that something, indeed, anything exists.
In the 1920s Heidegger saw this question as the basic question of on-
tology. Thus, in Being and Time he defines ontology as the science of the
being of beings.1 However, he faults ontologies for being “naïve and lack-
ing transparency” if they fail to address the question of the sense of be-
ing in general.2 Without mentioning the ontological difference by name,
Heidegger invokes the difference between being and beings in an effort
to motivate his fundamental ontology, aimed at determining the sense
of being. Since being, far from being something free-floating or existing
by itself, is always the being of some entity, some particular being, it is
necessary to begin with the investigation of the manner of being of one
particular sort of entity.3 In Being and Time Heidegger famously employs
an ordinary German term for existence, namely, “Dasein,” but does so
in a restrictive sense that is equivalent but not identical to “human be-
ing.” In this special use of the term, “Dasein” denotes the sort of being
that understands being and, indeed, such that being matters to it. He ar-
gues that Dasein, by virtue of this disposed understanding (befindliches
Verstehen), enjoys a certain prerogative over other entities. This disposed
understanding of being is what enables Dasein to care about entities, in-
cluding itself, and relate, theoretically and practically, to them. Thus, on
the analysis given in Being and Time, the ontological difference is rooted
in Dasein. Dasein, with its distinctive, existential understanding of be-
ing, triangulates being and beings (see figures 1-1 to 1-2a below).
1. SZ 37. All references to Being and Time are cited as “SZ” followed by the pagination of
the standard Niemeyer (Tübingen) edition, cited in all English translations. I cite the volumes
of Heidegger’s Complete Edition (Gesamtausgabe) for all other references to his work, by using
the standard abbreviation “GA” followed by the volume number, a colon, and the pagination.
2. SZ 11. So, too, in “What Is Metaphysics?” he speaks of “the genuinely metaphysical in-
quiry into the being of beings” and “the question of being as such” as “the encompassing ques-
tion of metaphysics” (GA 9:120).
3. SZ 9.
10 Daniel Dahlstrom
In the second section of Being and Time Heidegger endeavors to

demonstrate that the sense of Dasein’s being when it exists authentical-
ly is a distinctive timeliness (Zeitlichkeit), underlying but not to be con-
fused with derivative conceptions of time. “Sense” here signifies that in
terms of which Dasein understands and has access to being (and thereby
to itself), when it cares authentically. Ontologically conceived, Dasein is
its existential understanding of being, its being and others, and time is
what makes sense of this understanding when it is authentic; in other
words, Dasein paradigmatically understands being as time (even if the
understanding is for the most part tacit); it projects being onto time as
the horizon within which being—and thereby beings as well—are under-
standable.4
After demonstrating how this timely character paradigmatically pro-
vides the sense of Dasein’s being, Heidegger elaborates how versions of
timeliness provide the ultimate ontological sense of Dasein’s existen-
tial constitution in general, from its basic modes of disclosing and its
being-in-the-world to its distinctive spatiality and everydayness. Of cen-
tral importance, particularly given Heidegger’s development, is his char-
acterization of Dasein’s transcendence. In order for Dasein to thematize
anything on hand, Heidegger contends, it must transcend what is on hand
and since thematizing amounts to a change-over from uncovering in prac-
tice, a transcending by Dasein must underlie its practice, too.5 To take
something as being is at once to distinguish it from its being and to tran-
scend it by taking it as something that does not perfectly coincide with it
(perhaps because being can be said of other things). Whatever particular,
innerworldly beings we are concerned with, theoretically or practically,
presupposes that we in some sense transcend them by way of understand-
ing what it means for them to be.
But transcending them and understanding what it means for them
to be is grounded in Dasein’s distinctive timeliness. Timeliness is always
at once ecstatic and horizonal. The ecstatic character is the movement
of Dasein, the futurity of projecting and coming to itself, the past (liter-
ally, “having been”) of coming back to its thrownness, and the present of
being alongside entities, thanks to its thrown projection. Each of these
ecstases, as Heidegger dubs them, has a horizon: Dasein’s projects pos-
4. SZ 323.
5. SZ 363.
sibilities for its own sake as the horizon of its future; it comes back to
what to what it has been thrown into as the horizon of its having-been;

and it is alongside things for some intermediate purpose as the horizon
of its present. These horizons, together with the ecstasies, form a unity.
For example, I am alongside my desk, making it present, only inasmuch
it serves some intermediate purpose. In turn, this purpose (this “in or-
der to” that forms the horizon for making present) springs from how I
project possibilities for my sake in this situation into which I have been
thrown. My timeliness is ecstatically and horizonally unified; that is to
say, the way I am alongside things within the world in order to accom-
plish this or that springs from the way that I project myself for the sake
of myself and, in the process, come back to my thrownness. Heidegger
accordingly observes that time, in this fundamental sense, is “the condi-
tion of the possibility of being-in-the-world,
in which the being of inner-
worldly beings is grounded.”6
None of these ecstasies or horizons is more primordial than any oth-
er. None has any standing outside the process of time itself. They come
as a package, distinct but inseparable characteristics of the most basic
phenomenon of the process of time. This unity of ecstasies and hori-
zons constitutes for Heidegger the primordial phenomenon of the fu-
ture, past, and present. It is also the constitutive sense of Dasein’s exis-
tence, the condition of its possibility. But insofar as this is the case, that
is, “insofar as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is, too.”7 The world, on
Heidegger’s account, is grounded in the horizonal unity of ecstatic tem-
porality. That is to say, the world is the fusion—within a single, unified
horizon—of what things are for, how Dasein comes to itself, projecting
possibilities for its own sake, all the while returning to its facticity, to
what has been left to it. It is with this unity of temporal horizons in mind
that Heidegger declares emphatically: “The t imely-existential condition of
the possibility of the world lies in the fact that timeliness as an ecstatic uni-
ty has something like a horizon.”8
The foregoing review of Heidegger’s analysis of time as the sense of
Dasein’s being may have seemed like a detour from concern with the on-
tological difference and the conception of transcendence he employs to
6. SZ 351.
7. SZ 365.
8. SZ 365.
12 Daniel Dahlstrom
navigate that difference in Being and Time. But the detour was neces-
sary to get at the heart of Heidegger’s conception of transcendence in
this connection. For the world (or worldhood, as Heidegger sometimes
puts it more precisely), grounded in the timeliness that is the sense of our
existence, is the being that transcends particular beings, according to the
existential analysis of Being and Time. On this score, Heidegger is quite
explicit: “Having its ground in the horizonal unity of ecstatic timeliness,
the world is transcendent.”9 Recourse to the ecstatically-horizonally
founded transcendence of the world is, Heidegger submits, the answer
to the legitimate question of how entities can be encountered within the
world and objectified.10
In the years immediately following the publication of Being and Time,
Heidegger explicitly discusses the ontological difference as a basic onto-
logical problem and the timeliness of Dasein as the key to solving it.11 As
he puts it in lectures on the “Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology”
(1927), “the possibility of ontology stands or falls with the possibility of
crossing over from the ontic consideration of beings to the ontological
thematizing of being.”12 Such thematizing requires an understanding of
being as such, which in turn supposes an understanding of Dasein as the
entity with that understanding. At this point, Heidegger presupposes as
“justified” the result of the existential analysis in Being and Time, name-
ly, that “the constitution of Dasein’s being is grounded in timeliness.”13
But this result still leaves the question of the sense of being unanswered.
Heidegger proposes to take this final step by way of introducing the term
“temporality.” While admitting that it is practically a synonym of “time-
liness,” he introduces it to designate the “condition of the possibility of
the understanding of being and of ontology as such.”14 In other words,
having understood Dasein in terms of its timeliness (Zeitlichkeit), he now
9. SZ 365.
10. SZ 366. This elaboration of transcendence could be embellished by way of review of
the traditional medieval meaning of “transcendence” and the Kantian meaning of the “trans-
cendental,” two meanings that he combines here with one another and with his own concep-
tion of truth. See SZ 38: “Sein ist das transcendens schlechthin . . . Jede Erschließung von Sein als
des transcendens ist transzendentale Erkenntnis. Phänomenologische Wahrheit (Erschlossenheit
von Sein) ist veritas transcendentalis.”
11. GA 24:322; GA 26:193, 201; GA 9:118, 131–35, 167–75.
12. GA 24:322.
13. GA 24:323.
14. GA 24:324.
proposes to understand being in terms of temporality (Temporalität) and,

indeed, to do so as a means of establishing the basis of the ontological dif-
ference.
One might well object that this approach continues to take Dasein’s
timeliness as a baseline, leaving the question open of whether, indeed,
the sense of being of entities is exhausted by their potential encounter
with Dasein. Heidegger appears to be sensitive to this question. In lec-
tures in 1928, after posing the question of whether the interpretation of
Dasein as timeliness could be construed in a universally-ontological way,
he admits that the question is one that he cannot himself decide, that it is
still fully obscure to him.15
These misgivings notwithstanding, in the following semester (1928/29)
he explicitly equates the understanding of being with the possibility of the
ontological difference and, indeed, a possibility that rests upon the tran-
scending that defines Dasein.16 So, too, in “On the Essence of Ground,”
his 1929 contribution to a Festschrift for Husserl, he emphasizes that on-
tological truth (the unveiledness of being) first makes possible ontic truth
(the manifestness of beings).17 The two truths, the truth about the being
of beings and the truth about beings in their being, belong together, he
adds, on the basis of their relation to the ontological difference. The onto-
logical difference becomes a distinguishing fact (more precisely, a factical
distinctiveness, in Heidegger’s jargon) of Dasein, namely, its capacity to
relate to beings on the basis of an understanding of being. In other words,
in the figurative words employed by Heidegger here, the very possibility
of differentiating being and beings is rooted in Dasein’s essence. Echoing
his earlier remarks in Being and Time, he observes: “By way of anticipa-
tion, we may call this ground of the ontological difference the transcen-
dence of Dasein.”18
Heidegger devotes the largest part of this 1929 essay to elucidating
what he means by transcendence. We need not tarry over all the details,
but as he grounds the ontological difference at this point in transcen-
dence and later abandons the latter notion, the essential aspects of this
15. GA 26:271. In regard to this issue, see my paper “The End of Fundamental Ontology,”
in Division III of Being and Time: Heidegger’s Unanswered Question of Being, ed. Lee Braver
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), 83–103.
16. GA 27:223.
17. GA 9:131–35.
18. GA 9:135.
14 Daniel Dahlstrom
grounding deserve mention. He repeats his insistence, already flagged in

his 1927 lectures (“Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology”), that in-
tentionality is only possible on the basis of transcendence and not vice
versa. Transcendence is the fundamental constitution of human exis-
tence (das menschliche Dasein), its being-in-the-world in advance of any
characterization or, better, mischaracterization of it as a subject over
against objects. In other words, there is not first a subject in some sense
that then transcends and can be said to have the property of transcend-
ing. As fundamental to the constitution of human existence, the tran-
scending discussed here has more prima facie affinities with Kant’s use
of “transcendental” than with Scotus’s use of transcendentia. Yet the
comparison with the Kantian term is also limited, as Dasein’s “transcen-
dence” does not signal surpassing beings in a primarily cognitive or, for
that matter, in a planned way. Pre-theoretically
and pre-practically,
Das-
ein has always already moved beyond other beings, not to another entity,
but to the world.
Heidegger understands the world in this connection, not as the to-
tality of beings but how they are, relative to Dasein or, more precisely,
it is how human existence relates to beings as a whole. After marshal-
ing historical evidence—from Heraclitus, the New Testament, and the
philosophical tradition from Augustine to Kant—for this construal of
the world as essential to human existence, Heidegger gives his own exis-
tential take on this connection.19 As being-in-the-world, Dasein exists in
a certain sense for the sake of itself and thus for the sake of its world and
others. (In this coextensiveness with its world, it bears noting, the self is
not the ego but what first makes an ego, an I and a you possible—a quali-
fication that applies to the original formulation of this point in Being and
Time.) It is on the basis of the world that Dasein is able to mean any-
thing, with regard to whatever beings it can relate to and how it relates
to them.20 The world is the respective totality of Dasein’s original projec-
tion of possibilities that first enables entities to manifest themselves as
such. In a certain sense this account of the world is an understandably
truncated version of the Being and Time account of it as grounded in
19. GA 9:143, 154.
20. In the process, it gives rise to itself as a self, as an entity that has to be and in that sense
exists for the sake of itself. At the same time, since its selfhood first arises from passing over to
the world, existing for the sake of itself is coextensive with existing for the sake of the world—
and, as he also stresses, for the sake of others.
the unity of the horizons of Dasein’s underlying timeliness. Nonetheless,

as in Being and Time, Heidegger acknowledges that the world, insofar
as it is Dasein’s world, Dasein’s projection, is subjective in a way, albeit,
he is quick to add, “not as an entity in the internal sphere of a ‘subjec-
tive’ subject.”21 (In Being and Time he claims namely that “the world is
‘further outside’ than any object can be” and that “this ‘subjective’ world
as temporally-transcendent is more ‘objective’ than any ‘object.’ ”)22 So,
too, after glossing traditional attempts to understand transcendence in a
flight into the objective (e.g., the Platonic ideas), Heidegger observes that
transcendence can only be grasped “through a constantly renewed onto-
logical interpretation of the subjectivity of the subject.”23
These remarks illustrate that Heidegger himself at the end of the
1920s conceives the ontological difference as grounded in Dasein’s pro-
jection of its world. This projection coincides with existing for itself as
being-in-the-world, while a timeliness fundamentally constitutes and
gives meaning to this existence. The projection of the world, precisely in
this timely context, makes possible the foregoing understanding of the
being of beings.24 Yet the projection of a world, far from being a relation
of Dasein to beings, is its way of relating to itself. Thus the ontological dif-
ference is grounded in transcendence as the distinguishing, existential
dimension of Dasein, its being-in-the-world.25
Moreover, Heidegger does
not shy away from characterizing Dasein’s transcendence as a kind of
subjectivity, albeit requiring an ontological interpretation.26
To sum up this first part, in Being and Time and in Heidegger’s es-
say “On the Essence of the Ground,” he argues that the ontological dif-
ference, as the difference between being and beings, is based upon the
sort of timely transcendence that fundamentally constitutes human ex-
istence.
21. GA 9:158.
22. SZ 366.
23. GA 9:160.
24. GA 9:168.
25. This transcending is on more than one level, i.e., transcending entities it uses, encoun-
ters, and/or thematizes as well as its tradition and its self. In this last respect we have an open
ing to a Nietzschean self-overcoming.
26. GA 66:321; GA 65:451, 455.
16 Daniel Dahlstrom
From the Ontological Difference to

the Primordial Difference
Let us fast forward six years to the mid-1930s, to the beginning of the end
of some turbulent times for the public and political Heidegger. In 1935,
a year after Heidegger resigned as Rector of the University of Freiburg,
he delivered a series of lectures entitled “Introduction to Metaphysics.”
In these lectures he invokes the ontological difference but with a new
emphasis. He contrasts being, as traditionally conceived, with becom-
ing, semblance, thinking, and value to show that being in all four con-
trasts signifies presence. One objective of the contrast was to underscore
a point already flagged in Being and Time, namely, that this significance,
far from being incidental or contingent, emerges from the determination
of being that has held sway over our historical existence from “its great
beginning with the Greeks” and that this determination dominates—al-
ternatively, it is the power dominating—all our relations to beings.27 Ful-
filling this objective, however, serves the larger aim of demonstrating
that being as presence, the traditional concept, does not suffice to capture
all that is, not least what is in the senses of becoming, semblance, think-
ing, and value. Indeed, these “powers” as Heidegger also dubs them, that
stand over against being are even more in being than being as it has been
conceived since antiquity. “Being must therefore be experienced anew,”
Heidegger infers, and, indeed, experienced in such a way that, far from
being encircled (as the traditional concept was) by those powers and di-
visions, it is transformed into the “ground of all beings.”28 This phrase
certainly has the ring of metaphysics, with its play on the difference be-
tween grounding being and grounded beings.
Yet Heidegger follows up this remark, rather abruptly, that is, with-
out much in the way of clarification, with an observation that hearkens
back to the ontological difference but with a new emphasis: “The primor-
dial division, whose intensity and primordial parting from one anoth-
er [Auseinandertreten] sustains history, is the differentiation of being
and beings.”29 This observation suggests that Heidegger is running two
27. GA 40:211.
28. GA 40:213. Notably, the necessity is expressed conditionally, i.e., it is necessary “if we
want to set in work our historical Dasein as historical” (ibid.).
29. GA 40:213.
things together here that he elsewhere keeps separate. Thus, on the one
hand, he puts the ontological difference explicitly to use here, to flag the
necessity of thinking being in a way that departs from the traditional
conception of it as presence. On the other hand, however, as the cited ob-
servation suggests, he is shifting the center of gravity from being to the
ontological difference itself.
In the next few years, in the posthumously published Contributions
to Philosophy, Heidegger explicitly addresses his earlier reliance upon
the ontological difference. Matters are complicated by the fact that Hei-
degger introduces the archaic spelling of being (Seyn in place of Sein).
Sometimes the two terms overlap, but at other times he is clearly con-
trasting the historical character of Seyn with the metaphysical sense of
Sein as itself a type of entity (Art des Seienden) or the particular being
that is constantly present and is, in some sense, more than any other par-
ticular being (das seiendste Seiendes).30 Heidegger himself explains that
he uses the archaic spelling to designate inquiry that moves outside the
ontological difference and, hence, no longer thinks being metaphysical-
ly.31 In order to keep these two uses apart, I use the locution “histori-
cal being” to designate Seyn and “metaphysical being” to designate Sein
where it is clearly distinguished from the latter. Adopting this locution is
not without some risk, given Heidegger’s distinctive sense of history, yet
in support of this locution we might cite his observation in the Contribu-
tions to Philosophy that “history is no prerogative of human beings but
instead the essence of Seyn itself.”32 Or, as he also puts it in the essay en-
titled “The history of Seyn,” “the history of Seyn is the essence of Seyn.”33
In the Contributions Heidegger contends that he invoked the onto-
logical difference in Being and Time for the purpose of safeguarding the
question of the truth of historical being (Seyn) from any intermingling
with questions about beings. Yet the distinction was immediately forced
onto the path (i.e., the path of metaphysics) from which it emerges, such
that what counts as being is beingness or even a type of particular be-
ing, in effect, some metaphysical conception of being—from the Greek
30. GA 65:423–27, 466.

31. GA 65:436. This explanation is in keeping with his decision, announced in the Intro-
duction to Metaphysics, to forgo talk of ontology; see GA 40:44.
32. GA 65:479.
33. GA 69:136. For a sampling of the many references to Seyn as history (Geschichte) or es-
sentially related to history, see GA 65:269, 423, 451, 494; GA 69:115.
18 Daniel Dahlstrom
phusis, ousia, and idea to the Kantian objectivity of objects as the condi-
tion of their possibility and, thereby, to the absolute idealism of a mod-
ern technological age’s belief in the complete utility of everything.34 For
this reason, as part of an effort to overturn this first way of positing the
question of being in Being and Time, “it became necessary to make vari-
ous attempts to master the ‘ontological difference,’ to grasp its origin it-
self and, that is to say, its genuine unity.”35 So, too, it was necessary to get
free of talk of transcendence and the “condition of the possibility,” in or-
der to “grasp the truth of historical being on the basis of its own essence
(appropriation [Ereignis]).”36 In Heidegger’s elaboration of the ontologi-
cal difference in the context of the fundamental ontology pursued in Be-
ing and Time, he relied, as noted in the previous section, upon a notion
of transcendence and Kantian talk of “conditions of the possibility” to
elaborate the ontological difference and its grounding in the essence of
Dasein. Now, a decade later, he acknowledges the inadequacy of this way
of conceiving the ontological difference. It is inadequate because the dif-
ference between being (however conceived) and beings is understood in
terms of a difference between particular beings. As a result, this sort of
differentiation of being from beings precludes any account of their unity
and continues to treat being itself as a particular being.
Notably, despite these criticisms of the ontological difference, by no
means is Heidegger suggesting that we should or, indeed, can simply set
it aside. To the contrary, he regards it as an “unavoidable” means of pas-
sage to posing the question of the truth of historical being.37 The task is
to grasp the ontological difference’s origin and unity in the hidden differ-
ence of historical being and beings, the essence of which is Dasein’s ap-
propriation (Er-eignis) by historical being.38 (Heidegger emphasized the
same themes at the end of Introduction to Metaphysics, as he referred to
the ontological difference’s origin and unity in a primordial difference,
that is, the truth of historical being conceived on the basis of its own es-
sence, the appropriation.) This attempt at a more primordial question of
being is thus at once, Heidegger contends, “a more essential appropria-
34. GA 65:423.
35. GA 65:250.
36. GA 65:250, 426.
37. GA 65:467
38. GA 65:272: “Seiendheit aber gründet schon auf der verborgenen und nicht zu bewälti-
genden ‘Unterscheidung’ von Seyn und Seiendem.” See GA 65:455.
tion of the history of metaphysics.”39 What he means by this grounding

is by no means obvious but the general idea is rather simple. Historical
being, from the beginning, is forgotten and reinterpreted as a particu-
lar being, albeit the paradigmatic being, in the sense of being most of
all. This move begins with the initial ways that historical being prevails,
namely, as the ever-present phusis and aletheia, thereby concealing itself
and obscuring entities in their historical being.40
Given this shift in the way Heidegger deploys the ontological differ-
ence, he concludes: “Thus the tortuous and discordant character of this
distinction. For as necessary as it is [given where it comes from] . . . ini-
tially to fashion a perspective for the question of historical being, it none-
theless remains just as fatal. For this distinction first springs, indeed,
from an inquiry into beings as such (into their beingness). But on this
path one never gets directly at the question of historical being [Seyn].”41
In this conclusion Heidegger makes a passing reference to what he
elsewhere dubs the “leading question” (Leitfrage) of metaphysics, name-
ly, the question: what are beings? What are beings insofar as they ex-
ist? Or, equivalently but not identically, what do they have in common?
What is their beingness? To pose this question of metaphysics and ask
what beings are is to suppose the ontological difference, albeit precisely
as a difference that takes its lead from particular beings and differenc-
es among them. Indeed, Heidegger construes the history of metaphysics
as a history of disempowering being in favor of the limitless primacy of
beings.42 But there is, he submits, a more “basic question” (Grundfrage),
namely, the question not what beings are but what being is; or, as he also
puts it, what the essence or truth of historical being is. It is with an eye
on this basic question that he makes the observation that the ontological
39. GA 65:468.
40. GA 65:466, 469. Elaboration of this last remark requires coming to terms with, among
other things, Heidegger’s stress on the necessity of the Verwindung des Seyns in das Ereignis
and of returning to entities. See GA 65:250, 273, 494–97; GA 71:126, 140–44.
41. GA 65:250; see GA 65:424.
42. GA 65:427, 449. Ambiguous here is whether he means beings in general, some par-
ticular beings, and/or some paradigmatic manner of being. The epochal character of being
can coincide with one or more of these alternatives. Moreover, as the texts cited in the prece-
ding note suggest, Heidegger also stresses that the main culprit—and, indeed, the obstacle to
paying attention to beings themselves—is the metaphysical conception of being. As the texts
cited in the preceding note suggest, Heidegger seems bent on a renewed turn to beings them-
selves (paralleling an increasing concern with things), possible only by way of historical being
and its Verwindung.
20 Daniel Dahlstrom
difference becomes a genuine barrier (eigentlicher Schranke) that gets in

the way of the question of historical being. Moreover, it does so, he adds,
precisely insofar as one attempts to inquire into the unity of the differ-
ence. The unity can only remain a reflection of the difference and never
lead to the origin; in other words, once the inquiry into the unity takes
precedence, the difference can no longer be regarded as “original.”43
These remarks make it clear that Heidegger came to regard the onto-
logical difference as, in an important sense, provisional and transitional
(ein Übergängliches). As he puts it in the Contributions, thinking must
first begin with this difference on the way to an initial clarification and
then “leap over” this differentiation as part of the process of leaping into
its origin.44 Indeed, since metaphysics supposes the ontological differ-
ence, it cannot genuinely put the difference into question.45 Yet if on-
tologies and anti-ontologies alike are guilty of this obliviousness or indif-
ference to historical being, why trouble oneself with them? Heidegger’s
answer to this question is multi-layered
yet straightforward. It is not pos-
sible to shake off metaphysical habits with a single powerful blow and,
for the sake of communication, forays into metaphysical thinking are
unavoidable.46 More importantly, however, he needs to show that histori-
cal being is the origin of the usual ways of regarding being.47 As he also
puts it, the difference can say something thoughtful, only if it springs
from the question of the truth of historical being.48
Heidegger immediately follows up this critical account of the onto-
logical difference with the twin observations that historical being needs
human beings and human beings in turn belong to historical being,
though so belonging requires giving up being lost to beings (at least to
beings within the shroud of metaphysics). These twin observations, he
adds, make up historical being as the appropriation (or, if you will, his-
torical being as the enowning or appropriating event: Seyn als Ereignis).
In this way, Heidegger offsets the transcendental sense of being, coin-
cident with Dasein’s existential projection, as the source of difference
between being and beings. That is to say, the origin of the difference is
43. GA 65:250; GA 69:22.

44. See GA 65:207, 251, 469; see 451 for aletheia as the ground of the ontological difference.
45. GA 65:424.
46. GA 65:430.
47. GA 65:445.
48. GA 65:466.
neither being’s transcendence of beings or the transcendence that marks

Dasein’s being-in-the-world. (To put the matter in historical terms, the
origin is neither the medieval conception of being’s transcendence nor
the modern conception of human subjectivity’s transcendental charac-
ter.) That origin is instead the way historical being needs human beings
and human beings belong to historical being.
What is the problem with metaphysics and, indeed, why does Hei-
degger regard his earlier inquiries, for example, those glossed above from
Being and Time and “On the Essence of Ground” as inadequate? Hei-
degger regards metaphysics and the ontological difference upon which
it rests, not merely as a project of academic philosophers, but as a dom-
inant determining factor of Western thinking and action. Metaphysics
designates “that the thinking of being takes a particular being or beings
in the sense of the presently-on
hand as its point of departure and goal
for ascending to being, an ascent that at the same time and at once be-
comes the descent back into a particular being or beings. Meta-physics is
the justification of the ‘physics’ of particular beings through the constant
flight in the face of historical being.”49 Metaphysics, so construed, works
in collusion with the ascendancy of beings to push historical being out of
its worldview; or, perhaps more precisely, historical being has no place in
its picture of the world (see Zeitalter des Weltbildes). If being survives as
a question at all, it presents itself in the mask of the most universal and
empty abstraction, impotent, irrelevant, and unreal, a byproduct of rep-
resenting beings as beings, where being is equated with the objectivity or
simply represented character of objects of representation.50 Or a bit more
imaginatively, it is construed as some gigantic constellation of beings or
their unrestricted computability as such. Nor is it a mystery, Heidegger
suggests, why it is so difficult to think otherwise. Modern man has his
origin and the support for his unbroken power in precisely these presup-
positions about being.51
49. GA 65:423.
50. GA 65:444, 449, 456.
51. GA 65:423, 425; in this connection, see, too, the discussions of Machenschaft and the
Wesung des Seyns (GA 65:126), and my essay “Being and Being Grounded,” in The Ultimate
Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather Than Nothing Whatsoever?, ed. John Wip-
pel (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 125–45.
22 Daniel Dahlstrom
Conclusion
The ontological difference flagged by Heidegger in the late 1920s is not
the same as the primordial difference that he is trying to think from the
mid-1930s on. But they are, as the foregoing review makes clear, closely in-
tertwined. The ontological difference consists of being (being in general)
and the beings that are understood as being (explicitly by metaphysicians,
implicitly by nonmetaphysicians). What grounds the ontological difference
is the transcendence peculiar to Dasein, its timely being-in-the-world.
Be-
cause Dasein triangulates the ontological difference between being and be-
ings (see figure 1-1), fundamental ontology takes its bearings from existen-
tial analysis, that is, analysis of Dasein’s sense of being.
Figure 1-1
illustrates how the ontological difference is rooted in Das-
ein’s simultaneous understanding of being and interactions with beings
(entities). Dasein’s (theoretical and practical) interaction with beings is
grounded in its understanding of their being—though, of course, there
would be no understanding without that interaction. The sense of their
being as entities within-the-world supposes the sense of Dasein’s being,
namely, the timeliness of its being-in-the-world.
In this way the figure
schematizes the triangulation characteristic of Heidegger’s transcenden-
tal phenomenology in the late 1920s, as he locates the roots of the onto-
logical difference and, with it, the clue to determining the sense of being
(Sinn des Seins) in Dasein.
Figure 1-1
being beings
(Sein) (Seiendes)
Understanding Interaction
being-here
(Da-sein)
Figure 1-2
being
(Sein)
(pre-ontological) (ontic)
Da-sein beings (Seiendes)
Figure 1-2A
Being-handy
(Zuhandensein)
(pre-ontological) (ontic)
Da-sein at work implement (Zeug)
Yet the equilateral triangulation illustrated in figure 1-1

is somewhat

flat-footed. It does not capture the way that the dynamic triangulation
corresponds to Dasein’s transcendence of entities as the source of the on-
tological difference. Figure 1-2
is meant to remedy this deficiency. This
schema is meant to capture Dasein’s transcendence as the source of the
ontological difference precisely by surpassing or mounting over particu-
lar beings to being and returning to them, treating and conceiving them
as being, in one way or another; see, for example, figure 1-2a.

24 Daniel Dahlstrom
Figure 1-3
Being-here
(Da-sein)
metaphysical beings
being (Sein) (Seiendes)
Historical being
(Seyn)
From the mid-1930s,

the center of gravity of Heidegger’s analysis shifts
from Dasein to the Ereignis or, to use its metonym, historical being (Seyn).
The ontological difference is retained as something to be explained by the
primordial difference or, better, differentiation of Dasein from historical
being, a differentiation that coincides not only with the ontological differ-
ence but also the epochal self-concealing of historical being from Dasein.
The quadrilateral in figure 1-3 is meant to capture aspects of Hei-
degger’s way of conceiving the ontological difference as grounded in (but
also obscuring) the primordial difference inherent to the reciprocal ap-
propriation (Ereignis) of Dasein and historical being. The origin of the dif-
ference between metaphysical being and beings is historical being’s ap-
propriation of human beings and their response to that appropriation. As
such, historical being is unique, unrepresentable, supremely alien, and es-
sentially s elf-concealing.52 By contrast, “metaphysical being” refers to the
52. The appropriation (Ereignis) is never without disappropriation (Enteignis) (GA 14:50;
GA 71:124). What figure 1-3 does not display is the way that “historical being” is a metonym for
“the appropriating event,” at once appropriating Dasein to itself so that Dasein is handed over
(überantwortet) to historical being or, better, to the guardianship (Wächterschaft) of histori-
cal being (GA 65:489). So, too, historical being (understood as Ereignis) is the distinguishing
or differentiation itself, in which it differentiates itself from beings and from Dasein, entailing
the challenging notion of being both the relation and a relatum thereof (GA 65:477–80). For
a list of the attributes of historical being, see GA 65:470; for the relation of historical being to
Dasein, see GA 65:487–90; to historical human beings, see GA 71:192.
being as conceived throughout the history of metaphysics, with its sup-

position of a transcending universality and closure, a supposition that co-
incides with the being (presence) of particular sorts of beings and, there-
by, with historical being’s self-concealing. Metaphysical being (beingness)
and its ontological difference from beings are nonetheless grounded in
historical being and its difference from beings.53
53. Heidegger’s rethinking of difference continues in the ensuing decades; see in partic-
ular, from the early 1940s, the chapter on differentiation (Entscheidung) in Das Ereignis (GA
71:121–33); from the mid-1950s, the two lectures published as Identität und Differenz (GA 11);
and the discussion of thinking being without beings, i.e., thinking being on the basis of the ap-
propriation (Ereignis), in the 1962 essay “Zeit und Sein” (GA 14:5–30).
Richard Capobianco
Reaffirming “The Truth of Being”
Richard Capobianco
2 S Reaffirming Heidegger’s
“The Truth of Being”
Aletheia is . . . the fundamental feature of Being itself.

—Lecture course on Heraclitus, 1943
Truth abides in everything that abides.

—Lecture course on Parmenides, 1942–43
Over the past several decades, Heidegger’s thinking has been appropri-
ated or expropriated, as it were, in myriad ways, and all of these vari-
ous approaches testify to the extraordinary reach and richness of his
thought. Yet the time has come to bring back into view the core matter
of his thinking. William J. Richardson tells the story (and the late Man-
fred Frings related a similar story) of his visit with Heidegger in his home
in Zähringen (Freiburg) in 1959. At one point in their discussion, Hei-
degger, gazing out the window of his study and contemplating the wood-
ed landscape, expressed his desire, his eagerness, to say “it” yet again.
What was the “it” that Heidegger—for a whole lifetime—had his eyes
upon? This “it” (es) that “gives” (gibt) so richly and inexhaustibly is Be-
ing itself (Sein selbst) as the temporal-spatial
emerging and shining-forth
of beings in their beingness as gathered in the ensemble. Being as “mani-
festness” or “manifestation” (Offenbarkeit), this is the matter itself (die
Richard Capobianco, “Reaffirming ‘The Truth of Being’, ” in Heidegger’s Way of Being, pub-
lished and copyright © University of Toronto Press, 2014. Reprinted (with minor changes) with
permission of the publisher.
26
Reaffirming “The Truth of Being” 27
Sache selbst) of Heidegger’s thought—which, remarkably enough, is at

risk of being “forgotten” all over again. A Seinsvergessenheit is settling in
anew—and in Heidegger studies of all places. Over the last decade, there
has been a trend in the Heidegger scholarship toward understanding Be-
ing as reducible to “meaning” (“sense”), that is, toward understanding
Being only in terms of the human being’s (human Dasein’s) constitutive
meaning-making activity.1 Yet the “core matter” (die Sache) is not prin-
cipally Dasein, but Sein qua manifestation—what Heidegger came to call
“the truth of Being”—in relation to Dasein.
An Early Clue
In the 1960s, Heidegger repeatedly emphasized in his work and in his
personal correspondence that it was the “manifestness” of Being that
guided his thinking from the start.2 In 1973, three years before his death,
in a seminar with French colleagues in Zähringen, he made the observa-
1. Thomas Sheehan has made the most concerted effort to argue for the pure transcenden-
tal reduction of (Heidegger’s) Sein to Sinn (of Being to meaning or sense), Thomas Sheehan,
“A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001): 183–202.
See also more recently, Thomas Sheehan, “Astonishing! Things Make Sense!,” in Gatherings: The
Heidegger Circle Annual 1 (2011): 1–25. Related: Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology
in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Husserl, Heideg-
ger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Dan Zaha-
vi, Subjectivity and Selfhood (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Burt Hopkins, Intentionality
in Husserl and Heidegger (New York: Springer, 1993). My readings and reflections that follow
are broadly mindful—and critical—of all such strictly “transcendental-phenomenological” rea-
dings of Heidegger’s core matter, and of Sheehan’s reading in particular. Even so, I would also
make note that many years earlier, Hubert Dreyfus had laid out his basic reading of Heidegger
that the source of the “sense” of things is to be found in Dasein’s “absorbed,” everyday, skillful
coping practices; see his Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Di-
vision I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). Related: William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and
Time: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2006); Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism:
Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1991); Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” in his Essays on Heidegger and
Others: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 27–49. Sheehan
and Dreyfus read Heidegger from within very different philosophical traditions, no doubt, but it
remains, nonetheless, that for both the central matter of Heidegger’s thinking concerns the hu-
man being—Dasein and Dasein’s making “sense” of things.
2. See, for example, Heidegger’s letter to Manfred Frings dated October 20, 1966, in Heide-
gger and the Quest for Truth, ed. Manfred Frings (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), 17–21. Also his
“Preface” (1962) to William J. Richardson’s book Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), xv: “the question of Being in the sense of the thinking of
Being as such (the manifestness of Being).”
28 Richard Capobianco
tion that whereas Husserl was primarily influenced by the Brentano of

the 1874 work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he himself, from
the very beginning of his Denkweg, had been propelled by Brentano’s
1862 study On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle. In the seminar,
as the protocol has it, Heidegger added with a smile—but with emphasis:
“My Brentano is the Brentano of Aristotle!”3
What Heidegger was pointing to was that in his view, Husserl, de-
spite his breakthrough to the “things themselves”—and though there
remains considerable debate about this matter, let us grant that there
was a break out of the Cartesian mind-enclosure
to the “things them-
selves”—could not fully appreciate the proper character of the “things
themselves” because he continued to address what we encounter from
within the framework of a modern “subjecticity,” that is, principally and
primarily from the side of the conscious subject. Heidegger’s discomfort
with this view is evident as far back as his 1919 lecture course given at
Freiburg during the “war emergency semester” in which he began to take
his distance from Husserl’s phenomenological approach.4 Here Hei-
degger criticizes Husserl’s reflective, theoretical phenomenology for ad-
dressing the things that we encounter as inert objects appearing for and
before the sense-giving I or I-pole.
For Heidegger, though, what we encounter, what “there is” (es gibt),
has the character of an Ereignis, a “happening” or “event” within lived ex-
perience (employing his signature term Ereignis for one of the first times).
In other words, things “happen” to us and address us; they are “events” of
showing that we appropriate in language. As he puts it, “es weltet,” that is,
the surrounding world “worlds”; things “world” “everywhere and always.”
I suggest that with this expression “es weltet” Heidegger was tapping into
the meaning of the old verb form welten, “to world,” which, even more
evidently in English, once conveyed “to furnish and fill up” and also “to
come into existence.”5 In other words, “things” emerge and abound about
3. Martin Heidegger, Seminare, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Gesamtausgabe 15) (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1986), 385–86 (hereafter “GA 15”), translated as Four Seminars by Andrew
Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 72.
4. Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel (Gesamtaus-
gabe 56/57) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), 63–76 (hereafter “GA 56/57”), translated
as Towards the Definition of Philosophy by Ted Sadler (London: Athlone Press, 2008), 51–60.
5. For the German word welten, see the entry in the Deutsches Wörterbuch by Jacob
Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, 28:1563. For “world” as a verb in English, see the entry “world,
v.” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Consider as well how this reading helps us understand his
us in their eventfulness. The key point is that in his reflections here, we

detect that Heidegger, very early on, was animated and guided by an ex-
ceptionally vivid sense of how things are manifest to us in an “eventful”
way, and address us and even “speak” to us, as it were. Especially nota-
ble is the poetic example he gives from Sophocles’s Antigone of just such
a vibrant, resonant “happening” in our lived experience—the splendor
of the rising and shining sun. This is a perfect prefiguring of his reading
in subsequent years of phainomenon in terms of phainesthai in terms of
phos—light. Things “shining-forth”—emergence, arising, manifestness.6
Thus even as early as 1919, we can discern—there is this clue—that what
truly interested and moved Heidegger was not so much that things are
made-present by us (Husserl) as that things present themselves to us.
Being Is Truth in the First Place

Yet it was Heidegger’s study of Aristotle in those early years, culminat-
ing with his elucidation of Metaphysics, Theta 10 on the on hos alethes—
“the being as true,” that is, “truth” as belonging most properly (kyrio-
taton) to the being itself—that confirmed his insight that to renew the
question of Being was to recover the experience of Being as manifes-
tive, as showing itself from itself, as unconcealing, as shining forth, as
opening and offering itself, as addressing us and claiming us. This is the
many later statements regarding “world,” such as from 1941/42: “The springing up of the world
comes to pass as the self-opening
. . . The opening is aletheia; it is unconcealedness, truth.”
Martin Heidegger, Seminare: 1. Die metaphysischen Grundstellungen des abendländischen Den-
kens; 2. Einübung in das philosophische Denken, ed. Alfred Denker (Gesamtausgabe 88) (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 2008), 325. And in his many readings of Heraclitus from the ear-
ly 1940s onward, “world,” properly understood as the Heraclitean kosmos, is another name for
Being—and world/kosmos/Being is that which “shimmers ungraspably through everything”
GA 15:282 (8).
6. I examine the central importance of the image of the “sun” and “light” for the early
and middle Heidegger in my Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010),
chaps. 5 and 6. Apart from the texts, another clue is to be found in Heidegger’s famous hut
in Todtnauberg. In Adam Sharr’s book Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006),
there is a lovely photo of Heidegger, reposed and pensive, sitting at the head of the dining table
(33). To the left of him, as if an honored guest at his table, is a great smiling sun that is carved
into the wood of the inside back of a chair. Heidegger’s “sun”: the enabling light that allows
all things to appear—Being itself! Even though the trope of “light” (lumen, lux) became more
problematical to Heidegger in the later years because of the Platonic/metaphysical overtones,
still it remained a central feature of his thinking of Being from start to finish (see chap. 2 of my
Heidegger’s Way of Being).
“meaning” of Being that Heidegger sought after, even if originally this

seeking worked itself out largely within a Husserlian phenomenological
framework. Nonetheless, even in those early “phenomenological” years,
the word “meaning” in the formulation “the meaning of Being” argu-
ably served more as an indicator, a pointer, a marker for his primary
concern with the “manifestness” of Being in relation to Dasein. Or that
is certainly how the later Heidegger understood it. In 1946, in remarks
to Jean Beaufret under the title “Die Grundfrage nach dem Sein selbst”
(The Fundamental Question concerning Being Itself), Heidegger insist-
ed, “With that question [concerning Being], I have always—and from the
very beginning—remained outside the philosophical position of Hus-
serl, in the sense of a transcendental philosophy of consciousness.”7 This
is a most telling comment, and I do not think that it is meant dispar-
agingly at all; it is simply Heidegger’s realization some years later that
what he had his eye on from the outset was very different from Husserl.
That is, while Husserl was primarily concerned with clarifying the ac-
tivity of making-manifest from the side of consciousness, he had been
chiefly concerned with Being qua manifestation insofar as Being makes
manifest Dasein in the first place, along with its constitutive activity of
making-manifest.
Some years later in Le Thor in 1969, he explained further that al-
ready in Being and Time, “meaning” (Sinn) did not have for him the sig-
nificance of “meaning” or “sense” as Husserl understood this in terms
of “sense-giving” (Sinngebung) acts of consciousness. He added: “Being
and Time does not attempt to present a new meaning of Being [under-
stood in this Husserlian manner], but rather to open a hearing for the
word of Being—to let this hearing be claimed by Being. In order to be
7. Martin Heidegger, “Die Grundfrage nach dem Sein selbst” (The Fundamental Question
concerning Being Itself), in Heidegger Studies 2 (1986): 1–3. Note that Heidegger clearly refers
to the question of Sein selbst (Being itself) as the Grundfrage (the fundamental question). In
contrast, the Leitfrage (the guiding question) is Heidegger’s term for the inquiry into Seiend-
heit (beingness), the beingness of a being, which in his view was primarily pursued in the me-
taphysical tradition of thinking from the very beginning. Sheehan’s reading of the Grundfrage
is completely at odds with Heidegger’s own many statements on the matter, such as this one.
Furthermore, Heidegger’s synoptic statement here gives us an indication of why even in his ear-
liest work he did not focus on Husserl’s key notion of “constitution.” That is, we might say that
Heidegger’s focal point was always the manifestness of Being—and the manifestness of Being is
structurally prior to, and the ontological condition of, any such “constitution” of meaning. Being
is not reducible to meaning, and this is elucidated further in my Heidegger’s Way of Being.
the ‘Da,’ it is a matter of becoming claimed by Being.”8 Also at Le Thor,

he emphasized to the seminar members that in Being and Time, “mean-
ing” (Sinn) was never intended to refer simply to a “human performance”
(menschliche Leistung; Leistung, of course, is one of Husserl’s key words)
and thus only to the “structure of subjectivity.” Rather, “meaning” is to
be explained from the “region of projection,” which in turn is explained
by “understanding” (Verständnis), which itself is to be understood only
in the originary sense of “Vorstehen,” that is, “ ‘standing before,’ resid-
ing before, holding oneself at an equal height with what one finds before
oneself, and being strong enough to abide it.’ ”9 In other words, his cru-
cial point is that “meaning” must be understood most properly, that is, in
the first place, as a response to Being (manifestation) by Dasein and not
as a “performance” or “achievement” (Leistung) of transcendental sub-
jectivity. We may capture his position this way: only insofar as there is
manifestation (emergence) is there meaning. This is also to say that Being
qua manifestation is structurally prior to, and the ontological condition
of, any “constitution” of meaning.
Even so, his early talk about “the meaning of Being” proved to be
sufficiently problematical for him that he turned to the expression “the
truth of Being” (die Wahrheit des Seins) in the 1930s (including in Bei
träge where it appears as die Wahrheit des Seyns). This naming of the
fundamental matter for thought appears in his writings throughout the
remainder of his lifetime, but most notably in the work of the 1940s, in-
cluding the brilliant lecture courses on Parmenides (1942/43) and Hera-
clitus (1943, 1944), and in the important statements “Letter on Human-
ism” (1947) and “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’ ” (1949).10 Yet
with this phrase “the truth of Being,” he was only drawing out more fully
his own fundamental insight that had been there all along. Again, dur-
ing the 1920s, he had repeatedly made the point that the proper locus of
“truth” is “the being” (das Seiende) in its manifestness, and that “we take
part in the being’s unconcealedness, its truth [seine Wahrheit],” as he put
8. GA 15:345 (47).
9. GA 15:334–35 (40–41).
10. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Gesamtausgabe 54) (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 1982); Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Ge-
samtausgabe 55) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979); Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken,
ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 9) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1976); hereafter “GA 54,” “GA 55,” and “GA 9,” respectively.
it in the lecture course “Introduction to Philosophy” from the 1928/29

winter semester. Here is another key passage from this lecture course:
Yet the manifestness of the being in it itself [an ihm selbst] is made vividly clear
to us if we describe this fact negatively and say: this being, as it is here in this
context present-at-hand in it itself, is not concealed to us as what it indeed
could be; it is in it itself unconcealed. Because it is unconcealed in it itself can
we make propositions regarding it and also verify these propositions. The man-
ifestness of the being is an unconcealedness [Unverborgenheit]. Unconcealed-
ness actually means in the Greek aletheia, which we customarily, but inade-
quately, translate as truth. True, that is, unconcealed, is the being itself. . . . Thus,
not the statement and not the proposition regarding the being, but the being it-
self, is “true.” Only because the being itself is true can statements regarding the
being be true in a derivative sense.
In the tradition of metaphysics in the Middle Ages, there is, however, also
a conception of truth—veritas—according to which truth belongs to the being
itself, to the ens. One thesis reads: omne ens est verum, every being is true. But
this statement has an altogether different meaning, namely, that every being,
insofar as it is, is created by God; but insofar as it is created by God, ens crea-
tum, it must be thought by God. Insofar as it is thought by God as the one who
does not err and who is the absolute truth, the being is true by virtue of being
thought by God. Because every being is a created being, it is a being of a kind
that is true, verum qua cogitatum a Deo [true insofar as it is thought by God].
Therefore, this concept of the truth of the being rests on entirely different pre-
suppositions from those in our exposition of truth.11
As noted earlier, on this point, Heidegger drew his inspiration from

Aristotle (not Husserl) and specifically from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, The-
ta 10 at 1051b, admittedly a difficult text to decipher, where Aristotle states
that “being” is spoken of not only in terms of the categories and with
11. Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. O. Saame und I. Saame-Speidel
(Gesamtausgabe 27) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), 78 (my translation). See also in
the same volume, 104–5. Heidegger, in maintaining that it is the being itself that is manifest,
uses the phrase an “ihm selbst” rather than “an sich selbst.” This way of phrasing the matter ap-
pears to enable him (1) to draw a clear contrast with the Kantian/neo-Kantian Ding-an-sich
and (2) to emphasize that it is the being in it itself that is “true.” Heidegger also often employed
the phrase “von sich her”—a manifestation or showing of the being from itself forth; see, for
example, the 1969 seminar in Le Thor in GA 15:326–29, where he also characterizes the being
“in its place” (in seiner Lage) as “it lets itself be seen” (327). Note that this instructive phrase
“in seiner Lage” is omitted in the English edition (35). See also chap. 3 of my Heidegger’s Way
of Being.
respect to the potentiality and actuality of these, but also in the most prop-
er sense (reading kyriotaton) as the “true.”12 Heidegger understands this
text to be the culmination of Aristotle’s teaching in Theta and as the com-
pletion of the discussion of “truth” in Epsilon 4 (1027b). In his view, Ar-
istotelian scholars who have questioned or dismissed the significance of
Theta 10, such as Schwegler and Jaeger most notably, are simply displaying
the modern philosophical habit of thinking that “truth” has nothing to
do with “being” and is to be regarded only as an epistemological or logical
phenomenon. Countering this modern bias, Heidegger calls Theta 10 “the
keystone of Book Theta, which is itself the center of the entire Metaphys-
ics,” and he elaborates how in this chapter Aristotle speaks of the being as
true (on hos alethes) as what is most proper (kyriotaton) to the being. That
is, for Aristotle, the primary and proper locus of “truth” is the being as
manifestive, as showing itself as it is. This is precisely the Aristotelian in-
sight—and the ancient Greek experience more generally—that Heidegger
thought was “forgotten” thereafter in the metaphysical tradition, includ-
ing in the Middle Ages.
In an earlier lecture course during the winter semester of 1926/27, he
had paid close attention to Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of truth in De
Veritate, especially De Veritate I, 1 and 2, and even earlier, in 1924, he had
touched upon the matter of verum in Aquinas in an exchange with Max
Scheler that followed Heidegger’s lecture in Cologne on Aristotle.13 By the
late 1920s, as reflected in the extended text cited above, Heidegger’s criti-
cism of Thomas appears to have taken this form: in the De Veritate, Aqui-
nas understands Aristotle to maintain that the locus of truth is in thought
or, more precisely, in the judgment that composes and divides. Yet more
to the point, Aquinas asserts that, strictly speaking, being is true only in-
sofar as being is brought into relation with thought, with the intellect,
human and divine. Therefore, as Aquinas states in his Respondeo in I, 1,
12. Heidegger’s culminating statement on this Aristotelian text can be found in his 1930
summer semester lecture course in Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit.
Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Hartmut Tietjen (Gesamtausgabe 31) (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1982), translated as The Essence of Human Freedom by Ted Sadler (London: Ath-
lone Press, 2005); see esp. 80–109 (56–74).
13. Martin Heidegger, Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant, ed.
H. Vetter (Gesamtausgabe 23) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2006) (no available English
translation); specifically §10–15: 41–68. For Heidegger’s exchange with Scheler in 1924, see his
“Being-there and Being-true According to Aristotle,” in Becoming Heidegger, ed. Theodore Ki-
siel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 233.
being may be said to be “manifestative” (manifestativum) or “shown” (os-

tenditur) only as the consequence of truth (the effectum consequentem, the
effect following upon truth).14 In other words, manifestatio (manifesta-
tion) and ostentatio (showing or display) do not belong to being itself, but
only to being insofar as it is declared or displayed in the judgment. Ac-
cordingly, in the first reply, Aquinas refuses the apparent sense and force
of Augustine’s words that “the true is that which is” (verum est id quod
est) and proposes that Augustine was not identifying truth with the act
of being, the actum essendi, but rather was referring to being as the foun-
dation (fundamentum) of truth—and that truth properly resides only in
the judgment. For Heidegger, then, what was regrettably lost from view in
Thomas’s account is the Greek experience of Being as emergence, as aris-
ing, as showing itself, as displaying and declaring itself, as manifestation,
as “truth.” Being as aletheia. Or as he also put it some years later, “aletheia
is a name for esse, not for veritas.”15 That is, fundamentally, aletheia is a
name for Being.
The Priority and Primacy of Being

The “forgottenness” of the aletheic character of being (esse) in Thom-
as’s philosophy became more acute in Descartes’s thinking, which ren-
dered things as static objects for a subject, and in the subsequent unfold-
ing of the modern philosophy of consciousness in which things took on
the character of mere mental objects or entities. For Heidegger, Husserl’s
treatment of “the things themselves”—no matter his teacher’s important
breakthrough—nonetheless retained this modern subjectist philosophi-
cal coloring. In this regard, there is another text worth noting; it is an
14. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. 1, De Veritate, ed. P. Fr. Raymundi Spiaz-
zi, OP (Rome: Marietti Editori, 1953), 3.
15. “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” in GA 9:237, translated as Pathmarks by William McNeill
(182, note “a”). Also consider a marginal note he made concerning Thomas in the text of the
1949 “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’’’: “Veritas in Thomas Aquinas always in intellec-
tu, [even] be it the intellectus divinus” in GA 9:369 (280, note “c”). I also note that this origi-
nal and distinctive position that Heidegger maintains time and time again—Being as Aletheia,
Being Is Aletheia—is altogether missed by Sheehan in his readings of Heidegger. For Sheehan,
Heidegger’s aletheia pertains to Dasein only; see, for example, his “Astonishing!,” 10–11. Yet,
again, let us keep Heidegger’s distinctive position always in view: “Being is the truth as such.”
Martin Heidegger, Zum Ereignis-Denken, ed. P. Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 73.1) (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 2013), 133.
observation that Heidegger made much later in his thinking, in 1965.

Most readers are familiar with his 1964 address “The End of Philoso-
phy and the Task of Thinking,” which appears in the Basic Writings vol-
ume. Yet not long afterwards he delivered a similar address, this time on
the occasion of a birthday celebration for the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig
Binswanger. This talk was later published in 1968 (in a Japanese trans-
lation, and not until 1984 in German) under the title “On the Question
Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking.”16 In some
respects, I consider this address to be a more substantive and significant
statement of his later thinking than the slightly earlier and much better
known lecture. Heidegger makes an observation that restates and reaf-
firms in yet one more way his long-standing position—the position that
I have been laying out here—that it is the manifestness (the truth) of the
being, first brought to light by the ancient Greeks, that must again com-
mand our attention so that we may break through the immanentism of
the modern philosophy of consciousness. He invites us to think back to
Homer:
We may recall a scene during the homecoming of Odysseus. With the depar-
ture of Eumaeus, Athena appears in the form of a beautiful young woman. The
goddess appears to Odysseus. But his son Telemachus does not see her, and the
poet says: ou gar pos pantessi theoi phainontai enargeis (Odyssey, XVI, 161). “For
the gods do not appear to everyone enargeis”—this word is usually translated as
“visible.” Yet argos means gleaming [glänzend]. What gleams, shines forth from
itself. What shines forth thus, presences forth from itself. Odysseus and Telema-
chus see the same woman. But Odysseus perceives the presencing of the god-
dess. Later, the Romans translated enargeia, the shining-forth-from-itself, with
evidentia; evideri means to become visible to someone. Evidence is thought in
terms of the human being as the one who sees. In contrast, enargeia is a feature
of presencing things themselves.17
The basic complaint is a familiar one. The later Greek and Roman
thinkers subtly shifted the philosophical focus away from being toward
16. Martin Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for
Thinking,” trans. Richard Capobianco and Marie Göbel, in Epoché 14, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 213–
23; Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, ed. Hermann Heidegger
(Gesamtausgabe 16) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 620–33 (but see our preface to
the translation for a complete provenance).
17. Heidegger, “On the Question,” 219–20. For a discussion of Heidegger’s special use of
the word glänzen, see chap. 2 of my Heidegger’s Way of Being.
the human being as perceiver and knower. Further, it was Descartes who
decisively moved the human subject as the ego cogito to the center of
philosophical reflection. Yet in Heidegger’s critical remark on “evidence”
(Evidenz), we also hear once again, I think, a distancing from Husserl’s
position. Evidence, the principle of evidence, evidencing the truth—the
“achievement” of transcendental subjectivity in “constituting” the “phe-
nomenon” and in presenting such intelligible objects—this is the lan-
guage of Husserl’s phenomenological project that for Heidegger revealed
his teacher’s inability to break free and clear of the ego-subjectism
of the
Cartesian tradition of thinking. In other words, Husserl’s call “to re-
turn to the things themselves” was a promise unfulfilled or at least only
partially fulfilled. What remained of preeminent importance to Hus-
serl (and, it seems, to many recent Heidegger commentators as well) was
a consideration of the noetic or apophantic pole of the presentation of
things—and what remained unarticulated and unaccounted for, and cer-
tainly unappreciated as such, was the “gleaming” of the being (das Sei-
ende) itself, the “truth of the being itself.”18 Furthermore, in one of the
few instances where Heidegger mentions Wittgenstein, he levels a similar
but even harsher criticism. In Le Thor in 1969, he characterizes Wittgen-
stein’s first proposition from the Tractatus, “The real is what is the case”
(as Heidegger rendered it), as “truly an eerie [gespenstisches] statement.”19
He understands Wittgenstein’s proposition to mean that a being is no
more than “that which comes under a determination, is fixed [in signi-
fication], the determinable,” and such a formulation is for Heidegger an
“eerie” testament to how utterly and profoundly removed our contempo-
rary philosophical thinking about beings is from the Greek experience
of beings—the island in the sea, the mountain on the land, “leaping into
view” (springt ins Auge) as ta phainomena as ta alethea, as “what lets it-
self be seen,” the emerging, the manifest, the true.
18. Consider the clarity and force of Heidegger’s position as stated in “Plato’s Doctrine
of Truth” (composed 1940): “Unconcealedness reveals itself . . . as the fundamental feature of
beings themselves.” And further, “As Plato conceives it, unconcealedness remains harnessed in
a relation to looking, apprehending, thinking, and asserting. To follow this relation means to
relinquish the essence of unconcealedness.” In GA 9:237–38 (182); emphasis added. See also GA
54:50: “Nevertheless, for the Greeks, and still for Aristotle, aletheia is the character of beings
and not only a character of the perceiving of beings and of statements about them.”
19. GA 15:327 (35). Wittgenstein’s opening proposition in the Tractatus is generally trans-
lated as “The world is all that is the case.”
Thus, to pick up the thread of the narrative that I am unfolding, Hei-

degger had a very early insight into “the truth of the being,” and it is,
in part, this insight that moved him and guided him along his path of
thinking during the 1920s into the famous “turn” in his thinking (die
Kehre) after Being and Time, and then through the “turn” to his reformu-
lation of die Sache selbst as “the truth of Being” in the 1930s. The expres-
sion “the truth of Being” simply made explicit what was implicit or lim-
inal in his earlier phrase “the meaning of Being,” namely, that the focal
point of his thinking was, again, in his words, “the manifestness of Being
and its relation to the human being.”20
The core matter therefore: “unconcealedness-manifestation” (Being)
in “relation” (Bezug; Beziehung) to “disclosedness” (Dasein)—this one-
ness that is two-together or this one-together with two distinct and ir-
reducible “sides”—and in this “relation” of Being and Dasein, the struc-
tural priority or antecedence belongs to Being. In fact, in a seminar in
1941/42, he clearly states the matter of the irreducibility of the “truth of
Being” in relation to Dasein and Dasein’s constitutive meaning-making:
“Truth” is “independent” of the human being, since truth means the essencing
of what is true in the sense of unconcealedness. [In the subjectivist perspective,]
“truth” is “dependent” on the human being and caused, brought about, made,
produced. But the human being is dependent on the truth, if truth is [proper-
ly understood as] the lighting/clearing of Beyng as Beyng’s essence, since “to
depend” means: to be determined and thoroughly attuned in essence (but not
caused).21
Additionally, in the same seminar he clarifies that manifestation and

reserve belong to Being in the first place: “Manifestation is not the fruit
of cognition and thus not of the same origin of essence as cognition. The
concealed and likewise the unconcealed, that which is manifest, reside in
Being [sind beheimatet im Sein].”22
Indeed, the motif of the primacy and irreducibility of “the truth of Be-
ing” in relation to the human being’s meaning-making structure is ever
present in the thinking of the middle and later Heidegger and articulated
in various ways. For example, in his “Three in Conversation on a Coun-
20. Heidegger, “The Fundamental Question Concerning Being Itself,” 1; emphasis added.
21. GA 88:205; my translation, emphasis added.
22. GA 88:311.
try Path,” composed in 1944–45, the “teacher” or “guide” (der Weise) puts
the matter this way: “the essence of the human being is therefore released
into the regioning [die Gegnet] and accordingly needed by it, and solely
because the human being by himself has no power over truth, which re-
mains independent of him. Truth can only therefore essentially unfold inde-
pendently of the human being, because the essence of the human being as
releasement to the regioning is needed by the regioning. . . . The indepen-
dence of truth from the human is evidently then a relation to the human.”23
In the 1956 lecture course on “The Principle of Ground,” he charac-
terizes the matter more succinctly: “For we are never the ones who we
are apart from the claim of Being.”24 And in Le Thor in 1969, he gave
clear testimony to the development of his thinking, namely, to the “the
turn” (die Kehre) in thinking after Being and Time: “The thinking that
proceeds from Being and Time, in that it gives up the phrase ‘meaning of
Being’ in favor of ‘truth of Being,’ henceforth emphasizes the openness of
Being itself rather than the openness of Dasein with respect to the open-
ness of Being. This indicates ‘the turn’ [die Kehre], in which thinking al-
ways more decisively turns to Being as Being.”25
To be sure, for Heidegger it is the case that the human being is the
“shepherd of Being” or “the guardian of Being.” That is, we are always
reminded that our access to Being is only through our Dasein—and for
this reason it may be fair to say that his thinking remained broadly “phe-
nomenological” to the end—but, if so, his enrichment of phenomenology
lay precisely in his giving a full accounting of the “phenomenon,” of the
“claim of Being,” on the human being and our meaning-making. Nev-
ertheless, Being itself as “ever-living” emergence became of such over-
riding concern to Heidegger that he sometimes explicitly stated that the
“truth-ing of Being” not only exceeds the relation to the human being
(as already noted) but is also altogether independent of that relation. All
such statements are often overlooked and need to be taken into account;
they show that those commentators are mistaken who would read him in
23. Martin Heidegger, F eldweg-Gespräche, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler (Gesamtausgabe 77)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), 147 (emphasis added, except for the last line).
24. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, ed. Petra Jaeger (Gesamtausgabe 10) (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 103 (hereafter “GA 10”), translated as The Principle of Rea-
son by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 70.
25. GA 15:345 (47).
a strict transcendental-phenomenological manner to say that Being “is”

only insofar as there is human being:
At times, Being needs the essencing of human being, and yet Being is never de-
pendent upon existing humanity.
The history of Being is neither the history of the human being and of a human-
ity, nor the history of the human relation to beings and to Being. The history of
Being is Being itself, and only this.
Being and the truth of Being is essentially beyond all human beings and every
[historical] humanity.
Being always and everywhere endlessly exceeds all beings and juts forth into
beings.
Physis [as Being itself] is beyond the gods and human beings.26
Heidegger’s original and sustaining concern was with Being as man-

ifestation as shining-forth as phainesthai—the spontaneous and un-
grounded temporal emerging and issuing forth of all beings. We might
also recall in this respect his fondness for quoting Angelus Silesius’s po-
etic line that “The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.”27
Therefore over the years, guided especially by Aristotle’s insight into the
kinetic character of things, he unfolded his understanding of Being itself
26. All such texts point out that “the truth of Being” “is” even if the human being is not;
they speak to the trajectory of his thinking after Being and Time. See Heidegger’s own retracta-
tio of his earlier position in Being and Time in “Letter on Humanism,” in GA 9:336–37 (256–57).
The first and second lines cited are from “Recollection in Metaphysics”/“Die Erinnerung in die
Metaphysik” (1941). Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II, ed. Bernd Schillbach (Gesamtausgabe 6.2)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 441, 447 (emphasis added). Cf. Joan Stambaugh’s
translation in The End of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 76, 82. The
third line is from a text included as an Addendum in GA 54:249. The German reads: “Nur weil
das Sein und die Wahrheit des Seins wesentlich ist über alle Menschen und Menschentümer
hinweg.” The word “Menschentum” is commonly translated as “humanity,” but Heidegger uses
the plural (rare), which would be oddly translated as “humanities,” as Schuwer and Rojce-
wicz do on p. 166 of their GA 54 translation. So, I have opted for “every [historical] humanity,”
though Heidegger’s use of the plural form in this paragraph could also be captured by “every
historical people” or “all historical peoples.” The fourth line is also from the Parmenides vol-
ume: GA 54:164 (111). The fifth line is from his 1943 lecture course (GA 55:166). With respect
to this line, see the seminar in Le Thor in 1966 (September 9), where Heidegger restated the
view that physis and logos and kosmos spoken of by Heraclitus say the same as Being. On frag-
ment 30, he observed: “kosmos [is] older than the gods and human beings, which remain relat-
ed back to it, since not the gods or human beings could ever have brought it [kosmos] forth.” GA
15:282; Four Seminars, 8.
27. See especially Heidegger’s 1955/56 lecture course “Der Satz vom Grund” (GA 10).
(Sein selbst)—that is, the fundamental, unifying, and originary meaning

of Being—as the Being-way, as I prefer to name it, wherein and where-
by beings emerge, linger in their “full look” or “presence” (eidos), wane,
and pass away. As he saw it, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, remained
close to this originary Greek experience of Being; in other words, the
“full look,” the eidos or morphe that Plato and Aristotle determined to
be the ontos on, the “really real,” represented only a separating out and
privileging of this one aspect of the whole arc of presencing that is Being
itself. Consequently, for Heidegger, the temporal-spatial emerging of be-
ings in their beingness was still in the background of Plato’s and Aris-
totle’s thinking, unlike in the later metaphysical tradition in which the
variations on the formulation “being itself = essence (that is, constant
presence)” simply became philosophical formula.28
If the question is whether Heidegger himself withdrew or abandoned
the name Being in speaking about his core concern, as has been raised by
some Heidegger scholars more recently, then I have maintained that the
textual evidence is compelling and convincing that he did not.29 More-
over, if we hew close to this question, we uncover this engaging story of
how Heidegger struggled mightily from beginning to end to retain the
name of Being while distinguishing it from metaphysical “being(ness).”
His perseverance in this effort is simply remarkable—and a measure of
how important it remained to him to safeguard the originary word of
Western philosophical thinking—Being—right to the very end of his
lifetime of thinking. For Heidegger, there is no “beyond Being,” only
a “beyond being(ness).” Indeed, this is precisely how he read Plato’s
well-known phrase epekeina tes ousias from Republic VI; that is, Plato
was pointing beyond the ideas, “beyond beingness,” to a realm that “en-
ables” and “empowers” the ideas in the first place, a realm that Heidegger
identified as Being itself, the temporal-spatial Being-way.30
However, Heidegger surely enjoyed the Spielraum, the “free-play”
or “leeway,” of a thinker to name the Ur-phenomenon in a multitude of
different ways. The many names that he put into play, from the ancient
28. In this regard, note Heidegger’s remark in Le Thor in 1969: “We must never allow our-
selves to lose sight of the fact that the determinations of phainesthai and of the [on hos] alethes
are fully present in the Platonic eidos.” GA 9:333–34 (40). See also my remarks in chap. 3 of my
Heidegger’s Way of Being.
29. Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, chap. 1.
30. Ibid., chap. 6.
Greek words aletheia, physis, and logos to his own terms Ereignis, Licht
ung, Gegnet, and Es gibt, all attempt to say and show in its several di-
mensions the one fundamental matter—what he properly named Beyng
(Seyn), Being itself (Sein selbst), Being as such (Sein als solches), Being as
Being (Sein als Sein). “Saying” (sagen) is ultimately a “showing” (zeigen),
but it is also a “playing” (spielen), and Heidegger reveled in this “play” of
saying and naming—indeed, we may imagine, as he walked the forest
paths or gazed out the window of his study, meditating on how he might
bring “it” into language yet one more time.
Being as Ereignis
Let us consider further: how do Heidegger’s terms of art, Ereignis and
Lichtung, relate to “the truth of Being”?31 As noted earlier, he employed
the term Ereignis in his 1919 lecture course and in a few places thereaf-
ter, but, by his own testimony, it was in the years 1936–38, during which
he composed the private manuscript that we know as Beiträge zur Phi-
losophie (Vom Ereignis)—Contributions to Philosophy (From Ereignis)—
that he became intensely concerned with working out this notion anew,
specifically in historical terms. It is well known that Heidegger never
thought of this dense and difficult private manuscript as publishable, and
it was not published in the Gesamtausgabe during his lifetime, not until
1989 in fact. Beiträge deserves the kind of careful attention that it has re-
ceived in recent years. Even so, in my view, since its publication, the Hei-
degger scholarship has generally tended to overstate the significance of
this one text—and to overstate, in particular, the significance of the term
Ereignis in his thinking as a whole.
Indeed, it was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s that Heidegger
presented his notion of Ereignis in a more direct and public way. Yet, as I
noted in Engaging Heidegger, his discussion of Ereignis in his later work
is much more serene than in Beiträge and the Beiträge-related reflec-
tions of the late 1930s, all of which are marked by a somewhat disturbing
quasi-apocalyptic tone. In his later statements, he no longer speaks of Er-
eignis in terms of the dramatic—and even traumatic—moment-ousness
or event-fulness of history, but rather now as the “most gentle of all laws”
31. Ibid., chaps. 2, 5, and 6.

that gathers each being into what it properly is and into a belonging with
other beings—a characterization that is remarkably similar to his life-
long descriptions of Being as the primordial Logos in terms of the pri-
mordial gathering (Versammlung) of all beings. What is more, this is a
characterization that is also remarkably in tune with his earliest use of
the word Ereignis in the 1919 lecture course.32
The later Heidegger ultimately found in the word Ereignis a way of
bringing forth in a particularly vivid way the manifold features of Be-
ing itself. From the beginning of his path of thinking, he was concerned
to “ground” the metaphysical tradition’s core concern with “being(ness)”
by bringing into view Being as time—the movement, the way, in which,
by which, through which beings emerge, abide in their “full look,” de-
cline, and depart. The word Ereignis makes manifest the Being-way
by
virtue of the three fundamental resonances of the word itself, namely,
(1) the “event” or “happening” that is the efflorescence and effulgence of
beings coming into (2) their “own” (the eigen of ereignen) and thereby
(3) coming out into “full view” to Dasein (ereignen related to eräugnen,
literally “to come before the eyes,” from the German word for “eye,”
Auge). This Ereignis of beings, this unfolding process, is referred to by
Heidegger in the 1950s as the singulare tantum: the “singular as such,”
a phrase which no more than reiterated his frequent characterization of
Being itself as the “the one,” to hen (Greek), das Eine; or as “the one and
only,” das E inzig-Eine.33 This “singular” unfolding of beings bears within
it a dimension of reserve, but just in case this might be overlooked, he
sometimes had recourse to pair Ereignis with the word Enteignis as a re-
minder. Nevertheless, in the later work Ereignis conveys the simple and
quiet but also profound and astonishing “coming to pass” of all things,
such as the plum or cherry tree coming into luxuriant bloom—event-
fully, let us say.
One observation regarding his well-known but often misread 1962
lecture “Time and Being” will help clarify the matter. Nearing the end
32. See ibid., 43–47. For Heidegger’s characterization of Ereignis as “the most gentle of all
laws,” see Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(Gesamtausgabe 12) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985), 248. Richard Polt, though not
making the same point as I am here, nonetheless takes note of the connection to the early 1919
seminar in his careful study “Ereignis,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Mark Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 375–91.
33. See especially Heidegger’s 1957 lecture “The Principle of Identity,” in his Identity and
Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 36.
of the lecture, Heidegger states: “Yet the sole aim of this lecture has been
to bring into view Being itself [Sein selbst] as Ereignis.” In Engaging Hei-
degger, I commented further on this singularly important line:
This one line would certainly be decisive and definitive were it not that he does
not helpfully clarify this conclusion. He immediately shifts to a consideration of
how this is not to be thought. That is, he warns that the “as” in this statement is
especially “treacherous” because the metaphysical habit of thinking reflexive-
ly construes what follows the “as” to be only a “mode” of being(ness). He ob-
serves that if his statement is considered in this metaphysical manner, Ereignis
would be no more than a subset of being(ness) and therefore “subordinated”
to being(ness) as “the main concept,” and he emphasizes that this is certainly
not his meaning. Metaphysical thinking simply misses the fundamental mat-
ter to be thought in saying “Being itself as Ereignis.” This may be so, but he of-
fers no careful elucidation of how his conclusion is to be understood, although
his meaning is perhaps apparent enough that Being itself as Ereignis names the
giving of beings (what-is-given) in the fullness of their givenness (eidos, being-
ness), and relatedly, the giving of the epochal or historical renderings of being-
ness. Yet more to the point, he does not directly address the apparent tension in
the lecture between two claims: on the one hand, he states throughout that Er-
eignis “gives” das Sein (Es gibt Sein), but, on the other hand, he concludes with
the strong assertion that the whole point of the lecture is precisely to bring into
view “Being itself as Ereignis.”
The problem lies with his uncertain use of the word das Sein. One of the
chief difficulties in reading the later Heidegger is that he often leaves the reader
uncertain about the meaning of Sein in certain contexts, and here is a particu-
larly troublesome instance of this. Nevertheless, this is not the case with his use
of the name Sein selbst, Being itself, because throughout his work he is always
careful in reserving this name for the fundamental matter for thought. So, in
“Time and Being” we find that he does not state that Ereignis gives or grants Be-
ing itself; in fact, as far as I can determine, there is no place in any of Heidegger’s
texts—early, middle, or late—where he allows that Ereignis gives Being itself
(nowhere, in other words, where he uses the phrase Es gibt Sein selbst). There-
fore, if we sort out the language of the lecture, then we can make better sense of
his fundamental position: Ereignis as Es gibt gives (grants, allows, lets, enables)
beingness; but Ereignis and Being itself say the Same.34
34. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Ge-
samtausgabe 14) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2007), 26, translated as On Time and Being
A careful consideration of “Time and Being” reveals, therefore, that

there is no significant departure in Heidegger’s thinking at all, but rather
only a reformulation of the fundamental matter for thought in terms of
Ereignis as Es gibt. Yet, moreover, let us recall that already in 1946/47, in
the “Letter on Humanism,” he had made himself perfectly clear on this
point: “For the ‘it’ [es] that here ‘gives’ [gibt] is Being itself.”35 In fact, I
propose that his formulation of the Es gibt in “Time and Being” may be
regarded as a later retrieval and restatement of his very early observa-
tion on the lived-experience
of the “es gibt” (“there is” something) as an
Ereignis in §§13–14 of the 1919 lecture course, which I highlighted ear-
lier. Accordingly, I think that it is possible to say that Heidegger’s think-
ing and language in 1962 had returned to where it had essentially be-
gun in 1919. Even so, my overarching point is that the task for thinking
called for in “Time and Being” remained what it had always been, name-
ly, to get into full view what earlier Western philosophical thinking had
caught sight of only glancingly, if at all: the pure appropriating—putting
into place, giving, granting, letting—of what appears (beings) in the full-
ness of appearing (beingness).
Being as Lichtung
Another term d’art, die Lichtung, has received little careful scholarly at-
tention, which I have attempted to address and redress in Engaging Hei-
degger.36 There are a number of issues to be observed, but the matter that
I would focus on at present is that die Lichtung, translated as the “light-
ing” or as the “clearing” depending upon the period in which we find the
term in Heidegger’s writings, is but another name for Being itself. Sur-
prisingly, there appears to be considerable confusion concerning this is-
sue in the recent scholarship; some commentators mistakenly insist on
identifying die Lichtung exclusively with Dasein’s disclosedness or con-
stitutive disclosive activity, and their position rests primarily on their
reading of §28 of Being and Time. Nevertheless, by the time Heidegger
wrote the “Letter on Humanism” to Jean Beaufret in 1946, he had already
by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 21. See Capobianco, Engaging
Heidegger, 47–50.
35. GA 9:334 (254–55): “Denn das ‘es,’ was hier ‘gibt,’ ist das Sein selbst.”
36. Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger, chaps. 5 and 6.
made it clear that precisely this kind of reading was not tenable. “But die
Lichtung itself is Being,” he pointedly stated in the “Letter.”37 Some years
later, in the 1965 address in honor of Binswanger that I have cited, he
came back to this matter and clarified the development of his thinking in
a remarkably forthright way:
Thus it may be appropriate at this time to indicate, at least broadly, the clear-
ing [Lichtung] as the distinctive matter for another thinking. This is called for
because four decades ago the hermeneutic analytic of Dasein spoke about the
clearing, with the aim of unfolding the question of Being in Being and Time
. . . Yet it required a decades-long
walk along those forest paths that lead only
so far [Holzwege] to realize that the sentence in Being and Time: “The Dasein
of the human being is itself the clearing” (§28), perhaps surmised the mat-
ter for thinking but in no way considered the matter adequately, that is, in no
way posed the matter as a question that arrived at the matter. The Dasein is the
clearing for presence as such, and yet Dasein is, at the same time, certainly not
the clearing in the sense that the clearing is Dasein in the first place, that is, in-
sofar as [we must see that] the clearing grants Dasein as such.38
His reflection here is a superb example of a retractatio of the Augus-

tinian kind, not a “retraction” as such but a reworking, restating, refo-
cusing of an earlier position. Heidegger tells us that what he could not
say quite yet in Being and Time was that though Dasein is the clearing
in one sense, it is not the clearing as such. In other words, while Dasein’s
disclosure (that is, “clearing”) of what is must always be acknowledged
and kept in view, the focal point of his thinking had always been the
“clearing itself” (that is, Being itself) which “clears” or “grants” Dasein
and all beings in the first place. In a conversation with Medard Boss in
these same years, he made this very point even more clearly and firmly
using the more familiar language of earlier writings: The human being
is “the guardian of the clearing” (cf. “the guardian of Being”) and “the
shepherd of the clearing” (cf. “the shepherd of Being”), and as such, “the
human being is not the clearing itself, is not the whole clearing, is not
identical with the whole clearing as such.”39
37. GA 9:332 (253).

38. Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Think-
ing,” 221.
39. Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare. Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, ed. Medard Boss
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), 223, translated as Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—
Conversations—Letters by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Uni-
What is more, as late as 1973, in a seminar in Zähringen, he stated

this position once again and in no uncertain terms: “This clearing [Licht
ung] . . . this free dimension is not the creation of the human being; it is
not the human being. On the contrary, it is that which is assigned to him,
since it is addressed to him: it is that which is dispensed to him.”40 In
Heidegger’s universe of indications: Being itself, Ereignis, Lichtung—the
Same. Precisely in the same way that, according to Heidegger, “Aletheia,
Physis, Logos are the Same . . . as the originary self-gathering-together in
the One that is rich with distinction: to Hen. The Hen, the primordially
unifying One and Only, is the Logos as Aletheia as Physis.”41
In summary, Being itself is the unconcealing of beings (aletheia); the
emerging, arising, appearing, shining forth of beings (physis); the laying
out and fore-gathering of beings (the primordial logos)—but also the “ap-
propriating” (Ereignis) of beings and the “lighting” and “clearing” (Licht
ung) of beings. Yet to be more precise, characterizing Being itself as the
appearing or manifesting of beings does not in the first place refer to the
sheer, abiding “appearance” or “presence” of beings (which came to be
spoken of in the metaphysical tradition as eidos, morphe, ousia, ener-
geia, actualitas, essentia), but rather to anwesen selbst, presencing itself,
or to Bewegtheit (Heidegger’s translation of Aristotle’s kinesis), namely,
the “movedness” of all beings into and out of presence, which Heidegger
meditated on at length in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, B I.42
Being itself: the unifying one and only, temporal-spatial
emerging or ap-
propriating of beings into presence—but also the giving, granting, freeing,
letting of beings—as long as we understand by “letting” this “enabling”
(Ermöglichung) and “empowering” (Ermächtigung) movement into (and
out of) presence.
versity Press, 2001), 178 (translation slightly modified). Such texts, and many others, are
decisively at odds with Sheehan’s repeated claim—a claim that is central in his “new para-
digm”—that, for Heidegger, the human being is the whole of the clearing; see, for example, his
“A Paradigm Shift,” 193, and “Astonishing!,” 9. Furthermore, in this same passage, Heidegger
refers to Dasein as the guardian “of Ereignis.” According to Heidegger, then, Dasein is the guar-
dian of Being, Lichtung, and Ereignis, and thus we have additional reason to state that Being,
Lichtung, Ereignis say “the same”—and additional reason to refuse Sheehan’s reading of Erei-
gnis as reducible to Dasein’s thrownness or finitude.
40. GA 15:386–87 (73).
41. GA 55:371 (my translation; no available English translation). Note that Heidegger capi-
talizes all the Greek Ur-words.
42. GA 9:239–301 (183–230).
Concluding Thought
Truth of Being: Being truths. The “strangeness” of this matter for think-
ing was not lost upon Heidegger himself, who commented in the 1943
lecture course on Heraclitus:
The thinking of metaphysics knows truth only as a feature of cognition. That
is why the hint presently given—that “truth,” in the sense of aletheia, is the in-
ception of the essence of physis itself and of the divinities and humans belong-
ing therein—remains strange in every respect for all previous thinking. Yes, it
is even good and crucial that we hold fast to this strange matter and not be per-
suaded hastily that aletheia is not, as metaphysics up until now has meant in a
“self-evident” manner, a mere feature of cognitive comportment—but rather is
the fundamental feature of Being itself. It remains strange for us and must re-
main strange that truth is the originary essence of Being.43
Several decades later, this “strange” matter for thinking continues to

be largely eschewed by Continental and analytic philosophers alike—
and, perhaps much more surprisingly, by some Heidegger commentators
as well. Yet the way remains open for us to take up and take to heart this
marvelous matter of the truth of Being—Heidegger’s distinctive way of
calling us back to the experience of Being as manifestation; to the experi-
ence of things as they emerge and meet us and, as we say in English, “fill
our senses”; to the experience of ourselves “vibrating back” from things,
as Walt Whitman put it. The nearness and freshness and vividness of
what is, and the astonishment and joy and thanksgiving that this calls
forth in us. The dynamism of all things, both made and found, both of
the exuberant city and of the serene wooded path, all beings and things
as they emerge and linger and while in their appearance—but also wane,
falter, and pass away. There is for us to discern, too, the deep reserve in-
herent in the showing of things, the lethe dimension of aletheia that Hei-
degger spoke of so often. Lethe, this unconquerable reserve of Being that
43. Heidegger, Heraklit, GA 55: 175 (my translation; no available English translation). The
first epigraph that opens this essay is found within this passage. Heidegger’s two brilliant lec-
ture courses on Heraclitus that comprise Heraklit (first published in 1979) have not yet been
translated into English in complete form. Yet for a further discussion of these important texts
with a focus on the matter of Being in relation to the human being, see chaps. 5 and 6 of my
Heidegger’s Way of Being. Consider, too, Heidegger’s equally clear and firm statement in his
1955–56 lecture course “On the Principle of Ground”: “Self-revealing is a fundamental feature
of Being” (GA 10:102).
keeps us unsure and unknowing—and humbly reserved in our telling to

ourselves and to others of what is. With these observations taken togeth-
er, we are in view again of the core matter of Heidegger’s thinking, and
once more I call upon Walt Whitman to help us articulate this matter. In
Whitman’s strong voice:
A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the
ground and sea, they are in the air.44
All things rolling into manifestation. All things rolling into and out
of presence. All things rolling and gathering into language.45 This is the
“well-rounded, never trembling heart of truth”—and the very heart of
Heidegger’s meditative thinking.46
44. The opening lines from Whitman’s poem “A Song of the Rolling Earth.”
45. Heidegger, Heraklit, GA 55: 179: “physis itself is the self-showing
that essentially shows
itself in the signs.” See also chap. 5 of my Heidegger’s Way of Being.
46. GA 15:403; Four Seminars, 94.
Rudolf Bernet
Heidegger on Aristotle
Rudolf Bernet
3 S Heidegger on Aristotle
dunamis as Force and Drive
In focusing on Heidegger’s interpretation of the Aristotelian dunamis,

our aim is not to survey everything Heidegger ever wrote about the
phenomenological-ontological nature of force and drive, nor everything
he ever wrote about Aristotle. We shall thus pass over his reading of
the Leibnizian vis activa in his 1928 summer course, as well as his read-
ing of the Wille zur Macht in his series of courses devoted to Nietzsche
from 1936 to 1941. As for the numerous texts by Heidegger on Aristo-
tle, we shall equally be obliged to leave aside anything that does not di-
rectly pertain to a phenomenology of natural forces and animal drives,
which will notably mean excluding the interpretation of the Nicoma-
chean Ethics from the winter course of 1924/25 and the magnificent text
“On the Essence and the Concept of Phusis” written in 1939. This choice
also means that we shall not be able to delve into how the analysis of
“being-in-movement” contributes to the elaboration of the project of a
“fundamental ontology,” let alone regarding how it underpins a new con-
ception of phusis as event of an “uncovering” (Entbergung).
Here, we shall restrict ourselves to exploring, with Heidegger, certain
aspects of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. In a gradual dilation of
scope, we shall move from considering the essential structures common
to all natural movements to proposing an interpretation of the dunamis
as drive-like
force, and eventually work our way toward the nature and
Translated from the French by Basil Vassilicos.
49
50 Rudolf Bernet
the fortunes of a specifically human drive, which is to say one exposed

to logos. Proceeding along these lines, we shall not only be particularly
attentive to the character of the drives as both dynamic and unstable,
in their animation of the movement of life in living beings, to the pro-
found ambivalence between the activity and passivity of these drives,
and to conflicting drives and impotent drives. In addition, we shall care-
fully consider the finitude of any human drive-like force, as well as the
choice between a restriction of the drives and their free satisfaction in
the sphere of action.
The Structure of Movement and the

Particularity of Natural Movements
Although the analysis of natural movement remains the primary focus
in Aristotle’s Physics, the movement involved in making something (poi-
ein) is nevertheless taken as the fundamental basis for his analysis of the
essential components or archai of movement in terms of dunamis, ener-
geia, sterèsis (according to Physics A). One can think of at least two good
reasons for doing so. The first has to do with the fact that the structural
moments common to all movement are easier to distinguish in the pro-
cess of making something than in the unfolding of a natural movement.
In the sort of making proper to the fabrication of a manmade prod-
uct, neither the origin (archè) nor the end (telos) of the thing produced
(poioumenon) can be confused with the thing itself, and as a result each
structural moment is more easily identifiable as such. Put differently, in
the movement of making, the ability to make and the making that at-
tains its end remain distinct from the setting into work (energeia) of the
making.
The second reason why Aristotle chooses to analyze the general struc-
ture of movement in terms of making something consists, according to
Heidegger, in his marked preference for entities whose presence is distin-
guished by their high degree of stability and permanence. Such is the case
for the work (ergon) completed through a process of production that at-
tains its end. This is why the being-present
(ousia) of a being is more plain
to see in the constant availability of a produced thing than in a living be-
ing whose life consists precisely in deferring the termination of the move-
Heidegger on Aristotle 51
ment of its life.1 This is all the more true given that such termination can
in no ways be mistaken for the perfection of a finished product.
The being (phusis) of living beings thus entails that they are always in
movement, and two things seem key about this movement of life: that it
always remains in the process of actualizing itself (energeia), and that it
always remains on the way toward its completion in a final totality (entel-
echeia) that can only be a moving totality. This is why movement (kinèsis)
epitomizes the being of natural moving beings (kinoumena) more pro-
foundly than the being of things produced (poioumena), even though the
latter—as the result of a movement of production—are equally kinou-
mena.
Living beings are moving beings whose movement of life has its ori-
gin (archè) and its end (telos) in their life (phusis) itself, where the being of
such life consists precisely in being-in-movement
(Bewegtheit).2 Likewise,
the begetting of one living being by another also takes part in the move-
ment of life itself (phusis), whose being equally consists in being-en-route.

The being of life consists in being-in-movement
and this movement of life
is “the path that leads from phusis to phusis [hodos phuseôs eis phusin].”3
The power or force (dunamis) that allows the living being to live and
1. Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der

hermeneutischen Situation). Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophi-
sche Fakultät (Herbst 1922),” in his Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhand-
lungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, ed. Günther Neumann (Gesamtausgabe 62)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2005), 373 (hereafter “GA 62”), translated as “Phenome-
nological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,”
by Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan in their Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early
Occasional Writings (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 172: “The finished
product resulting from the coping movement of production (poièsis) . . . is what it is. Being
means being-produced . . . .”
2. Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. Mark Michalski
(Gesamtausgabe 18) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 380 (hereafter “GA 18”), trans-
lated as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark Basil Tanzer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 257: “Physis characterizes a being that is: to be
itself the worker of itself [im Selbst der Arbeiter seiner selbst sein].”
3. Physics B 193b13. Cf. Heidegger’s commentary: “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis. Ari-
stoteles, Physik B, 1,” in his Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe
9) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 292 (hereafter “GA 9”), translated as “On the Es-
sence and Concept of physis in Aristotle’s B, I,” by William McNeill in Pathmarks, ed. William
McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223: “Physis is . . . the being-on-the
way of a self-placing thing toward itself as what is to be pro-duced, and this in such a way that
the self-placing is itself wholly of a kind with the self-placing
thing to be pro-duced.
”
52 Rudolf Bernet
to pass its life on to another living being can thus only come to it from
the movement of its life or, as Heidegger says, from its Lebensbewegtheit
(being-in-movement-of-life).4
Since the life of every worldly living being is finite, or (coming down
to the same thing) since no form of life of a worldly living being has its
terminus in absolute perfection, the life of a living being always disposes
of still more resources (dunamis) that have not yet been exploited, even
up until the moment of its death. This amounts to saying that this life is
marked by a lack (sterèsis) of actualization (energeia) that is at the same
time a richness of as yet unrealized potentialities. This is why the duna-
mis that underlies the actual life of a living being is, for Heidegger, simul-
taneously a “force” and a weakness, simultaneously a “capability” (Ver-
mögen) and the acknowledgement of a possible impotence (adunamia).
This fundamental ambiguity of the dunamis is what fuels our interest in
the Aristotelean conception of a “drive” that sustains the life of a living
being. We shall return to it later after having clarified the general mean-
ing of this dunamis in its relationship with energeia or entelecheia and
with sterèsis.
One approach to dunamis, energeia, and sterèsis would be to take
them as the essential structures (or eidetic characteristics) necessari-
ly presupposed—as “grounds” (archai)—by the possibility of all move-
ment, irrespective of the difference between natural movement and the
movement of a poiein. By insisting on the ontological character of these
grounds, Heidegger takes a somewhat different tack and favors present-
ing them as the fundamental modes of being of the moving thing in its
state of movement. A moving thing in fact has these three different modes
of being-in-movement: the mode of a not yet actualized potentiality (du-
namis), the mode of an actual movement that is in the course of taking
place (energeia), and the mode of an (as yet or already) absent movement
(sterèsis). Nevertheless, Heidegger’s insistence on the ontological charac-

ter of the Aristotelian conception of movement or of being-in-movement
as a mode of being should not make us think that movement could ex-
ist without particular moving things, that is, exist in itself (kath’auto) or
distinct from (para) that which is in movement.5 Dunamis, energeia, and
4. GA 62:352 (159): “movement of factic life.”

5. GA 18:372–73 (252): “Movement is a how of being, not the being of presence. . . . Being-
moved is a mode of being-present of determinate beings.”
sterèsis are, to the contrary, modes of being of a particular being, different

modes of behaving or being present that a moving being can adopt either
simultaneously or successively. Aristotle’s presentation of these categories
of movement in Physics Gamma is subjected to an exacting analysis in
Heidegger’s course on the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy in the
summer semester 1924.6
Concentrating, in particular, on the nature of dunamis, the question
is one of understanding why, in Aristotle’s Physics, it is never a purely
speculative possibility and that it is always the possibility of a movement,
or more precisely a possibility in movement. Its essential relationship to
the impending event of a switch or swing (metabolè) into a realization
situates the dunamis halfway (or on the way) between the (stable and im-
mobile) presence of a simple possibility, on the one hand, and of a simple
reality, on the other. As Heidegger writes, the dunamis is a “readiness”
(Bereitheit) for “action” (Wirken).7 Its intimate relationship with one or
other form of energeia (Wirken) is what essentially makes the dunamis
into a mode of being of kinesis, which is to say a dunamis kata kinèsin.
This relationship to kinesis can then take the double form of either a pas-
sive susceptibility to undergo a movement or an active “capability” (Ver-
mögen), if not even a sort of “push” (Drängen) toward the realization of a
new movement.8 In neither case, however, does the dunamis constitute
an enduring property of the thing; it is to the contrary a mode of being
that irremediably exposes that thing to a change in its nature as well as in
its relation to other things in the surrounding world.
6. GA 18:283–329 (student notes) and 365–95 (Heidegger’s handwritten manuscript) (192–

222, 247–68).
7. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie, ed. Franz-Karl Blust (Ge-
samtausgabe 22) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 173 (hereafter “GA 22”), translat-
ed as Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 145: “[. . .] ‘potentiality’ [‘Möglichkeit’] as a mode of presence, suitability
[Eignung], preparedness for [Bereitheit zu], availability for, but in view of a ‘toward-which,’ a
‘not-yet,’ . . . . The ‘potential’ [Das ‘Mögliche’] is not un-actual in the sense of something not
at all present-at-hand,
but is un-actual as not now being actualized [un-wirklich als nicht im
Wirken].”
8. For “capability,” see Martin Heidegger, Aristoteles, Metaphysik Theta 1–3. Von Wesen und
Wirklichkeit der Kraft, ed. Heinrich Hüni, 2nd ed. (Gesamtausgabe 33) (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1990), 139 (hereafter “GA 33”), translated as Aristotle’s Metaphysics theta 1–3. On
the Essence and Actuality of Force by Walter Brogan and Peter Warnok (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 118–19. For “push,” see GA 22:323 (236): “If something is in movement,
then that means phenomenally: it pushes [drängt] out of itself on that what it can be . . .” (trans-
lation modified).
54 Rudolf Bernet
All moving beings (kinoumena) simultaneously appear according to

the mode of being of dunamis and according to that of energeia. In oth-
er words, the presence of a being-in-movement
is always comprised of a
blend of a spurring dunamis and of an energeia that has not yet been fully
realized. Without this tightly knit relationship to an energeia-in-waiting,
the dunamis would be an empty or purely imaginary possibility, and not
at all a real one, and it would have no relationship to movement. This is
because the metaphysical essence of all movement (kinèsis) consists, for
Aristotle, in a change or a switch (metabolè) from dunamis into energeia.
In like fashion, a being actually given in the mode of being of energe-
ia is only presented as a being-in-movement
to the extent that the already
realized dunamis from which its movement results and the dunamis dor-
mant within it are co-present. Aristotle calls this co-presence of an ab-
sence “lack” (sterèsis) and he quite logically holds this form of privation
to be the third archè of being-in-movement.9 It is through the interme-
diary of such sterèsis that the dunamis and the energeia of a thing can be
simultaneously present, and the negativity of this same sterèsis is the true
engine behind the shifting, changing relationships between dunamis and
energeia. The sterèsis, in the role of an actual nonbeing, ensures that in
the appearing of a dunamis the energeia is co-present
in the mode of be-
ing something-not-yet-realized. Moreover, this same sterèsis ensures that
in the appearing of the energeia the dunamis is co-present in the mode of
being something-no-longer-available as a potentiality.
The sterèsis opens up, in movement just as in speech, the space of a
separation or an interval that constitutes the most original locus (or the
“there”) of the moving thing. More specifically, as regards speech, the
fact that sterèsis is also a category of denial allows all the modes of move-
ment to be formulated or addressed under the double form of a positive
and negative statement. Since all movement can be stated in two man-
ners (dichôs legetai), a counter-movement
corresponds, in principle, to
every movement. Likewise, speech can be addressed to a being both in
terms of what it is (morphè, eidos) and in terms of what it is not (sterèsis),
and this entails that every being is, in each case, only “more or less” what
speech says about it. What this duplicity of speaking reveals is nothing
less than that every being is fundamentally in movement: “a being, as it
9. Metaphysics D 1022b22–1023a7.
is determined as this dichôs, shows in itself the essential being-possibility

[Seinsmöglichkeit], to be something that is ‘from . . . toward.’ Since it is
the possibility of the ‘from . . . toward’ of something like a change [Um-
schlag], it can be in movement.”10
Heidegger’s 1924 summer course on Aristotle concludes with an inter-
pretation of the third chapter of Physics Gamma, in which the analysis of
movement is extended beyond the perspective of the movement of a sin-
gle moving thing. Factoring in the relationship between different moving
things and their respective movements leads Aristotle to augment his the-
ory of movement with a new category. While the categories of dunamis,
energeia, and sterèsis suffice for understanding the being-in-movement of
a singular moving thing, study of the interaction between various mov-
ing things demands that one append to them the category of a “relation”
(pros ti). This pros ti helps one to understand the mode of being of the
moving thing by drawing attention to the manner in which the moving
thing is related, in its movement, to other beings.11 Aristotle distinguish-
es between two fundamental forms of such a relationship of one moving
being to another being, namely the active form of a doing (poièsis) and
the passive form of an undergoing (pathèsis). That which is in movement
owes (pathèsis), in most cases, its movement to another moving thing,
and as a result of its movement, sets other things in movement (poièsis).
Setting-in-movement and undergoing-a-movement are thus two forms of
being-in-movement bound to each other through a form of “reciproca-
tion” (Wechselwirkung) or through an interaction between a movement
and a counter-movement
belonging to different beings.12 However, con-
sidered in more detail, these two modalities of being-in-movement are
combined, generally, already in one and the same moving being as soon
as a moving being enters into relation with other moving beings; a being
that is in movement simultaneously moves and is moved.13
Heidegger insists a great deal on the fact that one should not confuse
this double manner of being of the movement with the difference between
two beings where the one initiates movement and the other undergoes it.
10. GA 22:311–12 (211, translation modified).

11. GA 18:324 (219): “This category of the pros ti means that beings are determined as be-
ing in relation to another. . . . the character of every being that is in movement.”
12. GA 18:390 (264).
13. GA 18:327 (221): “. . . every moving thing is the moving of something moved, and every
moved thing is the moved of something moving.”
56 Rudolf Bernet
The Aristotelian analysis of the double movement of “teaching and learn-

ing” appears to confirm this line of reasoning, in that here it is indeed a
case of a movement and a counter-movement
where the one cannot exist
without the other and where their conjunction has to be understood as a
necessary unity. This boils down to saying, with Heidegger, that it is ul-
timately a question of two modes of being of one and the same complex
movement that is typically distributed across two different moving be-
ings. The student is never confused with the teacher, but it is in the heart
of one and the same movement that they relate to each other and that
their different manner of relating to the acts of teaching and of learning
appears.14 It thus appears once more that every movement is itself related
to a counter-movement, and we shall be obliged to gauge the consequenc-
es of this originary duplicity of movement when turning to a metaphysi-
cal conception of the human drives.
In the 1924 course, however, the interpretation of the pros ti and of
the double nature of movement as poièsis and pathèsis pursues a different
sort of agenda. Heidegger is above all interested in showing that this re-
lationship of every moving being to other moving beings is inserted into
an all-encompassing
ensemble of different beings that all relate to each
other (albeit in diverse manners). Heidegger already has a term for this
ensemble, namely the “world.” All moving beings are related to each oth-
er in this world that at the same time forms the horizon for all authentic
comprehension of the meaning of the being of movement: “The moving
of what sets in movement [des Bewegenden] and the becoming-moved
of
what is moved is the same there [Da], i.e., movement is not a being, but
the how [Wie] of the being of the world.”15
Through this identification of the Aristotelian category of the pros
ti with the mode of being of the “world” (which is the horizon on the
grounds of which a being is related to other beings), the world is estab-
lished as the cornerstone of the Heideggerian reconstruction of Aristo-
tle’s theory of kinèsis.16 It follows that, for Heidegger, different modes
of being-in-movement
equally (or rather, first and foremost) have to be
14. GA 18:327 (221): “The genuine being of one who teaches is to stand before another,
and speak to him in such a way that the other, in hearing, goes along with him. It is a unitary
being-context [ein einheitlicher Seinszusammenhang] that is determined by kinesis.”
15. GA 18:394 (267, translation modified).
16. GA 18:325 (219): “Pros ti as determination of the being of the world: pros allela.”
understood as being different modes of being-in-the-world.

In this way,
Heidegger’s 1924 interpretation introduces a shift that is both subtle and
laden with crucial consequences; the world is inserted into the role Ar-
istotle reserves for phusis as archè of all natural movements. If life is in-
deed the most original form of a natural movement, then as a result of
this shift the scope of the different forms of life changes. Namely, one
can only understand the different forms of the enactment of the move-
ment of life on the basis of the difference between the various manners
of being related to the world: “Living [Das Leben] as a definite type of
being-in-the-world, is characterized by the pros ti.”17
Dunamis as the Double Force of

the Living Being
In the Natorp Report from 1922 as well as in his courses on the Aristo-
telian theory of movement from 1924 and 1926, Heidegger is essentially
concerned with the particular movement that characterizes the life of hu-
man beings. Only in courses after the publication of Being and Time did
Heidegger become positively interested in the life of plants and animals
and, more specifically, in a determination of the movement of life (Leb-
ensbewegtheit) applicable to all living beings. The best known evidence of
this evolution is certainly the course from 1929/30 that nonetheless takes
animal life, from within the perspective of fundamental ontology, to be a
deficient (“poor”) or deprived mode of the being-in-the-world of Dasein.18
It is only in Heidegger’s last course on Aristotle, in 1931, that his point of
view changes and that the analysis of the relationship of the movement
of life with the world becomes less dominant. By situating the movement
of the life of living beings within the compass of dunamis, and by under-
standing this dunamis as “force” or “capability,” Heidegger’s earlier in-
terest in the integration of living beings in the harmonious milieu of the
world makes room, in the 1931 course, for a different sort of focus: that of
the duplicity of all force, of the multiplicity of forces that govern life, and
17. GA 18:327 (221).

18. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit,
ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 29/30) (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster-
mann, 1983), translated as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude
by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
58 Rudolf Bernet
above all of their possible antagonism. Whereas before the phenomeno-

logical model of the dunamis was the thing whose meaning lies in how it
is ready to hand (zuhanden), now the starting point is that of possessing
an as yet unrealized capability or an inhibited force or power.
On the back of this newly awakened interest in the drive-based dy-
namic of animal and human life in the 1931 course on Metaphysics Theta
1–3, it is remarkable how much the focal point of Heidegger’s analysis
of Aristotelian kinèsis shifts, away from energeia and toward dunamis.
Heidegger also presents us with a new understanding of the human du-
namis as a power that humans can have without necessarily wanting to
make use of it. Such restraint in the exercise of power ought to be seen,
according to Heidegger, as the expression of a typically human sort of re-
serve, and should be regarded as the most redeeming quality of that force
whose mode of being is that of a dunamis meta logou. Possessing (haben,
echein) such a specifically human power thus entails keeping it in reserve
(an sich halten). The introduction of logos into the dynamic of the move-
ment of life not only changes the meaning of the double nature already
uncovered in all forms of movement, but it equally opens up, within hu-
man existence, the new dimension of choosing a sort of asceticism in the
usage of power. Heidegger arrives at these positions by way of interpret-
ing in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta the status of a dunamis as unhar-
nessed hexis.
Heidegger’s interpretation of the first chapter of Metaphysics Theta
contains the most significant developments not only for a properly on-
tological understanding of the dunamis kata kinèsin but, more gener-
ally, for a metaphysics of the drive. In order to provide an idea of the
semantic richness of dunamis as archè of kinèsis, Heidegger proposes a
long list of terms for it—“force [Kraft], capacity [Fähigkeit], art [Kunst],
talent [Begabung], capability [Vermögen], competence [Befähigung], ap-
titude [Eignung], skill [Geschicklichkeit], violent force [Gewalt], power
[Macht]”—while still insisting that all these terms do not at all mean
anything “subjective.”19 He also underlines, once more, that such a force
or dunamis kata kinèsin can be manifested either as a passive force (du-
namis tou pathein) or as an active force (dunamis tou poiein).20 Just as the
1924 course already laid emphasis on how teaching and learning are two
19. GA 33:72 (60); GA 33:76 (64).

20. GA 33:90 (75–76).
faces of one and the same movement, Heidegger highlights, here once
more, that the force involved in doing something and the force required
to endure something—even if both of these forces are allotted in differ-
ent ways to various beings—are two manners of being and of appearing
that belong to the common essence of all force.
The being of force is thus able to be manifested in a double guise and
can be simultaneously invested in different beings. When one being acts
upon another being that lends itself to such action by allowing some-
thing to be done to it, we have what Heidegger calls an “ontic” relation of
force. Such a relation, however, presupposes a complex “ontological unity”
of force.21 That is, all force can be characterized by an original duplic-
ity, ambivalence, or versatility, and all force already comprises in itself a
counter-force:
This of course does not mean that a definite individual force directly at hand
[vorhanden] consists of two forces, but rather that this force in its essence, that
is, being a force as such, is this relation of the poein to a paschein: being a force is
both as one . . . Force-being [Kraftsein] does not consist of two present-at-hand
forces, but rather, to the extent that a force is present, there is in this being pres-
ent the implicating directedness toward the corresponding counter-force [Ge-
genkraft]. This . . . belongs to the being-force of force.22
This internal opposition or tension belonging to all force clarifies

why the focal point of Heidegger’s analysis of movement shifts from en-
ergeia to dunamis. It is important to note, however, that emphasis on this
tension takes nothing away from the fact that the dunamis essentially
aims at exercising its power, that is, aims to “surpass itself” in a realiza-
tion of its capacities.23 This orientation or pressure toward exercising its
21. GA 33:107 (90–91): “If force-being

[das Kraftsein] means the original unitary, impli-
cating, and reciprocal relation [ursprünglich einheitlicher, einbeziehender Wechselbezug] of be-
ing an origin for doing and suffering, then this ontological unity of the reciprocal relation does
not mean the ontic unity . . . . The unity of force-being needs instead to be understood from
out the fact that this unity, as a unity of reflexive and inclusive relational being [Einheit des
rück- und einbezüglichen Bezogenseins], demands precisely the ontic discreteness and differ-
ence [Verschiedenheit bzw. Unterschiedenheit] of beings, which always persists with this char-
acter of force-being . . . .”
22. GA 33:105–6 (89).
23. GA 33:100–101 (84–85): “Having the power for something . . . means here: being capa-
ble of handling something in the right way [in der rechten Weise fertig werden können mit et-
was], being able in the sense of mastering [Können im Sinne von Meistern], being the master
over . . . , mastery. . . . Hence, the power for something [Kraft zu etwas] is always not falling short
60 Rudolf Bernet
talents is so strong that a dunamis without energeia (actual or deferred)

would be incomplete; it is only in the triumph of a successful realization
that all the richness of a force can, retrospectively, be manifested.24 All
the same, by underlining the role of dunamis at the expense of energeia,
Heidegger demonstrates a newfound interest in the ontological status of
a capacity as such, which is to say to a form of actuality or reality that
falls to it independent of any realization.
This then leads Heidegger to a generous appraisal of curbed capacities
and of the indispensable role that checked forces play in the movement of
human life. All these changes in the Heideggerian interpretation of Aris-
totle stem from a novel, more acute sensibility for the original negativity
that inhabits all force, independent of its relation to an energeia not yet re-
alized. In the 1931 course, as a result, we are confronted with the essential
relations that force has not only with a “counter-force,” but equally with
an “unforce” (Unkraft) and with the force of a “resistance” (Widerständig-
keit). When applied to the movement of human life, this means that all
human activities and behaviors result from a choice and above all from a
preliminary confrontation regarding opposite and opposing drives. This
also means that our experience of impotence, of conflict, and of resistance
is not only due to our confrontation with the interests of other human be-
ings, or with a reality that turns out to be indifferent or even hostile to our
desires. Rather, our powers and drives are deeply marked, from the be-
ginning, by an original and indelible negativity.
Heidegger’s increased sensitivity to the different forms of an origi-
nal negativity in the heart of all dunamis cannot be put down to the
way a reciprocity obtains between the “force” of a doing (poiein) and the
“counter-force” of an undergoing (pathein). That aspect of the dunamis
had already been well established in his 1924 course. The novel facet of the
1931 course is the observation that a certain mode of negativity can already
be found in each of the two fundamental forms of force. The force involved
in receptivity (dunamis tou pathein) is already split between a positive “ca-
pacity to endure” (Ertragsamkeit) or “plasticity” (Bildsamkeit), on the one
of a definite how. In the essence of force there is, as it were, the demand upon itself [ein An-
spruch an sich selbst], to surpass itself ” (translation modified).
24. GA 33:78 (65): “Forces do not allow themselves to be directly discerned. We always
find only accomplishments, successes, effects. . . . We come upon forces only retrospectively
[Auf Kräfte schließen wir nur rückwärts] . . . .”
hand, and a negative “intolerance” (Unduldsamkeit) or an “attitude of re-

sistance” (Widerständigkeit; hexis apatheias), on the other.25 In the case
of a fabrication process, this double, contradictory form of a passive force
(dunamis tou pathein) means that a material (hulè) either lends itself or is
opposed and adverse, if not hostile, to receiving a particular form (mor-
phè). That is, the material may be either appropriable or in-appropriable
for the realization of a certain work. Such in-appropriation
or resistance
is “not nothing,” since it entails, to the contrary, the exercise of a force and
even the most originary manifestation of a force:
That which resists is the first and most familiar form in which we experience
a force. . . . what resists is itself the forceful and the force. . . . We experience the
forceful first . . . in the resisting object. And in its resistance, we experience first
its n on-ability [Nichtkönnen], its being-inhibited
[Gehemmtsein]. And only in
this do we experience a wanting to be able [Können-wollen], a tending to be able
[Können-mögen], and an ought to be able [Können-sollen].26
This new interest in the negativity constitutive of forces is clearly

evinced when Heidegger moves from discussing passive force (dunamis
tou pathein) and its resistance to an analysis of active force (dunamis tou
poiein). In his eyes, impotence or “unforce” (Unkraft; adunamia) consti-
tutes the negative counterpart of active force.27 This “unforce” should not
be confused with the external “counter-force” to which we have repeated-
ly referred in the foregoing. To the contrary, it involves a loss or a “with-
drawal” (Entzug; sterèsis) of power that directly affects active force as
such. Fatigue, weariness, collapse, and all the other states in which we are
without force should thus still be understood as modes of the being and
the appearing of active force. The nature of active force is conserved even
when its potency has vanished, and this demonstrates, once more, that
the being of force as dunamis does not at all depend on the actual exercise
or realization of its power.28 There are thus two ways to understand why
Heidegger cites the passage where Aristotle writes “every force is unforce
with reference to and in accordance with the same.”29 First, no real power
is immune to a loss of its power or to a “breakdown” arising in the course
25. GA 33:87–89 (73–74).

26. GA 33:91 (76–77).
27. GA 33:108 (91).
28. GA 33:109 (92–93).
62 Rudolf Bernet
of its exercise. Second, the being of a force (dunamis) remains fundamen-

tally unaffected (“the same”) by any such events, that is, the existence of a
force does not at all depend on the presence of the possibility to assert its
power by being realized in an energeia.
Heidegger appears willing to say that these two interpretations amount
to the same, since the event of a loss of actual power only confirms how the
ontological nature of force always comprises a form of unforce. Precisely
when it acts a check upon the actual power of active force, this unforce
appears best able to reveal the being of force in general; in the negative
mode of unforce, the dunamis most clearly evinces its ontological differ-
ence with energeia. By explicitly insisting upon the revelatory power of
“loss and withdrawal,” Heidegger thus renounces, at least implicitly, com-
mencing an analysis of the nature of dunamis from the starting point of
energeia and from within the privileged horizon of an actual movement.
The following passage can thus be read as a retraction of earlier interpreta-
tions of the dunamis, such as are to be found in the courses prior to Being
and Time: “The steretic alteration of force into unforce is accordingly of a
different kind from, say, the turn from movement toward rest, not only be-
cause in general force and movement are different according to their mate-
rial determination [Sachgehalt], but because the possessive character prop-
er to force is more intimately bound up with loss and withdrawal [Verlust
und Entzug].”30
In the loss of and in the withdrawal of power, it is most plainly shown
how the existence of a force does not at all depend on the actual possibil-
ity of being exercised. More importantly, however, loss and withdraw-
al demonstrate that such exercise of power is secondary to the being of
force, because it is extrinsic to the very essence of force. It is in impedi-
ment, and not in realization, that forces become most pressing, and there
is no better way than this of conveying everything that distinguishes the
essence of a drive from the essence of acting: “the incapable [Unvermö-
gende] is precisely actual insofar it does not find the transition to enact-
ment. To not find the transition to . . .: this is not nothing, but instead
can have the pressing force [Eindringlichkeit] and actuality of the great-
est plight [Bedrängnis] and so be what is properly pressing [das eigentlich
Drängende].”31

Human Life in the Opposition of Drives:

Their Restriction and Disinhibition
The richness of this newfound understanding of dunamis is revealed
above all in its application to the being-in-movement of life, and more
particularly as applied to the movement of human life. We have seen that
dunamis has to be understood as a force that encapsulates the opposite
poles of passivity and activity, and that these two fundamental forms of
force are most clearly shown under the negative guise of a resistance and
an unforce. When considered in view of the human experience of press-
ing drives and oppressing impotence, of painful inhibitions and chimeri-
cal volitions, and of subjugation to an overwhelming force of the drives,
these findings entail nothing less than a natural ontological anchoring of
such experience within the framework of an Aristotelian conception of
kinèsis. That is to say, a new understanding of human life is announced
in this novel interpretation of dunamis.
Human existence henceforth seems more deeply marked by the in-
quietude of a “not-having the force-to” than by the proud assurance of
a “can-be” (Sein-können), and the nonbeing or privation (sterèsis) of the
possibility of being able to realize one’s talents seems to weigh heavily
upon the burden of one’s own being-toward-death.
Accordingly, a hu-
man being comes to be seen as an existent whose force of being is ir-
remediably lacking full realization and for whom we cannot but wish
happy encounters and favorable circumstances so as to avoid remaining,
throughout his or her life, an unkept promise. The high esteem in which
one holds one’s own faculties often seems to have no other foundation
than the fact that their prestige remains insulated against the trial of any
possible realization. And even when not lacking the force of action or fa-
vorable circumstances, a human being must still face the fact that the re-
alization of his or her forces will along the way always be beset with the
obstacle of his or her own counter-drives and the resistance of a reality
that obstinately refuses to fulfill his or her wishes.
It is true that these perspectives on human life, quasi-Schopenhauerian

in their somberness, do not hold Heidegger’s attention for long. In his com-
mentary on Metaphysics Theta 2 and 3, he quickly succumbs, yet again, to
Aristotelian optimism. In his discussion with the Megarians in Theta 3,
Aristotle is less concerned with the loss of a power than with the conserva-
64 Rudolf Bernet
tion of an unharnessed power. This concern testifies to his wish to do jus-

tice to the independence of the being of the dunamis vis-à-vis its realiza-
tion in an energeia, and in the text one hardly finds mention of any disquiet
incited by the disorderly character of antagonistic drives or the impotence
of humans to face up to deeds that outstrip them. Aristotle seems content
to show that even if all dunamis presses toward switching (metabolè) into
an energeia, the absence or lack of such a realization does not abolish the
actual being of a force. This independence or excess of the being and the
reality of a power vis-à-vis its exercise comes about for at least two reasons.
First, the realization of a power, far from exhausting and abolishing that
power, to the contrary only confirms and reinforces it. Second, the impos-
sibility of the realization of a capacity does not annihilate a power, no more
than its actual realization does. As Heidegger notes, since the acquisition
(Einübung) of a new capacity is so arduous and requires so much effort on
our parts, it is certain that once acquired, its possession cannot be limited
to practicing or exercising it (Ausübung) at some moment or other.32
However, how ought we understand such a preservation of a capac-
ity that has not been harnessed, and what is to be said about its mode of
presence or absence? It goes without saying that a capability that has not
been realized or a competence that has not been exploited are completely
different from a lacking force or an unforce. We know that, in Aristotle,
the having (echein) or the possession of a habitual disposition to a certain
type of action is called hexis. Heidegger has moreover shown himself to
be quite sensitive to the Aristotelian conception of the supreme practical
hexis that Aristotle calls phronesis. It is nonetheless striking to observe
once more how, in his 1931 course, Heidegger gives his interpretation of
hexis a new twist, of which one cannot find any trace in his commentary
on the Nicomachean Ethics. Once more, the negative character of hexis
is set in a positive light, namely in the roles assigned to reserve and re-
straint in Heidegger’s appreciation of what it means to possess a certain
skill or capability. In this connection, Heidegger describes the possession
of an unharnessed power (dunamin echein) that has the form of a hexis
in the following way: “Something which is capable [das Vermögende] is
capable in that it ‘has’ a capability [Vermögen]; it holds itself in this capa-
bility and holds itself back [an sich hält] with this capability—and there-
32. GA 33:188 (161).

by precisely does not enact it. This holding itself back is at the same time
a holding onto for . . . [Aufbehalten für]” the enactment itself.33
One should not conclude from this that Heidegger has converted
into a proponent of unharnessed talents or of the suspension of all active
life. What he seems to have in view is rather a deepened understanding
of active life that lays emphasis on its anchoring in an ensemble of the
drive-like forces that both precedes active life and makes it possible, and
whose potentialities life will never come close to exhausting. Couched in
more classical language, the exercise (energeia) by which a power (duna-
mis) is made explicitly present in the world rests upon an anterior pres-
ence of this power, which is more hidden and more steadfast in kind.
This anterior presence is none other than that of a dunamis that has be-
come hexis.34 The exercise of a human capacity is thus signaled by an
intensified and reinforced presence of this capacity, by the confirmation
of the possession of an active power. However, even if it is true that exer-
cising them does not cancel out our capabilities, but to the contrary rein-
forces them, it remains no less true that such exercise entails a transfor-
mation in the nature of these capabilities.35
What then happens, exactly, when a capability, power, or drive actu-
alize itself, that is, leads to an action that reveals this capability, power,
or drive for what they truly are? Right at the end of the 1931 course, Hei-
degger makes use of the fairly surprising example of a hundred meter
sprinter (Hundertmeterläufer) “taking his or her mark.” The example of

34. GA 33:185 (158): “Enactment is practicing [Vollzug ist Ausübung], thus presence of prac-
tice [Übung] and of skill coming from practice [Geübtheit]; it is the presence of being in practice
[In-der-Übung-sein] of something which is already present. Although enactment is presence, it
is by no means the presence of what was previously simply absent but just the reverse, the pres-
ence of something which was indeed already present as well. . . .” (translation modified).
35. Cf. the passage in the Zollikon Seminars where Heidegger makes a clear distinction
between the dunamis of a tree trunk (as a potentiality to serve as hulè for a poiesis) and the
dunamis (as a potentiality-to-be) of human Da-sein: “Yet when I have made the trunk into a
beam, then it is no longer a tree trunk. Thereby, it has been used up as a tree trunk. . . . Ecstat-
ic being-in-the-world always has the character of the potentiality-to-be. . . . But when I enact it
[vollziehe], . . . then, nevertheless, this potentiality-to-be this way is still there, present. . . . It is
not something that has been used up like the former tree trunk. . . . On the contrary, Da-sein’s
ecstatic potentiality-to-be is reinforced [gesteigert] as potentiality-to-be
in its enactment and in
its being enacted [bei seinem Vollzug und in seinem Vollzogenwerden].” Zollikoner Seminare. Pro-
tokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, ed. Medard Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), 209–10,
translated as Zollikon Seminars. Protocols—Conversations—Letters by Franz Mayr and Richard
Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 164 (translation modified).
66 Rudolf Bernet
the sprinter would allow us to understand better the nature of the actu-
alization or enactment of a power that has been acquired and perfected
thanks to countless prior instances of exercise:
What presents itself to us is not a man standing still, but rather a man poised for
the start . . . . The only thing needed is the call “go.” Just this call and he is already
off running, hitting his stride, that is, in enactment. . . . Now everything of which
he is capable is present [anwesend] . . . . This execution of his capability [Vermö-
gen] is not its brushing aside, not its disappearance, but rather the carrying out
of that toward which the capability itself as a capability pushes [drängt]. . . . To
actually be capable is the full preparedness of being in position to, which lacks
only the disinhibition [Enthemmung] into enactment, such that when it is at
hand, when it has happened, this means: when the one who is capable of sets
himself to work [sich ins Zeug legt], then the enactment is truly practice [Aus-
übung] and just this.36
While this phenomenological description would have deserved to be

cited in full, its most interesting contribution to our discussion undoubt-
edly lies in how it makes the actualization of a capability or power, whose
latency does not cease to be pressing, dependent upon an event of a “dis-
inhibition.” This consideration sheds new light on our question concern-
ing the change in nature undergone by a capability or by a drive when
it moves to action. What Heidegger’s description of the hundred meter
sprinter suggests to us is that this passage or transition to action is dic-
tated by an external event of a purely negative nature, namely the mere
disappearance of an impediment. What is new in the actualization of a
virtual power exclusively concerns the enactment and thus the visibil-
ity of a force and not its deepest nature. There is no better way than this
of expressing just how much energeia owes to dunamis; in being real-
ized, the power or the force only undergo a superficial modification that
consists in the suppression of a privation, that is, the suppression of a
form of negativity that still weighed upon its latent presence as a simple
drive. The positivity of an act that realizes a driven force is thus in truth
the result of a double negation. Recalling what Heidegger said about
“being-inhibited” (gehemmt sein) under the form of a “resistance” or a
hexis apatheias, it is tempting to make the event of the “disinhibition” of
a capability depend not only on the external “call” of the starter of a race,
36. GA 33:218–19 (187–88, translation modified).

but also on the disappearing or the surpassing of the internal resistance

constituted by apathy.37
In actuality, neither the laziness to promote our talents nor the con-
servative character of our drives receive much attention in Heidegger’s
commentary on Metaphysics Theta 2, which is a text where Aristotle
comes to be quite explicitly concerned with the nature of specifically hu-
man forces. According to Aristotle, a human force can be distinguished
from all other types of force, regardless whether we speak of forces of
nature or animal drives, by the fact that it is governed by logos, which
makes it into a dunamis meta logou. While the forces belonging to a life-
less being (apsychos) remain foreign to humans and are often even hos-
tile to them, every human being has a stake in the ensemble of capabili-
ties manifest in animals and plants, that is, in the forces and instincts
that govern the life of the living beings (empsychos).
We are well aware that the study of these vital forces or instincts
has prime importance in Aristotle’s De anima. Given that Heidegger
is more particularly interested in the nature of a dunamis according to
movement (kata kinèsin), what distinguishes his approach is the way he
never fails to underline the central role played by movement in the vi-
tal forces of plants and animals. The perception (aisthēsis) shared by all
living beings and their faculty of discernment (krinein) are held to de-
pend on their capacity to move (kinein). By consequence, the differentia-
tion amongst their faculties of perception depends on the richness of the
forms of movement that are at their disposal. Heidegger’s term for this
perception by living beings consisting in such a discernment or in an ex-
ploration (Erkunden) of the surrounding world by way of bodily move-
ments is “orientation.”38
This animal power to find its way in the world in function of its needs
is conjoined, in human beings, with logos. For Heidegger, this logos, no
less than animal aisthēsis, is still related to movement in an essential
manner, that is, to that very particular movement that constitutes the
concerned commerce of the human being with worldly things and the
37. GA 33:91 (77); GA 33:87 (73).

38. GA 33:124 (106) and GA 22:309 (228, translation modified): “We say something is liv-
ing where we find that: it moves in an oriented way, i.e., in a way that it perceives. . . . Bound up
with the phenomenon of kinein is the phenomenon of krinein, of ‘distinguishing’ in the sense
of a formal orientation in general.”
68 Rudolf Bernet
care for itself. The mark of logos is so deeply imprinted in all the human
capabilities that the being of the human is designated, by Aristotle, as a
“having logos” (logon echein). The “being” of the human and above all
its “potentiality-to-be” according to the dunamis of its capabilities are in
this way grounded in “the having” of logos:
When we speak of the besouled being who has logos, we do not mean that lo-
gos, conversance [Kundschaft] (discourse) [Rede], is merely added on [Beigabe];
rather, this echein, having, has the meaning of being. It means that humans con-
duct themselves, carry themselves, and comport themselves in the way they do
on the basis of this having. The echein means having in the sense of disposing
of . . . ; to be empowered to [in Kraft sein zu] for and above all through conver-
sance [Kundschaft] (logos) means: to be conversant [kundig sein] in oneself and
from out of oneself.39
This logos that so profoundly marks all the specifically human capa-
bilities and powers nonetheless does nothing to alleviate the original op-
position or clash that, as we have seen, characterizes all dunamis in gen-
eral as force. The dunamis of human beings, sculpted as it is by logos, is
no less ambivalent than any other sort of force: “force as dunamis meta
logou has, from its moment of origin, a double direction and a duplicity
[zwiespältig].”40 What the logos adds to the natural clash of nonhuman
forces is perhaps nothing else than the privilege of the capacity or rather
the obligation of having to choose between opposed forces or again to
choose to pursue, simultaneously, one same force in its double direction-
ality. All these choices can, accordingly, turn out happily or unhappily.
In contrast with Heraclitus, Aristotle nevertheless seems to understand
the logos above all as a mediating agent that can pacify the antagonism
between animal drives.
The duplicity that characterizes the dunamis meta logou still lends it-
self to different scenarios of realization or enactment. In conformity with
his characteristic optimism, Aristotle’s preference always runs toward
the scenario of a complementarity between opposed human forces. Such
is the case in the medical arts, which is the example Aristotle is most
willing to use. This example is remarkable in the way it highlights a con-
versance (Kundigheit) that conjoins, within itself, two human capabilities
39. GA 33:127–28 (108–9, translation modified).

that, despite going in opposite directions, not only complete each other,
but mutually reinforce each other. In the medical art of treating an ill-
ness the human art and know-how (technè) of providing care or doctor-
ing (Verarztung, iatreusis) and the opposite capability of letting the natu-
ral power of healing (hugiaisis) that belongs to phusis run its course are
called upon to complete each other.41 Upon closer examination, such a
complementarity of opposite powers can already be observed in the pro-
cess of hugiaisis itself; the negative force invoked by the doctor to combat
illness and his or her positive force to promote health both feed into each
other.42
However, we should immediately add that this is not always and not
necessarily the case. Far too often, the exercise of medical power to pro-
mote health runs up against the negativity of the “unforce” of the doc-
tor’s impotence or incompetence when it comes to combating illness
efficiently: “every dunamis meta logou prepares for itself, and this neces-
sarily, through its proper way of proceeding, the continually concomitant
opportunity for mistaking, neglecting, overlooking, and failing; thus every
force carries in itself and for itself the possibility of sinking into un-force.”43
And, the third scenario, there are also circumstances—by far the most fre-
quent—in which there is neither complementarity between opposed forces
nor a human skill to pursue a force in its twofold direction. These are situ-
ations where human beings cannot escape the painful choice of making a
decision that is either wholly positive or wholly negative.
It is only at the very end of his interpretation of Metaphysics Theta 2
that Heidegger draws our attention to the origin of this necessity for hu-
mans to make, in the realization of their powers, such decisions and such
choices between opposed and nevertheless equally possible directions. In
a word, this necessity stems from an ontological finitude that character-
izes force in general:
Over and above the particular discussions, however, this is the decisive content
of the second chapter, the fact that therein the essential notness [Nichtigkeit],
that is to say, the inner finitude of every force as such is illuminated. . . . the in-
ner essential finitude of every dunamis lies in the decision, required from out
41. GA 9:256 (196).

42. GA 33:133 (114): “. . . this orientation of the art of doctoring as a healing of sickness is al-
ready in itself and in fact necessarily oriented toward health.”
43. GA 33:154 (131–32).
70 Rudolf Bernet
of itself and indissociable from its enactment, to turn to one or the other side.
Where there is force and power, there is finitude.44
This natural tension and opposition in all force is perceptibly re-

inforced, deepened, and accentuated when it combines with the logos
whose nature also consists, as we have noticed, in being related to op-
posites. The intimate contradiction residing within all dunamis comes
thus to be conjoined, in the human dunamis meta logou, with all the op-
positions due to dichôs legetai. Human logos thus appears as the most
originary site where all the forms of contrast and all the forms of non-
being are revealed.45 Only logos is capable of bringing into appearance
the profound nature of a lack (sterèsis) that inhabits all dunamis kata ki-
nèsin and that consists in the affirmation of a nonbeing. It is also only in
logos, to which belongs the power to unite opposites within itself, that
there can be a manifestation of the original interweaving between posi-
tivity and negativity, between givenness and withdrawal.46 It is only in
logos that the experience of this original interweaving of opposites can
be distilled into an experience of human finitude. Only through logos,
finally, can a human being come face to face with the finitude of the
being-in-movement of his or her own life as well as with the necessity to
make a choice between the inhibition and the disinhibition or release of
his or her driven forces.

45. GA 33:135 (115): “Aristotle traces back to logos the manifestness [die Offenbarkeit] and
the contrary which is given with it [das damit gegebene Gegenteilige] and to which certain forc-
es are related. Conversance [Kundschaft] is not only the abode [Stätte] of manifestness, it is
also at the same time the site [Sitz] of the manifestness of the contraries [des Gegenteiligen]”
(translation modified).
46. GA 33:144 (123): “But why is there in logos this contrariness [diese Gegensätzlichkeit]
of the positive and negative? Because the essence of logos is notification [Kundgabe], and be-
cause this is giving notice [Kund-geben] of something as something. . . . Because all giving is a
response to a not having which receives [Weil alles Geben auf nehmendes Nichthaben antwor-
tet]” (translation modified).
William McNeill
Heidegger, Aristotle, and Philosophy
William McNeill
4 S Tracing technē
Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Legacy of Philosophy
In the 1920s, Heidegger engages in an incisive and comprehensive cri-

tique of technē, the knowledge or artisanship that guides the produc-
tion of artifacts, arguing that it furnishes the foundation and horizon for
Greek ontology, and by extension for the entire Western philosophical
tradition. This horizon is problematically reductive because the ontology
it gives rise to understands the Being of beings in general in terms of in-
dependent presence-at-hand, the appropriate mode of access to which is
theoretical apprehension. Not only philosophy and ontology, but science
and its outgrowth, modern technicity—itself a monstrous transforma-
tion of technē—would be an almost inexorable consequence of this fate-
ful Greek beginning. The project of Destruktion, the “destructuring of
the history of ontology” announced in Being and Time, would seek to
retrieve and to open up an entirely other dimension of Being, a dimen-
sion foreclosed by the Greek beginning and yet awaiting us precisely as
the unthought of that beginning and the tradition to which it gave rise.1
The destructuring would take as its guiding thread an understanding of
the Being of Dasein—designating the being that we ourselves in each case
are—as radically temporal, never simply present-at-hand, and essentially
inaccessible to theoretical apprehension. Yet the critical resource for this
analytic of the Being of Dasein was, for the early Heidegger, itself pro-
1. On the destructuring of the history of ontology, see Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
(Halle a. d. S.: Niemeyer, 1927), §6 (hereafter “SZ”); translated as Being and Time by Joan Stam-
baugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
71
72 William McNeill
vided by Greek philosophy: it was Aristotle’s insight into the Being of the
human being as action, praxis, and its authentic mode of self-disclosure,

phronēsis, that led Heidegger to see the radically different kind of tempo-
rality pertaining to human existence in contrast with the theoretically
ascertained time of nature as something present-at-hand.
This provided
a key insight into the essence of “truth” (alētheia) as unconcealment. Ar-
istotle’s insight into this more primordial sense of alētheia or “truth” as
the knowing self-disclosure
of our radically temporal Being-in-the-world
as praxis, as opposed to truth conceived as a property of logos, judgment,
or theoretical knowledge, was a forgotten thread of Greek philosophy
that could shed light upon the limits and foundations of the theoretical
tradition that dominates the subsequent history of ontology.
While Heidegger, in the 1920s, certainly radically transforms Aristo-
tle’s analysis of phronēsis, opening it up phenomenologically and expos-
ing the radical, “ekstatic” temporality it implies, and showing how this
originary and primordial temporality constitutes the horizon for every
understanding of Being, there can be no doubt that, following Aristot-
le’s distinction between technē and phronēsis, he rigorously differentiates
Dasein’s authentic self-understanding from any kind of “technical” un-
derstanding. The model for authentic self-understanding is the phronēsis
that, for Aristotle, guides excellent or virtuous praxis; by contrast, un-
derstanding oneself in terms of a particular work—whether an already
existing work, or a work to be produced—is inevitably an inauthentic
self-understanding that projects Dasein’s Being upon the Being (or pos-
sible Being) of an entity within the world that has the character of some-
thing present-at-hand or ready-to-hand. Any ontological understanding
of one’s own Being emerging from the horizon of technē is clearly prob-
lematically reductive. And yet, why, then—given the entire rigor and
phenomenological persuasiveness of these analyses by which technē is
decisively sidelined as a reductive and inferior mode of disclosure, re-

sponsible, as it were, for the entire cumulative sins of the Greek-Western
philosophical tradition—why, then, does technē return so centrally as ar-
guably the issue to be thought throughout Heidegger’s work from at least
the mid-1930s on? Why is it the work, qua work of art or technē, that, in
“The Origin of the Work of Art” from 1935–36, is now said to first dis-
close the historical Being and world of Dasein?
In an attempt to approach these questions, I shall begin by recall-
Heidegger, Aristotle, and Philosophy 73
ing Heidegger’s critique of technē in the 1920s. This critique, one must
be clear, is also and intrinsically a critique of the whole of Western phi-
losophy, from beginning to end. In the second part of my essay, I shall
briefly review the resource that not only underlies that critique, en-
abling Heidegger to see the reductiveness of the understanding of Be-
ing that emerges from the Greek, Platonic-Aristotelian
interpretation of
technē and that subsequently dominates Western philosophy, but that
also opens the way to another, more radical understanding of Being in
terms of ekstatic temporality and the happening of unconcealment. That
resource, as I have indicated, is Aristotle’s account of phronēsis. In the
third and final section of the essay, however, I shall attempt to complicate
the distinction between what seem to be the two very different under-
standings of Being that emerge from Heidegger’s early analyses of technē
and phronēsis, namely, presence-at-hand and ekstatic existence (respec-
tively). I shall do so by way of a common root or point of intersection: the
phenomenon of world and the disclosure appropriate to it. Heidegger’s

ongoing meditation on the question of world and world-disclosure in the
late 1920s, I shall suggest, prepares the path for the return of technē to
central stage, now in its Janus face of art and technicity, as the focal point
of Heidegger’s subsequent thinking.
The Early Critique of technē as Horizon for

the Understanding of Being in General
Heidegger’s claim that technē,2 seen as a mode of producing (Herstellen),
constitutes the fundamental horizon of Greek ontology is made most
succinctly and forcefully in the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems
of Phenomenology.3 The radicality of the Greek beginning is striking
in its claim that the form or morphē of a being is grounded in its eidos,
which Heidegger translates as Aussehen, the “look” of a being. In the or-
2. This section is a condensed and somewhat modified version of a paper first presented at
the meeting of the Heidegger Circle at Northern Illinois University in 2008, under the title “The
Naivety of Philosophy: On Heidegger’s Destructuring of the History of Ontology.” The original
paper is available to members via the website of the Heidegger Circle at www.heideggercircle.org.
3. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 24) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975) (hereafter “GA 24”),
translated as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: India-
na University Press, 1982).
74 William McNeill
der of perception, of our sensuous apprehension of a being, precisely the

opposite is the case: the look of something is grounded in its form. The
form or shape of the wood determines how the wood appears and looks,
whether as a tree, a table, or a chair. For Greek philosophy, however, the
converse is the case, because Greek ontology understands these aspects
of a thing—shape and look—not within the order of perception, but from
the perspective of production and productive comportment. All produc-
tion entails the prior forming of an image, a seeing in advance of what
has yet to be produced, and this anticipated look of the thing to be pro-
duced is what Greek ontology interprets in terms of the eidos or idea of
the being. What is critical is not just that this look determines the shape
or form of the thing to be produced, but that it does so in advance: what
determines the Being of something is that which governs its genesis, its
coming into Being. And this, Heidegger comments, explains what Aris-
totle means in determining the eidos as to ti ēn einai, as what is generally,
and altogether inadequately, translated as “essence”:
The eidos, as the look of what is to be shaped that is anticipated in the imagina-
tion, gives the thing with regard to what this thing already was and is prior to all
actualization. For this reason, the anticipated look, the eidos, is also called the to
ti ēn einai: that which a being already was. What a being already was prior to ac-
tualization, the look that provides the measure to which production conforms,
is at the same time that from which what is shaped properly derives. The eidos,
that which a thing already was in advance, provides the lineage [Geschlecht] of
the thing, its derivation, its genos.4
The genos or “genus” of something, Heidegger adds, has precisely this

ontological sense of Geschlecht, “lineage,” and is not primarily to be un-
derstood in the logical sense. And the “nature” or phusis of something
is understood along the same lines, as that which first enables a thing to
come into Being, to be produced or to produce itself. Yet it is this very
moment of coming into Being, of genesis as phainesthai, as emergence
into appearance, that is eclipsed when the eidos is thematically abstract-
ed as such and posited as that which was earlier—whether as something
that, having independent existence, is itself a being (as in Plato’s idea),
or as what constitutes the true “beingness” or ousia of something, as in
Aristotle. Heidegger highlights the implicit temporal dimensions of this
4. GA 24:150–51.
fundamental move of Greek ontology, initially in a broad sketch that en-

compasses the ontologies of both Plato and Aristotle:
All that which is earlier than what is actualized is as yet free from the incom-
pleteness, one-sidedness, and sensuousness that are necessarily given with all
actualization. The “what” that lies prior to all actualization, the look that pro-
vides the measure, is not yet subject to changeability, to arising and passing
away, unlike that which is actual. It is both earlier than the latter, and, as that
which is earlier, always, that is, what a being—always conceived as producible
and produced—already was in advance is what truly is in the Being of a being.5
Yet if the eidos thus understood, as originally accessible within technē,

determines the true Being (or more precisely, “beingness”) of a thing for
Greek ontology, how is the Being of a being implicitly already understood
by the Greeks prior to the emergence of philosophy and ontology? What
is implicit already in their prephilosophical, everyday experience of be-
ings that prepares the way, so to speak, for the philosophical interpre-
tation of the Being of such beings precisely as eidos? Prephilosophical-
ly, argues Heidegger, beings are understood first and foremost as those
entities that lie independently and constantly before us, encompassing
both the items of equipment (Zeug) produced by technē and those prod-
ucts (Erzeugnisse) of nature that are constantly available for use.6 What
qualifies as a being is whatever lies at our disposal, lies before us, “before
the hand,” vor-handen, as Heidegger writes: present at hand before us.7
This is the prephilosophical sense of the Greek ousia: whatever we “have”
at our disposal, our “means,” as it were. And it is this sense of ousia that
gives rise to the philosophical interpretation of what truly is, of the true
Being (beingness) of a thing, as that which lies most constantly and in-
dependently before us: the hupokeimenon, das Vorliegende. What is im-
portant here, as Heidegger underlines, is that a certain prephilosophical
5. GA 24:151.
6. It should be noted here that the word for equipment, Zeug, from zeugen, to produce
(also in the sense of procreate) carries within it the very strong connotation of something pro-
duced. Both items of equipment and the so-called
products (Erzeugnisse) of nature are some
thing “produced” in the sense of set forth (hergestellt).
7. Heidegger’s hyphenation of the term vor-handen here of course suggests literally that
which lies before our hands, in front of us, ready for possible use. The term vorhanden, it
should also be noted, is a very precise translation of the Greek procheiron. Aristotle, for ex
ample, in Book I of the Metaphysics, writes of how the first philosophers initially contemplated
ta procheira, the things that lay present at hand (982b13).
76 William McNeill
Greek experience of beings remains decisive for the philosophical inter-

pretation of the Being of beings undertaken by Plato and Aristotle:
For everyday experience, whatever is before the hand [vor-handen] in such a
way is what counts as a being in the first instance. The goods and chattels that lie
at our disposal, what we have: these above all are beings, in Greek: ousia. Even
in Aristotle’s time, when it already had a secure, philosophical and theoretical,
terminological meaning, this expression ousia still also signifies the equivalent
of possessions, property, means. The prephilosophical, genuine meaning of ou-
sia persisted. Beings accordingly means: that which lies present before us, at our
disposal.8
This prephilosophical experience of beings not only prepares the

way for the philosophical interpretation of what a being most truly is—
its “whatness,” or what would later come to be called essentia—in terms
of its ousia understood as eidos. It also implicitly prescribes the way of
being or mode of givenness of beings thus understood—their einai, lat-
er characterized as existentia—in terms of actuality conceived as being
present at hand.9 Indeed, this very distinction between essence and way
of Being, essentia and existentia, is, Heidegger argues, first opened up
by the orientation toward productive comportment. Yet is production
the sole horizon for this interpretation of einai as presence-at-hand, asks
Heidegger? Does not Greek ontology take as paradigmatic for its under-
standing of being precisely those beings that do not first need to be pro-
duced by technē, those beings that are by nature, that belong to the kos-
mos? Is it not the world, understood as phusis and kosmos, that is seen
as being always already present-at-hand, as that which is eternally (aei
on), and is not in need of production? Is it not from such beings that the
predominant understanding of Being as independent presence-at-hand

is derived? Against such an objection, Heidegger insists that this very
understanding of the kosmos is itself first enabled within and from out
of the horizon of productive comportment, of technē. For production,
Her-stellen, setting-forth, means “to bring into the narrower or wider
realm of what is accessible, forth, forth into the There [Da], such that
what has been produced or set forth stands independently in itself and,
8. GA 24:153.
9. Ibid.: “The verb einai, esse, existere must be interpreted starting from the meaning of
ousia as what is present-at-hand,
present. Being, being actual, existing in the traditional sense
means p resence-at-hand.”
as standing steadfastly and independently, remains and lies before us as

something that can be found before us.”10
The understanding of Being that guides productive comportment
takes the being that is to be produced “in advance as something to be
freed to stand independently on its own. The Being that is understood in
productive comportment is precisely the independent Being of that which
is completed.”11 This “peculiar character of freeing and releasing” that lies
within the understanding of Being that guides technē means that technē
is oriented in advance, from the very outset, toward that which can be
seen as independently present and standing on its own. Even though the
seeing that guides technē is a circumspective seeing, oriented specifically
toward production, such seeing already carries latent within it a seeing
that is oriented toward the mere apprehending of any and every being
as set forth and standing before us, the apprehending of such a being in
advance in terms of its eidos, that is, the pure apprehending of theoreti-
cal contemplation, of a theōrein that would be appropriated as the seeing
of philosophy and science. This means, Heidegger insists, that produc-
tive comportment, and the understanding of Being that guides it, is not
restricted to beings that are or can be produced, but rather “bears within
it a remarkable scope with respect to the possibility of understanding the
Being of beings,” a scope that explains the universality with which all
the concepts borrowed from the sphere of technē are deployed as foun-
dational concepts of Greek ontology.12 It is from within technē itself that
beings of nature and the kosmos can first appear as beings that already lie
before us, independently present-at-hand:
In other words, it is within the understanding of Being belonging to productive
comportment, and thus in an understanding of that which is not in need of pro-
duction, that an understanding can first arise of beings that are independently
present-at-hand before and for all further production. It is an understanding of
what is not in need of production—an understanding that is possible only with-
in production—that understands the Being of that which already lies at the ba-
sis of and lies prior to all that is to be produced, and that is thus in the first in-
stance already independently present-at-hand.
The understanding of Being that
belongs to production is so far removed from understanding beings only as that
10. GA 24:152.
11. GA 24:160.
12. GA 24:164.
78 William McNeill
which has been produced that it rather precisely opens up an understanding of

the Being of that which is already simply present-at-hand.
13
Heidegger’s “destructuring” of technē as the thoroughgoing horizon of
Greek ontology appears both comprehensive and exhaustive, and I have
certainly not been able to present it in all of its astonishing detail here. Yet,
we may ask, from what perspective is this destructuring undertaken? What
provides, as it were, the critical resource for Heidegger’s phenomenological
critique? And in what does the critique consist? Thus far, we have at most
a genealogy of the foundational conceptuality of Greek philosophy, but no
assessment of its legitimacy. The underlying critique throughout these re-
flections is a radical one: Greek ontology is not only incomplete and re-
ductive, but naive: “Ancient ontology undertakes its interpretation of beings
and its elaboration of the said concepts naively, as it were.”14 The naivety of
Greek ontology consists in the fact that it never really escapes the horizon
of the natural, everyday understanding of beings, the horizon dominated
by technē, and that it brings conceptuality explicated from this experience
to bear on beings as a whole, including the human being. It thereby fails
to see, or rather, determines reductively, the Being of the human being,
or what Heidegger calls Dasein. The problem, therefore, is that it does not
radically interrogate Dasein ontologically, but imports a conceptuality and
ontological horizon that here too are borrowed from the sphere of produc-
tive comportment—which means, from the prevailing, everyday under-
standing of the Greek world. Heidegger expresses the point thus:
Having recourse to the comportments of Dasein in its ontological interpreta-
tion can occur in such a way that that to which one has recourse, Dasein and its
comportments, does not become a problem in its own right, but that the naive
ontological interpretation goes back to the comportments of Dasein in the same
manner that is familiar to the everyday and natural understanding of Dasein.
The ontology is naive, then, not because it does not look back toward Dasein
at all, or is not reflective at all—this is excluded—but because this necessary
looking back toward Dasein does not get beyond a vulgar conception of Dasein
and its comportments, and thus does not emphasize this conception in its own
right—because it belongs to the everydayness of Dasein in general. Reflection
remains within the orbits of prephilosophical knowledge.15
13. GA 24:163–64.
14. GA 24:155.
15. GA 24:155–56.
In conclusion, the overarching claim of Heidegger’s destructuring of

the history of ontology and its Greek foundations around the mid-1920s
is clear: Greek ontology—and by extension, philosophy itself in its en-
tire history from the Greeks to the present—is naive. It is naive because
it never really breaks with what Heidegger terms the “natural,” “every-
day,” “vulgar” understanding of the world, oriented toward beings that are
present-at-hand, and whose horizon is that of technē. Not only is the mean-
ing of Being in general never radically interrogated; it is not even raised
as a question, because what Being means has been presupposed from the
outset. The Being of the human being, Dasein, constitutes no exception.
“In naive, ancient ontology,” comments Heidegger, “Dasein has seemingly
been forgotten.”16 To raise in a radical manner the question of the mean-
ing of Being as such, as well as that of the Being of Dasein, one would have
to radically break with the interpretive horizon of technē itself.
The Phenomenological Retrieval of phronēsis

as Disclosive of a More Original Horizon
In my introductory remarks, I indicated that it is Aristotle’s account of
phronēsis, practical wisdom or prudence, as presented in the Nicomache-
an Ethics, that provides the critical resource for Heidegger’s ontology of
Dasein that attempts to break with the interpretive horizon of technē. In
this second section, I want first to recall some of the central features of
Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s phronēsis, and then to raise some
16. GA 24:156. The word “seemingly” (scheinbar) is of course not insignificant here: this
is no doubt a tacit acknowledgement of Aristotle’s analysis of the Being of the human being
as the authentic self-disclosure of praxis in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, which, as I
suggested above, becomes a critical resource for Heidegger in revealing a mode of disclosure
that is neither that of theoretical contemplation (oriented as it is toward what lies present at
hand), nor that of technē: namely, phronēsis. As Heidegger would explicitly concede in 1928,
the authentic Being of Dasein “was nevertheless, as authentic action, as praxis, of course not
unknown to antiquity.” See Martin Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Aus-
gang von Leibniz, ed. Klaus Held (Gesamtausgabe 26) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978),
236 (hereafter “GA 26”), translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic by Michael Heim
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). In Being and Time itself, Heidegger, referring
explicitly to Book VI of the Ethics as well as Book IX.10 of the Metaphysics, emphasizes that
despite the Greeks being responsible for scientifically developing and bringing to domination
the most proximate understanding, which understands Being in general as presence-at-hand,

there was alive, at least in Aristotle, a pre-ontological understanding of a more primordial
sense of alētheia as unconcealment. See SZ 225.
80 William McNeill
questions that might problematize the broader interpretive framework

within which this appropriation is accomplished.
As Aristotle tells us, phronēsis is an intellectual or dianoetic virtue:
a virtue of thought that entails excellence in deliberation on how to at-
tain a given end of human action. It is directed, not toward the Being of
something other than myself, such as a work to be produced, but toward
the Being of myself in each instance, toward the Being of the self as prax-
is, as action. It is thus in service to praxis, doing, and not to poiēsis, mak-
ing; these two, Aristotle insists, are fundamentally different. Phronēsis
deliberates on how best to act in the here-and-now situation, which is
always changing, yet does so always with a view to living well as a whole,
to eudaimonia as the ultimate goal of human existence. Phronēsis is thus
a kind of knowledge that is subservient to praxis itself in its very enact-
ment at every moment, and as such, it is new on each occasion, at each
moment. It is not a knowledge that is secured once and for all, but an
ongoing task of deliberating on how best to act in the here-and-now sit-
uation—a situation that can never be foreseen and that must therefore
be disclosed in what Aristotle describes as a practical “perception” or
aisthēsis, a seeing that apprehends the momentary situation as a whole,
and to which deliberation must be responsive.
We can see already from this very brief sketch why it is phronēsis that
offers the critical resource whereby Heidegger attempts, in Being and
Time, to break with the interpretive horizon of technē. If phronēsis is ap-
pealed to as providing phenomenologically more appropriate access to
the Being of the human, it is on account of several things.
First, phronēsis is concerned with the Being of the human being as
such (and not with the Being of present-at-hand things or works that can
be produced and set forth as present at hand)—not in a thematic-objective
way, but as an acting being, as a being whose very Being is the ongoing
possibility of action, of praxis. Second, in phronēsis, there is a seeing of
the Being of the human that is not theoretical, not the objective seeing
of something independently present-at-hand,
but a momentary catch-
ing sight of one’s ownmost Being in the situation of action, that is, as
acting—in the very enactment of one’s ownmost (singular) possibility of
Being, of the dunamis of one’s ownmost Being. The seeing or eidenai in
phronēsis is that of a practical nous, of an apprehending or catching sight
of one’s ownmost Being in the moment of one’s ownmost self-enactment,

the moment which Heidegger terms the Augenblick. Third, if phronēsis

provides and testifies to a phenomenologically more appropriate access
to the Being of the human as in each case mine, it is on the one hand be-
cause the Being of the human—as attested to in phronēsis—cannot be ad-
equately understood in terms of an already existing eidos. The eidos of the
human, of my own Being, is never pregiven as something to be contem-
plated. It is something that—as the form of my action—has always yet to
be decided, has always yet to emerge. Fourth, on the other hand, this also
means that what is problematically reductive about technē with respect
to the disclosure of the self, of the human, is its temporality: the inscrip-
tion and prioritizing of the “always already there” of the eidos as origin, as
archē, of the work, of the ergon, of that which has yet to come into Being.
By contrast, the temporality of phronēsis is marked by an “always yet,”
which is to say, a never-yet.
The Being of the human is such that, insofar
as it is, it has always yet to be, it is not yet: it is the not-yet of its ownmost
having to be. But this very temporality—the temporality of the moment
or kairos—Heidegger suggests, was never adequately explicated by Aris-
totle; it was, rather, seen only in terms of Being as not yet fully completed,
not yet fully actualized: not yet standing in the fullness of its most proper
possibility for presence, that is, for Aristotle, the praxis of theōria, the ac-
tivity of contemplation, as standing in the presence of that which always
is, of that which is aei. We see this in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics,
where Aristotle privileges sophia (philosophical and theoretical wisdom)
over phronēsis as a mode of disclosure. In explicating phenomenologically
the ekstatic temporality of Dasein, by contrast, Heidegger seeks to under-
stand that temporality of Dasein’s being-underway
more radically and in
its own terms, not with a view to a possible finality, but in its own radical
finitude, and as providing the most originary horizon (temporality in its
horizonal constitution, which Heidegger terms Temporalität) for any un-
derstanding of being whatsoever.
The significance of phronēsis for Heidegger is thus multiple. First,
it comprises a unique mode of knowledge—of disclosure—that is not
the epistemic/scientific contemplation (theōrein) of the eidos of things
through deduction; nor the contemplation, in sophia, of the ultimate first
principles (archai) of beings as such and as a whole (via noein/epagōgē);
nor, above all, is it the antecedent contemplation of the eidos in service
to making or producing (poiēsis), in which that which is to be produced
82 William McNeill
is anticipated in a proairesis, an anticipatory decision. For this disclo-

sure, in technē, aims ultimately at closing our proairesis by arriving at a
relatively secure technique that can become routine. Whereas technē, we
may say, aims at the mastery of presence by making it subservient to the
eidos, phronēsis maintains an openness that must be responsive to the
happening of presence, a happening that always exceeds its control. Fur-
thermore, phronēsis comprises a disclosure of factical life, of the Being of
Dasein itself as it is lived—that is, of a truth of existence—that remains
inaccessible to, and unattainable by, all theoretical and scientific contem-
plation. The most proper, most primordial truth of my existence as it is
lived, as it is being enacted, is inaccessible to any knowledge premised
on the theoretical ideal. With this insight, an intrinsic limit to the theo-
retical aspiration of both philosophy and science becomes visible. And
finally, phronēsis is a form of self-knowledge that is not only radically
temporal, but that brings to a fore the finite and “ekstatic” temporality of
human existence or Being-in-the-world
as such, a temporality that nev-
ertheless was not fully or thematically explicated by Aristotle himself.
Yet precisely at this point, where the Being of the human might thus
seem to be most clearly and definitively distinguished from the Being of
what is brought forth in technē or found to be already present at hand
and not in need of production by the human (namely, phusis), several
questions must arise.
First, is it technē as such that is problematic as a horizon of access
to the human, or merely the Platonic-Aristotelian,
eidetic appropriation
of technē and the temporality it inscribes—what Heidegger, some years
later, would describe as the “purely ‘technical’ interpretation” of technē?17
17. See the lecture course on “The Will to Power as Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 192; translated by David Farrell Krell as Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 1:164–65 (translation slightly modified). It is significant that
this later remark comes in the context of a meditation on the question of art, and that Heideg-
ger there distinguishes this purely “technical” interpretation from “care” as “the innermost es-
sence of technē,” where “Care” is understood in terms of meletē, and as “a composed resolute
openness to beings.” Notably, the concept of resolute openness (Entschlossenheit), which was
earlier used both to translate the moment of boulē (decision arrived at through deliberation)
within phronēsis and (in Being and Time) to characterize the authentic Being of Dasein, is now
associated precisely with technē (as it is also in “The Origin of the Work of Art”). For the trans-
lation of boulē as Entschlossenheit, see the 1924–25 course on Plato’s Sophist: Heidegger, Platon:
Sophistes, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler (Gesamtausgabe 19) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1992),
150; translated as Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
An inauthentic self-understanding, emergent from the everyday horizon

which is that of technē, Heidegger insists, can be at once genuine and
disclosive of (authentic) Dasein itself. Thus, in all its pre-ontological, ev-
eryday activities and absorbed involvements, Dasein, or the Being of the
human, is never entirely concealed from itself. Its self-concealment
is not
a total concealment, but a distortion (Verstellung), a distortion arising
from the everyday mode of experiencing oneself, one’s own Being, as re-
flected out of things themselves—out of the things with which one is in-
volved in the mode of technē. Heidegger emphasizes that it is here a mat-
ter of an “inauthentic self-understanding”
that nonetheless is “genuine”
and “experiences the authentic Dasein as such, precisely in its peculiar
‘actuality.’ ”18 It is a question of how this pre-ontological experience of
the authentic Being of the human (and that means: of the possibility of
the human—if Dasein is primarily Seinkönnen, potentiality for Being)
is conceptually appropriated, that is, interpreted and thus understood—
and thus itself experienced at the explicit, conceptual level.
Second, if phronēsis indeed provides appropriate phenomenological
access to the Being of the human as such—if Dasein’s “peculiar ‘actual-
ity’ ” is disclosed phenomenally in phronēsis—then how exactly is it dis-
closed and “what” is disclosed there? The Being of the self is not disclosed
as something non-sensuous,
nor as the interiority of the soul or the ego,
but in its very “not yet”—a “not yet” that, however, is the “not yet” of the
unfolding situation itself, of its Being-in-the-world. Heidegger, with Ar-
istotle, emphasizes that the self is given to itself only in and through the
nous praktikos, which is a practical apprehending, a practical aisthēsis—
thus only in and through the sensuous presence of what is already “there.”
This in turn must lead us to ask a third question. Is the Being of the
human, of Dasein, ultimately separable from the Being of the intraworld-
ly, of beings that appear within the world—given that Dasein itself is
nothing other than Being-in-the-world? Even though this “in-the-world”
is not the Being “within” the world of other entities, this does not pre-
clude that the Being of other entities may indeed be constitutive of and
for the Being of Dasein. In other words, it does not preclude that Dasein’s
relation to its own Being, or to world—a relation that constitutes its onto-
logical distinctiveness vis-à-vis all other entities—might be possible only
as a relation to those other entities. Heidegger indeed acknowledges this
18. GA 24:228.
84 William McNeill
very point early in Being and Time, when briefly explicating the concept
of facticity. Dasein, Heidegger insists, is not an ontological abstraction,
but always exists concretely and factically. The ontological analytic of Da-
sein is grounded in the ontic, in the facticity of factically existing Dasein.
Yet what does this facticity mean? The concept of facticity, he explains,
entails “the Being-in-the-world of an ‘intraworldly’ being [since Dasein
also appears to others as a being within the world], in such a way that this
being can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being
of those beings that it encounters within its own world.”19 Furthermore,
Heidegger himself insists in the last pages of Being and Time that “what
seems to be so illuminating as the distinction between the Being of exist-
ing Dasein and the Being of non-Dasein-like beings (presence-at-hand,
for example) is only the point of departure for the ontological problematic,
but nothing with which philosophy can content itself.”20
Rethinking the Phenomenon of World

In the concluding section of this essay I want to suggest that what is at
stake in the retrieval of technē that occurs from the late 1920s through
the mid-1930s and beyond must indeed be understood in terms of the
question of world. Central to Being and Time is the claim that Dasein’s
Being is Being-in-the-world, a mode of being that enables Dasein to
dwell, for a time, in the presence of other beings that show themselves
within the world, whether artifacts, nature, or other Dasein-like
beings.
Yet what exactly is world? We must recall Heidegger’s insistence in Be-
ing and Time that traditional ontology has always and repeatedly passed
over or “leapt over” the phenomenon of world and its ontological struc-
ture, substituting instead those beings found within the world, beings re-
garded as present-at-hand,
including “nature” itself.21 In the 1927 lecture
course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger makes the point
even more emphatically:
Elucidation of the concept of world is one of the most central tasks of philoso-
phy. The concept of world and the phenomenon designated thereby is what has
never yet been recognized at all in philosophy. You will think that this is a bold
19. SZ 56.
20. SZ 436–37.
21. SZ 66, 100.
and presumptuous claim. You will object: How can it be that the world has not
hitherto been seen in philosophy? Did not the very beginnings of ancient phi-
losophy lie in asking about nature?22
Yet nature, even conceived as the entire kosmos, or as the totality of

beings that appear in it: plants, animals, humans too—all of this is not
world, but rather beings that appear within the world:
World is not something subsequent that we calculate as a result from the sum
of all beings. The world comes not afterward, but beforehand, in the strict sense
of the word. Beforehand: that which is unveiled and understood already in ad-
vance in every existent Dasein before any apprehending of this or that being,
beforehand as that which already stands forth as always already unveiled to
us. . . . World is that which is already antecedently unveiled and from which we
return to the beings with which we have to do and among which we dwell.23
If ancient philosophy passed over the phenomenon of world, it was be-

cause it invariably began from the contemplation of what was present-at-
hand and proceeded to understand everything, the world and the kosmos,
in terms of the same implicit ontological horizon of presence-at-hand.
Aristotle himself indeed testifies to precisely this at the beginning of his
Metaphysics: “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally
began to philosophize, wondering in the first place at the aporias that lay
resent-at-hand [ta procheira tōn aporōn], and then by gradual progression
p
raising questions about the greater matters too, such as about the changes
of the moon and of the sun, about the stars, and about the origin of the
whole [peri tēs tou pantos geneseōs].”24
In their naivety—a naivety which Aristotle himself largely shares—
the first philosophers leapt over what was initially given, yet was so close
to them that they could not see it: world as the antecedent horizon with-
in and from out of which beings, including the present-at-hand,
could
first appear as such. According to Being and Time, this leaping over the
phenomenon of world begins with Parmenides.25
Now, in both Being and Time and The Basic Problems of Phenome-
nology it might appear that Heidegger, having recognized and forcefully
22. GA 24:234.
23. GA 24:235.
24. Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b12.
25. SZ 100.
86 William McNeill
demonstrated the naivety of both ancient and all subsequent ontology,

has also succeed in retrieving, through this “destructive” interpretation,
the horizon that was passed over in philosophy hitherto, providing us for
the first time with a phenomenologically sound account of the phenom-
enon of world and its ontological structure. Do we not, indeed, through
the brilliant phenomenological analyses of readiness-to-hand
and of Da-
sein’s everyday dealings in its most proximate environment (Umwelt), ar-
rive at a conclusive definition of world? It is, Being and Time tells us ex-
plicitly, the contexture of signification (Bedeutsamkeit) that “constitutes
the structure of world, that wherein Dasein as such in each case already
is.”26 And yet, this answer is far from being conclusive. For why, we must
ask, is it precisely the question of world that remains the central and most
pressing concern of Heidegger’s subsequent lectures and writings in the
1920s, including the lecture course on The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic (1928), the essay “On the Essence of Ground” (1928), the 1928–29
lecture course Introduction to Philosophy, and the 1929–30 lecture course
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude? As
Heidegger himself put it in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, “What
is this enigmatic phenomenon [dieses Rätselhafte], the world, and above
all, in what way is it?”27
I cannot adequately address here the development of Heidegger’s
thinking of world as it moves through the late 1920s into the mid-1930s

and beyond. I shall instead make just a few remarks that attempt to trace
that development and what is at stake in it.
(1) It is the question just raised by Heidegger, I would submit, that
gives us a clue as to why world remains a burning issue for him, one that
has not been resolved by the phenomenological analyses in Being and
Time. For the question is not only what world is—formally, we may in-
deed say that it is the contexture of signification—but how it is, its way
of being or of prevailing. For not only is world not a thing or entity, not
a being, nor the sum total of beings within the world, but it is not a phe-
nomenon that simply “is.” It is, rather, an event, something that hap-
pens—as Being and Time had already insisted. As Heidegger put it in the
essay “On the Essence of Ground,” “World never is, but worlds”—a claim
that would be repeated some six years later in “The Origin of the Work of
26. SZ 87.
27. GA 24:236.
Art.” Now, as we trace Heidegger’s work in the late 1920s, we see that this
happening of world is thought not only as temporality and as the “play”
of transcendence, but increasingly as world-formation—that is, in terms
of poiēsis.28 There is a poietic dimension to the happening of world, Hei-
degger comes increasingly to acknowledge, and it is this poietic dimen-
sion that moves his thinking of world in the direction of the question of
art, in other words, back to the question of technē. For it is art that in-
deed brings forth and presents this poietic happening of world. Signifi-
cantly, Heidegger already knew and anticipated this at least as early as
1927. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, it is not his own phenom-
enological descriptions that tell us what world is, but rather Dichtung,
the poetic or literary work, specifically Rilke’s poetic description, in the
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, of the wall of a house that has been
torn down.29 Similarly, in the 1929–30 course, after over five hundred
pages of philosophical analysis, Heidegger concludes by telling us that it
is in “The Intoxicated Song” of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra that
we experience what the world is.30
It is this poietic formation and antecedent disclosure of world—
in the 1920s understood by Heidegger initially as temporal transcen-
dence, then as the “play” of or within such transcendence, and finally
as world-formation— that constitutes the common root and common
ground of both phronēsis and technē as forms of worldly understanding:
both are, as Aristotle himself states, modes of unconcealment, of alētheia.
It is this antecedent and thus always excessive happening of world (ex-
ceeding and preceding the human) that comprises what Heidegger calls
on the one hand the “enigma” (Rätsel) of art and on the other the “mys-
tery” (Geheimnis) of the essence of technicity as a destining and revealing
of Being.31
28. On this, see especially the 1928–29 Freiburg course: Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in
die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel (Gesamtausgabe 27) (Frankfurt am
29. See GA 24:244–47.
30. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit,
ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 29/30) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 531–
32 (hereafter “GA 29/30”), translated as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Fi-
nitude, Solitude by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995).
31. Cf. GA 29/30:414: “World-formation occurs, and only on its ground can a human being
exist in the first place.” On art as enigma, see the postscript to Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung
88 William McNeill
(2) During the period of Being and Time, Heidegger was insistent that
world had the same mode of Being as Dasein. World, that is, was under-
stood ontologically, and just as Dasein’s Being was conceived as radically
distinct from the Being of entities within the world (the present-at-hand
and ready-to-hand), so too such entities were denied any intrinsically
worldly character. They could enter a world, appear within a world, but
were not in themselves world-like, or could be said to be such only in
a “secondary” way (as “world-historical”).32 They did not in themselves
contribute to the happening of world. Yet as Heidegger’s work moves to-
ward the 1930s, he increasingly acknowledges that this understanding of
world is still too “subjective,” or at least too anthropocentric. World can-
not adequately be conceived as belonging purely to Dasein (at least not
if Dasein is conceived as the Being of the human being, as it was in the
phenomenology of Being and Time), nor as purely ontological. Again, we
see this most prominently in relation to the work of art. In “The Origin
of the Work of Art,” it is the work of art itself, such as the Greek temple,
that is said to “open up” a world.33 Heidegger writes:
It is the temple-work
that first fits together and at the same time gathers around
itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster
and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of
destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational con-
text is the world of this historical people. . . . Standing there, the temple-work

opens up a world.34
(3) Finally, this insight into the nature of the happening of world,
which corresponds to a new understanding of the issue of institution
or founding (Stiftung) and of projection (Entwurf) on Heidegger’s part,
ought also to make us reflect on Heidegger’s later writings on technol-
ogy and its essence, technicity. In insisting that the essence of technic-
ity, as a mode of technē, consists in revealing, that is, in the happening of
des Kunstwerkes,” in his Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), 66; translated by
Alfred Hofstadter as “The Origin of the Work of Art” in his Poetry, Language, Thought (New
York: Harper and Row, 1975), 79 (translation modified). On the mystery of the essence of tech-
nicity (but also of art), see Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in his Vorträge und
Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1985), 29, 32, 40; translated by William Lovitt in The Question Con-
cerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 25, 28, 35.
32. See SZ 381, 388–89.
33. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 42.
34. Ibid., 41–42.
unconcealment, Heidegger repeatedly returns us to the question of an-

other possibility of technē, that of art. If it lies in the essence of techno-
logical revealing as Gestell, as “enframing” and challenging-forth that,
despite being a revealing, it precisely “dissembles” revealing as such, we
must nevertheless continue to ponder the other side of technē, that of art,
which “once brought the shining of the gods,” enabling, in Hölderlin’s
words, the possibility of a poetic dwelling for human beings upon this
earth.35 In particular, I would suggest, we need to urgently ponder not
only the fact that, if world is not something human, but a phenomenon
that, in its happening, always precedes and exceeds the human, then we
do not and cannot control the destiny of the world through any human
planning or calculation; but also the fact that the shaping of this desti-
ny occurs, not purely ontologically (not, that is, if we conceive the onto-
logical in terms of the ontological difference), but through the ontologi-
cal work of beings themselves, through that which we produce or bring
forth. What we produce, in other words, our works—whether consumer
goods and items of utility, works of art, or of philosophy—are not sim-
ply something at our free disposal. They carry and configure our destiny.
35. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962), 34–35.
Rudolf A. Makkreel
Heidegger’s Reading of Kant
Rudolf A. Makkreel
5 S Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading of Kant

A Kehre about Judgment
It is well known that in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Martin

Heidegger argues that the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason
is not the improvement over the first edition that it is generally assumed
to be. Because timeless concepts of the understanding are given clear pri-
ority over the temporal schematization of the imagination, Heidegger
reads the second edition as a lapse into a shallow idealism on Kant’s part.
The second edition is seen as responsible for the heritage of German Ide-
alism and Marburg neo-Kantianism
that reduce Kant’s theoretical phi-
losophy to mere epistemology. It is Heidegger’s aim to retrieve something
more profound from his reading of the first edition, namely, an ontological
access to the world that can ground our intellectual representations of it.
In a later set of lectures published as What Is a Thing?, Heidegger re-
turns to the Critique of Pure Reason with a different assessment. Now he
says that although Kant had attained his basic insights in the first edition,
it is not until the second edition that he succeeded in bringing forward
a delineation of judgment that justifies his transcendental position. The
first edition had exposed our human finitude by pointing to the tempo-
rizing role of the imagination in foreshadowing the thingness of things.
The second edition is now seen as providing a way to cope with the fac-
ticity of our finitude through a new conception of judgment. Kant’s in-
sight that judgment is no longer a mere intellectual relation among con-
cepts, but capable of giving concepts an intuitive grip on the thingness of
things, also leads Heidegger to other reassessments of the second edition.
90
Heidegger’s Reading of Kant 91
In what follows I will examine both interpretations of Kant and use them
to assess the Kant-Heidegger relationship more fully. The overall aim is
to underscore how Heidegger responds to Kant’s evolving views on the
functions of judgment and how they can provide access to the world.
Ontological Schematization and the

Meaning of Objectivity
Both in his 1927–28 Marburg lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
and in his 1929 book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger as-
signs the imagination an extraordinary role in providing access to the
world. Because the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is more
detailed about the role of the imagination in experience than the second
edition, Heidegger prefers the former and claims that Kant recoiled from
his own initial insights in the revisions of the latter. Whereas in the first
edition Kant had allowed the imagination some independence from the
understanding, in the second edition he made it completely dependent.
The first edition “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding”
is also of interest to Heidegger because it gives a much more detailed ac-
count than the second edition of the threefold synthesis necessary for
cognition. In this so-called subjective deduction, the synthesis of appre-
hension in intuition, the synthesis of reproduction in imagination and
the synthesis of recognition in the concept are said to be the “three sub-
jective sources of cognition, which make possible even the understand-
ing, and through the latter, all experience.”1 These three syntheses
highlight the temporality of consciousness and point to the necessity of
the transcendental unity of apperception, which is the objective condi-
tion of all experience.
The true importance of the imagination is not to be found in the re-
productive synthesis just mentioned, for it is merely a condition for com-
bining the manifold of intuition. In explicating the unity of appercep-
tion, Kant adds that this objective condition still needs the help of a
productive synthetic power of the imagination for it to be relatable to ob-
jects of experience. At one point Kant suggests that the transcendental
unity of apperception is a mere principle and that “prior to apperception”
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 97–98.
92 Rudolf A. Makkreel
there must be a “transcendental synthesis of the imagination.”2 He then

calls this
a pure imagination, as a fundamental faculty of the human soul that grounds all
cognition a priori. By its means we bring into combination the manifold of in-
tuition on the one side and the condition of the necessary unity of apperception
on the other. Both extremes, namely sensibility and understanding, must nec-
essarily be connected by means of this transcendental function of the imagina-
tion, since otherwise the former would to be sure yield appearances but no ob-
jects of an empirical cognition, hence there would be no experience.3
Heidegger seizes on this as the central insight of the Critique and

boldly characterizes the transcendental imagination as nothing less than
primordial time. He writes: “If the transcendental imagination as the
pure formative faculty in itself forms time, i.e., lets it spring forth, then
the thesis . . . that transcendental imagination is primordial time, can no
longer be avoided.”4
It is certainly the case that the imagination is central for Kant in
keeping time from dispersing our mental representations. In the subjec-
tive deduction, Kant offers the example of the “line in thought” to show
that there is always the danger that as I focus on the successively repre-
sented parts of the line, I lose the earlier ones. Only if the imagination
can reproduce the previous parts of the line as apprehension moves on to
the succeeding parts can a unified line be attained. For the line to be one
appearance, the reproductive synthesis of imagination is required. But
more generally the imagination is the faculty that can span the various
modalities of time. The productive synthesis of the imagination is able to
mediate between the manifold of intuitive apprehension on the one hand
and the conceptual unity of apperception on the other. It holds the mani-
fold of parts of the whole together so that they can be recognized, not
only as one mental appearance, but also as one object. Here the imagi-
nation is productive in opening up what it means for something to be
an object of our experience. This is the famous schematizing function of
the transcendental synthesis of imagination that Heidegger constantly
points to.
2. A 118–19.
3. A 124.
4. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James Churchill (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 192.
The schematizing imagination gives objective meaning to the pure

logical concepts of the understanding and renders them categories that
can transform mental Objekte into real Gegenstände that can stand over
against us ( gegen-stehen). Schematization realizes the understanding by
giving it objective reference, but it does so by restricting that reference
to sensible objects of experience. The schematizing imagination uses the
concepts of the understanding which bring unity to our representations
and explicates them in terms of time as that pure form that can mediate
between thought and sense. Here again the intimate link between imagi-
nation and time becomes crucial. It is as if time gives an a priori access
to objectivity. It is not that it discloses specific ontical objects (only the
receptivity of sense can do that). Instead, it opens us up for the possibil-
ity that something can be recognized as an object. This is how Heidegger
describes it:
The transcendental schematism is the basis of the intrinsic possibility of onto-
logical knowledge. It forms the object which takes up a position in opposition
to . . . in this pure act of ob-jectification and in such a way that what is represent-
ed in pure thought is necessarily given in an intuitive form in the pure image of
time. As that which gives something a priori, time bestows in advance on the
horizon of transcendence the character of a perceptible offer.5
The schematizing imagination is, according to Heidegger, ontological

in disclosing what it means to be an object for a subject. It is productive,
not in generating empirical ontical objects, but in preparing us tempo-
rally for something that stands opposed to us. At the same time, it dis-
closes our own finitude as a being subjected to temporal dispersal.
Heidegger is less interested in those moments of the “Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories” that are concerned to justify their objective
validity. This is when Kant goes on to characterize the understanding,
not merely in relation to the spontaneity of imaginative synthesis, but
as the faculty of rules. The syntheses of apprehension, imaginative re-
production, and recognition provided Kant a preliminary way of point-
ing to the sources of the understanding, but it becomes clear even in the
first edition that the definition of the understanding as a rule-giving

or legislative power is “more fruitful, and comes closer to its essence.”6
5. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 113.

6. A 126.
Kant had already admitted in the “A” preface that there is something
hypothetical-seeming about the subjective deduction because searching
for the subjective powers that contribute to the workings of the under-
standing is “like the search for the cause of a given effect.”7 Even in
the first edition, Kant’s main concern is with the objective deduction and
what the pure understanding can anticipate a priori about the object to
be cognized.
In order to avoid the appearance of dabbling in psychological spec-
ulation, Kant drops the subjective deduction in the second edition and
points directly to the unity of apperception as the supreme principle of
all use of the understanding without even mentioning the imagination.
Instead of considering the understanding as deriving its synthetic power
from the imagination, Kant now claims that all synthesis, even that of
imagination, is a function of the understanding. The unity of appercep-
tion that guides the understanding is not just a logical analytical unity,
but a transcendental synthetic unity where the unity of whatever mani-
fold is given is accompanied by the self-consciousness of the “I think.”
The unity is synthetic because it is both mine and distinct from me. It is
objective in that it judges a manifold of sense to refer to a unified object.
The result of framing the synthetic productive process as a judgment is
to ground the objectivity of experience.
Heidegger regards this new emphasis on judgment as a loss, for he
thinks of judgments as merely logical assertions that relate concepts. He
claims that the second edition is a backsliding into a conceptual idealism
that is later accentuated by Fichte and Hegel. By living in pure thought,
they increasingly lost sight of the transcendence of the object. In his con-
cern with the factical core of experience, Heidegger seems even willing to
embrace the thing-in-itself when he writes: “What is the significance of
the struggle initiated in German Idealism against the thing-in-itself
ex-
cept a growing forgetfulness of what Kant had won, namely, the knowl-
edge that the intrinsic possibility and necessity of metaphysics . . . are, at
bottom, sustained and maintained by a more fundamental working out
of . . . the problem of finitude.8 Similarly, Heidegger declared in his lec-
tures on the Critique of Pure Reason:
7. A xvii.
8. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 252–53.
The central problem of the transcendental deduction is not a quaestio iuris, but
a quaestio facti. It is not about a fact [Faktum] in the sense of empirically ascer-
tainable facts [Tatsachen] and properties, but a fact in the sense of an essential
ontological resource of Dasein or the transcendental condition of the subject.
As a fundamental disposition of Dasein, it cannot be illuminated as a question
of validity that is juridical for here we are concerned with a demonstration of
ontological states of affairs.9
Questions of justification come at the end of the process and cannot

carry the weight of ontological grounding, according to Heidegger. Only
the temporality projected by the imagination can constitute ontological
objectivity and give access to factical reality. Kant’s accentuation of the
juridical features of his transcendental philosophy is thus a retreat into
idealism for Heidegger.
Kant, on the other hand, saw his second edition as a further delimita-
tion of his merely formal idealism. In both editions he claims to be a tran-
scendental idealist and an empirical realist. The second edition added a
“Refutation of Idealism” in order to create an explicit distance from the
psychological idealism of Berkeley. He had become more skeptical since
1781 about the possibility of psychology ever becoming a strict science and
dropped the subjective deduction because it might give the impression
that he was engaging in psychological speculation about the formative
powers (bildende Kräfte) that relate the imagination and the understand-
ing. All that is important for transcendental purposes is that the mind
constitutes the formal unity (formale Einheit) of objects of experience.
Although the temporality of consciousness is not discussed at length in
the second edition “Transcendental Deduction,” the way schematization
is referred to time is not altered in any way. The second edition formu-
lation of the “Second Analogy of Experience” adds two new paragraphs
about the temporal sequence of appearances and how we arrive at the idea
of alteration. Moreover, he preserves those passages in the “Second Anal-
ogy” about successive syntheses of apprehension and imagination that are
reminiscent of the discussions of temporality in the subjective deduction.
But there is an important difference that reflects the influence of the
9. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Ver-
nunft, ed. Ingtraud Görland (Gesamtausgabe 25) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), 330
(hereafter “GA 25”).
new “Refutation of Idealism.” We find that the concept of succession,

which in the first edition seemed a primitive temporal concept, turns out
in the second edition to be inseparable from space. Kant writes: “Motion,
as an act of the subject (not as a determination of an object), and there-
fore the synthesis of the manifold in space, first produces the concept
of succession.”10 Succession as a feature of inner sense must be derived
from a motion of the imagination generating space-time. Moreover, any
determination of inner sense presupposes something permanent in out-
er sense. This undermines the assumption of psychological idealism that
inner experience is immediate and outer experience inferential. The con-
tents of inner sense cannot attain any determinacy from mere psycho-
logical introspection; they can only gain this through reference to outer
objects in space. Thus Kant argues that “the mere, but empirically deter-
mined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects
in space outside me.”11 Heidegger is not convinced by this refutation of
idealism. He thinks that by making the refutation dependent on the way
our inner sense is affected by outer things, Kant has merely overcome an
ontical idealism. Empirical consciousness presupposes our being part of
the causal nexus, but pure consciousness could still proclaim idealism.
What Heidegger seeks is an ontological refutation of idealism. This leads
him to go back to passages, such as the one at A 123, where Kant writes:
“it is only by means of this transcendental function of the imagination
that the affinity of appearances and . . . experience itself become possible;
for without them no concepts of objects at all would converge into an
experience.” But the reason that Heidegger gives for the claim that Kant
here makes an ontological break with idealism is not convincing. It is
not because Kant recognizes the threat of human finitude in temporality
that he is led to acknowledge the force of external reality.
I agree with Heidegger’s Kant interpretation insofar as it finds the
schematizing function of the imagination to be ontologically significant,
but the fact that it is correlated with the form of time is less significant
than the fact that schematization is a mode of meaning-formation. There
is nothing anthropologically revealing about Kant’s use of time in the
subjective deduction. Time remains an abstract ideal form in Kant until
it is reconsidered in relation to our aesthetic experience of the beautiful
10. B 154–55.
11. B 275.
and the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. In the appreciation of beau-

ty, the regular course of time is slowed down and allowed to linger. Even
more strikingly, Kant claims that the feeling of the absolute greatness of
the sublime “cancels the time-condition
in the progression of the imagi-
nation” that is needed for ordinary experience.12 The fact that the infin-
ity of the sublime cannot be intuited, but is merely be felt, underscores
our finitude.13 Here Kant addresses the very threats posed by temporal-
ity that Heidegger accuses him of repressing when he eliminates the sub-
jective deduction from the second edition.
Judgment as Taking the Measure of Things

In 1962 Heidegger published a text entitled Die Frage nach dem Ding (What
Is a Thing?) which is based on a lecture course he gave in Freiburg in the
winter semester 1935–36. In these lectures Heidegger reassesses the role of
judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason. Judgment is no longer criticized
as a strictly intellectual procedure. Heidegger comes to the realization that
the second edition provides an important clarification about the function
of judgment. Kant writes: “I have never been able to satisfy myself with the
explanation that the logicians give of a judgment in general: it is they say,
the representation of a relation between two concepts.”14
This relation between concepts can be conceived purely mentally. In-
stead, he continues, “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the
way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception.”15
The subjective relation between concepts is replaced with giving cogni-
tions an objective reference. What the imaginative schema achieves sub-
jectively in relating a universal concept to a particular object, the judg-
ment achieves objectively. In the first edition Kant had already claimed
that the schema gives the concept meaning (Bedeutung) by temporally
anticipating or imaginatively pointing (deuten) to an object. Now in the
second edition Kant also provides a formulation that allows a judgment
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 142 (5:259).
13. For more on the sublime in Kant, see Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation
in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), chap. 4.
14. B 140.
15. B 141.
to be related to the object from the start. It is this shift in emphasis that
Heidegger now makes central to his reading of Kant. It should be made
clear, however, that from the beginning Kant had conceived schematiza-
tion as a function of judgment. His discussion of the schematism is the
first chapter of “The Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment”
in both editions and remains unchanged.
Our question will therefore be whether Kant’s new formulation of
the function of judgment constitutes enough of a shift to justify the way
Heidegger treats it as a Kehre? Kant’s second edition definition of judg-
ment gives a transcendental rather than a purely logical account. Hei-
degger now recognizes this and goes on to interpret judgment as a mode
of thinking that is at the same time intuitive and therefore important for
accessing the thingness of things. The stress is now on intuition rather
than imagination. The indirectness of the imagination is replaced with
the directness of intuition. This leads Heidegger to actually claim that
transcendental thought involves transcendence. For Kantians this is in-
appropriate in that transcendental thought concerns what underlies ex-
perience, whereas the transcendent surpasses experience. Transcendental
conditions such as the forms of space and time and categories like causal-
ity are conditions that we bring to experience whereas transcendent ideas
such as freedom and God can never be experienced. But what Heidegger
means by transcendence is thought “passing over to the object.”16 Tran-
scendence is here not directed upward but sideways. This sense of passing
over to the object is still in the spirit of Kant. But the way Heidegger elab-
orates it is not. Heidegger writes: “transcendental reflection is not direct-
ed upon objects themselves nor upon thought as the mere representation
of the subject-predicate relationship, but upon the passing over [Über-
stieg] and the reference [Bezug] to the object as this reference.”17
This transcendent reference is explicated as a dependence of thought
on intuition. Heidegger even claims that thought “comes to be essential-
ly subservient to intuition” (das Denken . . . kommt in eine wesenthafte
Dienststellung zur Anschauung).18 It is hard to reconcile this with Kant’s
actual claim in the second edition that all synthesis is a function of the
16. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton and V. Deutsch (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1967), 176.
17. Ibid.
18. Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987), 116.
understanding, thereby making the synthesis of the imagination more

clearly dependent on the understanding than before.
There is no doubt that all synthetic a priori principles of the under-
standing have a reference to intuition in general, but this involves an antic-
ipatory rather than a subservient relation. Synthetic a priori principles an-
ticipate the objectivity of objects, not the thingness of things as Heidegger
would have it. Heidegger’s language of thingness is meant to transform an
epistemic relation into a metaphysical one. He acknowledges that Kant’s
new definition of judgment involves a metaphysical insight that Kant him-
self could only articulate epistemically. Even a great thinker like Kant can-
not jump over his own shadow according to Heidegger. He then offers the
amusing aside that “Hegel alone apparently succeeded in jumping over
this shadow, but only in such a way that he eliminated the shadow, i.e. the
finiteness of man, and jumped into the sun itself.”19
The intuition to which Kantian thought is said to be subservient is the
pure intuition of time.20 The insight of the first edition is thus not lost in the
second edition, as Heidegger had argued a few years earlier. Kant’s judg-
ment projects an imaginative schema that makes the thing accessible as
thing before it is actually sensed. Transcendental judgment is not just per-
ceptive but apperceptive to cite Kant. Whereas perception apprehends an
object, in apperception for Heidegger “the relation to the I is grasped and
perceived in a certain way, along with the object. The standing-over-against
[Entgegenstehen] of the object [Gegenstand] as such is not possible unless
what encounters, in its standing-over-against,
is co-present with [mit pres-
ent] itself.”21 The temporal againstness which was conceived purely oppo-
sitionally in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is now conceived as an
over-againstness that encompasses a being-with.
What Heidegger consid-
ers an encounter with things could also be regarded as a judgmental mode
of contextualizing them. The various ways judgments can contextualize
things will be developed further in the concluding section.

Heidegger’s language of co-presence-with gives more prominence to
space and this accords with what we have said about Kant’s own new em-
phasis on space in the second edition. But space as Heidegger explicates it
serves to make room for, not just possible objects over against an abstract
19. Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, 150.

20. Ibid., 147.
21. Ibid., 158; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 124.
subject, but real things that are there for a worldly subject. Both are already
there in the world. The synthetic a priori judgments that make an objective
world cognizable for Kant are reconceived as ontological pre-judgments
(Vor-urteile) by Heidegger.22
Earlier I characterized synthetic a priori judgments as being anticipa-
tory and claimed that this stands in conflict with Heidegger’s assertion
that they make thought subservient to intuition. When Heidegger later
examines Kant’s synthetic a priori “Anticipations of Perception,” he actu-
ally addresses this very problem by comparing Kant’s two formulations
of it. Heidegger now claims that the second edition version of “the prin-
ciple which anticipates all perceptions” is an important improvement
over the first edition formulation. In the A edition intensive magnitude
is first assigned to sensation and then to the real which corresponds to it
in the object. The B edition corrects this by straightaway assigning inten-
sive magnitude to the real qua object of sensation. This is how Heidegger
assesses the outcome: “At first glance, perception as pure reception and
anticipation as a reaching and grasping beforehand [entgegen-fassendes
Vorgreifen] are thoroughly contradictory. And yet it is only in the light
of the reaching and anticipating presentation of reality that sensation be-
comes a receivable, encountering this and that.”23
But instead of admitting that this makes the import of sense depen-
dent on thought or judgment, Heidegger speaks of “the transcendental
nature of sensation” itself.24 It turns out that the so-called subservience
of thought to intuition means only that thought must reach beyond it-
self. Thought is not really subservient to sense, for as Heidegger himself
concludes, “the what-character of what can be sensed must be pre-sented
beforehand and anticipated in advance within the scope and as the scope
of what can be received.”25 Thought is only subservient in that it is about
something outside itself, but even Heidegger acknowledges at times
that critical thought is “measure-giving” (massgebend).26 If critique qua
thought as such has a measure-giving scope, we can say that critique qua
judgment is a form of measure-taking. The measure-giving quality of
Kant’s first Critique grounds what Heidegger considers its mathemati-
22. Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, 180; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 141.
26. Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding, 92, 115.
cal or m
easurement-taking nature, but this switch from measure to mere
measurement also means for him that it cannot do justice to our ordi-
nary ways of experiencing things. For that we must look to Kant’s third
Critique.
The Contextualizing and Orientational

Nature of Reflective Judgment as a Mode
of Access to Our Being-in-the-World

In his 1936–37 lectures on Nietzsche, entitled The Will to Power as Art, Hei-
degger indicates that it is in his Critique of Judgment that Kant address-
es the distinctively human way of encountering things through an aes-
thetic appreciation of the beautiful. Defending Kant’s oft-misinterpreted
conception of disinterestedness, Heidegger asserts that “in order to find
something beautiful, we must let what encounters us, purely as it is in it-
self, come before us in its own stature and worth . . . . Comportment toward
the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained favoring. We must release
what encounters us as such to its way to be; we must allow and grant it
what belongs to it and what it brings to us.”27 This way of interpreting
aesthetic experience makes it, to quote Heidegger again, “a basic state of
human being in which man for the first time arrives at the well-grounded

fullness of his being.”28
This is one of the few places where Heidegger discusses Kant’s third
Critique. There is an even less known, but intriguing excursion in §23
of Heidegger’s 1927–28 lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason, where
Kant’s conception of nature as a domain is clarified by a brief look at an
introductory section of the Critique of Judgment. This excursion is en-
titled “Die Charakeristik gegenstandsbezogener Begriffe in der ‘Kritik der
Urteilskraft’ ” and examines the way Kant distinguishes a domain as one
of four contexts that can be specified when concepts are referred to ob-
jects by judgment.29 Heidegger writes: “When concepts are referred to
objects, Kant allows them to be framed in terms of either 1) a field, 2) a
territory, 3) a domain, 4) or a habitat.”30
27. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:109.

28. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:113.
29. See GA 25:324–26.
30. GA 25:325.
When judgments refer concepts to objects without determining wheth-

er cognition of them is possible, they can be said to have a field (Feld). This
is the most neutral way of thinking of objects. Thus we can speak of the
field of supersensible objects, even though no cognition of them is possible
for us. Such objects are thinkable in form, but they have no experienceable
content like sensible objects. When a judgment refers a concept to a sen-
sible object, it provides it a territorial ground (Boden, territorium). To the
extent that our concepts can legislate to this territory of experience they
establish a domain (Gebiet) governed by laws of necessity. To the extent
that our concepts are empirical they merely carve out a more contingent
habitat (Aufenthalt). Heidegger finishes his summary of these distinctions
by declaring: “Like Kant, we are interested in the domain of concepts.”31
Now it seems rather strange to go through all these distinctions and
to focus merely on one of the four regions—the Gebiet or domain of con-
cepts—and never make reference to the other three again—especially if
one’s interest in judgment is ontological. This is all the more so in light
of Heidegger’s subsequent notion of the fourfold. To be sure, it was a do-
main of judgment that Kant focused on in his first Critique. In the third
Critique Kant introduces these contextual distinctions in order to make
room for an aesthetic experience of nature that is not the usual cognitive
one. There is accordingly an aesthetic reflective way of judging the terri-
tory of experience that allows us to assuage the “incalculable gulf between
the domain of the concept of nature, as the sensible, and the domain of
the concept of freedom, as the supersensible.”32 Kant proposes that when
we attribute beauty to an object we are not defining it as part of a cogni-
tive domain nor as part of the moral domain. The aesthetic judgment is
not determinant or legislative in that way, but reflects on our relation to
the object and the pleasure we find in its form. This pleasure locates a con-
tingent habitat (Aufenthalt) of order that falls outside either of Kant’s two
domains of necessity. A habitat was defined as that part of the territory of
experience where only an a posteriori order has been found, but reflec-
tively it also specifies where the judging subject is located. The experience
of beauty is distinctive in discerning a purposiveness of form that is felt
to be communicable to other human beings. In section 9 of the Critique
of Judgment, where Kant differentiates the evaluative nature of aesthetic
31. Ibid.
32. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 63 (5:175–76).
universality from theoretical universality, he writes “the aesthetic univer-

sality that is ascribed to a judgment must . . . be of a special kind, since the
predicate of beauty is not connected with the concept of the object con-
sidered in its entire logical sphere and yet it extends the predicate over the
whole sphere of those who judge.”33
When we ascribe beauty to an object, we do not assign it another de-
terminate objective property such as color, size, or shape to distinguish it
from other objects in our field of vision or the domain of scientific cog-
nition. Instead, the predicate of beauty relates a work of art to the sphere
of human beings who are able to evaluate it. An evaluative judgment of
taste requires a contextual reconfiguration from objective to intersubjec-
tive universality.
A proper judgment of taste must come through our engagement with
others. The aesthetic pleasure we find in a thing of beauty should be a
communicable sentiment rather than a private sensation. Accordingly,
Kant asserts that it would be self-contradictory to assign the universal
communicability of a felt aesthetic pleasure directly to “the representa-
tion through which [its] object is given.”34 Instead, “it is the universal
communicability of the state of mind in the given representation which,
as the subjective condition of the judgment of taste, must serve as its
ground and have the pleasure in the object as a consequence.”35
What is different here is the way in which the object being judged is
contextualized. The sensuous pleasure derivable from the directly repre-
sented object refers merely to the limited locale or habitat of one’s own
inner sense. The aesthetically apprehended object is indicative of the
larger territory of what can be humanly shared, and the resulting plea-
sure is reflective and follows from one’s being part of this communal ter-
ritory. Reflective judgment prescribes the predicate beauty as being valid
for all human beings (“human reason as a whole”) and in doing so it
opens up a felt lawfulness that suggests a broader reflective framework
for coming to terms with both the laws of nature and of freedom.36
Another way to characterize aesthetic reflective judgments is to con-
trast them to the determinant “top-down” judgments of the first two
33. Ibid., 100 (5:215); translation slightly modified.

34. Ibid., 102 (5:217).
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 173.
Critiques and regard them as interpretive judgments that start with the
empirical givens of experience. Determinant cognitive judgments sub-
ordinate particulars to already available universals; reflective aesthet-
ic judgments coordinate individual states of mind with “a communal
sense” to orient us in the search for new evaluative universals.37 In other
words, reflective judgments allow us to encounter things in the unex-
pected ways that Heidegger prizes.
It is unfortunate that Heidegger did not more fully explore Kant’s in-
sight that the power to judge objects also contextualizes them and that
reflective judgment serves to differentiate those contexts, for then he
would have been able to relate what he considers to be a rare aesthetic
way of encountering the world to the other ways in which Kant engages
the world. Kant’s four judgmental contexts allow us to see how he moves
from the academic conception of a cognitive subject as standing apart
from the domain of nature to a worldly conception of subjects rooted in
the world and striving to orient themselves there. If one takes the full de-
velopment of Kant’s theory of judgment into account then one must ac-
knowledge not only that judgments transcend mere conceptual relations
to schematically or imaginatively prefigure objects of cognition, but also
that they can configure orientational contexts for making sense of them.
Heidegger recognized the prefigurative import of Kant’s theory of judg-
ment in the first Critique, but not the configurative import of the theory
of judgment in the third Critique.
Heidegger’s powerful claim that human Dasein is always already a
being-in-the-world is a radicalization of these Kantian modes of reflec-
tive orientation. Thus his conclusion in What Is a Thing? that a human
being is “to be understood as always leaping beyond things,” but as part
of an encounter in which these things “send us back behind ourselves
and our surface” is anticipated by the configurative function of reflec-
tive judgment that allows individual subjects to respond to specific con-
texts.38 To be sure, if Heidegger had gone on to acknowledge this further
affinity with Kant, he still would have distanced himself from the ideal-
ism inherent in Kant’s transcendental principle of reflective judgment.39
37. Ibid.
38. Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, 244.
39. See §58 of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, which is entitled “On the idea-
lism of the purposiveness of nature as well as art, as the sole principle of the power of aesthe-
tic judgment.”
The purposiveness Kant attributes to beauty in nature is only justified

as an interpretive Denkungsart that is valid from the human perspec-
tive. Although this reflective purposiveness makes no objective explana-
tive claims, it supports us in searching for order in things and events that
were left contingent from the perspectives of science and morality. Kant’s
reflective purposiveness assures no historical summum bonum, but leaves
room for the hope that some form of cosmopolitan cooperation can be
attained. Obviously Heidegger’s transcendental ontology places less faith
in human interpretation and none in progressive cosmopolitanism. It es-
chews all modes of idealism, whether theoretical or practical.
Heidegger recognized correctly that Kant’s transcendental approach
to experience was more than epistemological in scope. Yet there remains
an important difference in that for Kant the transcendental involves con-
tributory conditions that make meaningful experience possible, while
for Heidegger it involves receptive conditions that allow us to find our
place in being. What Kant considered the anticipation of transcenden-
tal thought becomes the taking-in-advance
of perception for Heidegger.
Richard Polt
Political Thought in Heidegger 1933–35
Richard Polt
6 S Drawing the Line

Political Thought in Heidegger’s Lecture Courses
and Seminars of 1933–35
Readers of Heidegger have to acknowledge his great powers of insight,

description, and synthesis; his ability to bring ancient problems to life
and cast them in a dramatic new light; and the force of his challenges to
received systems of thought. But we are also obliged, as responsible phi-
losophers and human beings, to doubt the cogency and wholesomeness
of the thoughts of a man who supported Hitler. We have a responsibility
to draw the line between Heidegger’s insights and his errors. Only now is
it becoming possible to do so with a relatively thorough knowledge of his
life and writings.
However, Heidegger remains an ambiguous and problematic thinker;
despite all the evidence, the question of his error and guilt will continue
to be debatable.1 It is not simply a question of historical and textual ac-
1. In “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?”: Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer, 2010), Holger Zaborowski presents a highly informative overview of various
dimensions of the evidence, generally tending to put off definitive judgments. In contrast, Em-
manuel Faye adopts a prosecutorial attitude in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Phi-
losophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). Faye’s refusal to find any worthwhile thought in Heidegger
leads to distortions, in particular an inability to recognize that Heidegger developed criticisms
of Nazi ideology in the later 1930s. However, Faye has shown that at the height of his politi-
cal enthusiasm Heidegger was an energetic, committed member of the Nazi intellectual van-
guard, and that he did what he could to support Hitler’s dictatorship. For another hostile but
thought-provoking study, focused on the political subtext of Being and Time, see William H. F.
Altman’s Martin Heidegger and the First World War: “Being and Time” as Funeral Oration (Lan-
ham, Md.: Lexington, 2012).
106
Political Thought in Heidegger 1933–35 107
curacy; it will always require philosophical reflection, and by the same

token, it will never be put to rest. The uncomfortable task of reflecting
on Heidegger and politics is a permanent part of interpreting his phi-
losophy. The questions cannot be settled by any single fact, such as the
fact that he joined the National Socialist party and never resigned—we
would have to ask what party membership meant to him. They cannot
be settled, either, by a concatenation of complex facts—the mass of docu-
ments, texts, anecdotes, and photographs that lies before us. The ques-
tion demands that we think.
Even the interpreters who admit this sometimes assume that the chal-
lenge is to identify Heidegger’s beliefs. We then decide whether those be-
liefs should be labeled “Nazi.” But Heidegger never understood philosophy
in the vulgar sense as a set of beliefs—something that one “has.” Philos-
ophy is something we do and something that happens to us—a journey
along paths that may well turn out to be “woodpaths” or dead ends. The
challenge in interpreting Heidegger is to travel with him, noticing various
positions he takes along the way but not identifying any of them as the es-
sence of his philosophy, which can then be judged correct or incorrect. If
there is any proposition to which Heidegger remains true, it is that truth
is not a property of propositions. Truth is not the correctness of an asser-
tion, but the happening of unconcealment—a happening that assertions
can intimate, but that ultimately eludes all propositions and beliefs. So the
question that should be posed is not simply whether Heidegger held Nazi
beliefs, but which of his thoughts end in blind alleys, concealing more than
they unconceal, and which are journeys that we need to continue.
I focus here on the seminars and lecture courses that Heidegger held
from the time he assumed the rectorship in May 1933 through the winter
semester of 1934–35, with a particular focus on the 1933–34 course “On
the Essence of Truth.” This is the period of his greatest enthusiasm for
National Socialism, and these are the texts where he does the most to
connect his political choices to his philosophical thoughts. His private
journals, known as the Black Notebooks, express his emotions as he as-
sumes the rectorship—first with hesitation, then with steely determina-
tion—and becomes increasingly frustrated as his year as rector draws to
an end.2 But the journals are disappointingly opaque as regards any phil-
2. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. Peter Trawny
(Gesamtausgabe 94) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2014), 110–62 (hereafter “GA 94”).
108 Richard Polt
osophical basis for his actions. He feels that “the Führer has awakened a
new reality that gives our thinking the right path and impetus,” but the
content of that thinking is, for the most part, left unsaid or expressed so
vaguely that it is difficult to understand why he would see National So-
cialism, in particular, as worthy of support.3 As for Rector Heidegger’s
official communiqués and speeches, they are short rhetorical pieces com-
posed on particular occasions, or bureaucratic memos; one is left won-
dering about the thoughts and motives behind the words. It is as a teach-
er that Heidegger best unites philosophical analysis with the aspiration
to motivate his audience politically; hence I emphasize the lectures and
seminars. These political-philosophical
texts can best come into focus if
we first characterize Heidegger’s most enduring concerns and consider
some landmarks on his larger journey.
Drawing the Line

We can approach Heidegger’s general project by contrasting drawing
and photography. Photography can involve a choice of apparatus, angle,
exposure, aperture, subject, time, and processing techniques. But at the
crucial moment when the picture is taken, the machine does the work
of recording the scene. A digital camera even automatically applies the
Cartesian method: it divides the phenomena into as many pixels as nec-
essary, ordered in a rationally imposed grid; ascertains the numerical
value of each pixel; and reassembles all these values in sequence to create
an accurate, manipulable, reproducible representation.
A drawing, in contrast, puts all the work in the hands of the artist,
who has to decide where to begin. What points are the indispensable ref-
erences in the scene? What lines mark the crucial boundaries? As shapes
and contours emerge, the scene comes to life on paper.
The draftsman’s lines are lines of being. They may begin with the vi-
sual essence of a thing—the marks that let us recognize it when we see it.
This is, as it were, the morphe rather than the eidos; but presumably the
two are not unrelated. The eidos is an intensification of vision, and the
best drawings evoke the essence of what they draw. Dürer’s drawing of a
hare brings out the characteristic shape of the animal, but also its hare-
3. GA 94:111.
ness and its animality. Not only that, but the hare seems to be there for
us in the drawing, to live on the paper. Dürer has evoked both the es-
sence and the existence of the hare—to use an all-too-easy distinction.
What-being and that-being,
to use Heideggerian terms, are not as obvi-
ously distinct as our logicians insist, but bleed into each other when we
draw out the being of a thing.
When we try to draw only what a thing is, we get a so-called
left-
brained picture, a schematic diagram. This is what most children’s draw-
ings are: not natural, uncultured expressions, but representations of the
cultural symbols they have learned. Children rarely draw what they see;
they draw the prisms through which they see it. The mature artist also
draws the what-being, but in constant dialogue with the that-being. The
lines of a drawing are not a priori figures, but allow the thing they delin-
eate to present new aspects.4
Presence, then, is essential to drawing; but drawing does not occur
in a simple present, and does not represent what simply presents itself.
In one respect, the draftsman never draws what he sees, but only what he
has seen: he glances from the subject to the paper, drawing what is fresh
in his memory. Even the freshest memory is selective, a look back at what
has presented itself, identifying the crucial contours of its “being what
it was,” in the Aristotelian phrase. In another respect, the draftsman is
looking forward, into possibilities: from the infinite unlimited, he is able
to draw the limits that make it possible for the thing he is drawing to be.
The presentation of the thing on paper, the emergence of its being, hap-
pens through the interplay of looking back and looking forward. Draw-
ing is ecstatic, standing out into future, past, and present.
Although all the work of drawing is in the hands of the artist, the art-
ist cannot arbitrarily create the drawing out of nothing. Representational
art, at least, can fail—not because it is not photographically accurate, but
because it fails in its selection of features; it does not draw out the being
of the thing. We cannot give rules for this art, or define successful draw-
ing precisely, but we have all seen bad drawings. Drawing is neither pure-
4. For Fichte, the imaginative construction of a geometrical line is emblematic of free

subjective activity. See David W. Wood, “Mathesis of the Mind”: A Study of Fichte’s “Wis-
senschaftslehre” and Geometry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 219. Representational drawing, in
contrast, exemplifies Heidegger’s view that freedom is embedded in a situation and receptive
to beings. Freedom does not consist in positing an abstract I and not-I,
but in discovering and
deciding who one is and what things mean.
110 Richard Polt
ly active, then, nor purely passive. It is an attentive, discerning response

that is drawn out by the being of the thing drawn, at the same time as the
response draws out the thing’s being.
We can extend these points to the human understanding of be-
ing in general. The being of beings—their what-being,

how-being, and
that-being—is given to us thanks to our extension into future, past, and
present. We respond to being and bring it out in everything we do: not
just in drawing, but also in taking a photograph, writing an essay, act-
ing, or failing to act. The human receptivity to being is implemented, ex-
pressed, or explored in our every thought and deed.
However, most of our behavior takes this relation to being for grant-
ed. We glance at a scene or use the things in it, taking them in or taking
them up without taking the time to draw them out—that is, to appreci-
ate their being. We act as if beings were simply present, handed to us in
self-evidence. We neglect the miracle of their givenness and our own re-
sponsibility to receive and cultivate that givenness.
For a purely technological attitude, the presence of beings becomes
flat, calculable data that can be transformed and reproduced ad infini-
tum in accordance with our will. Things become resources. Form be-
comes information. It is as if we forgot that the digital camera is a spe-
cialized tool, and made it into a model for the original encounter with all
reality—as if we ourselves were digital cameras.5
Why are we not digital cameras? Neuroscientists might describe the
far greater complexity of the human brain as compared to a camera, but
this, from a Heideggerian point of view, would miss the qualitative dif-
ference. What makes us different from things is that our own being is
at issue for us—and, because we work out our own being by being in a
world, the being of all the beings in our world is at issue for us.6 “What is
this?” we can ask; “What is it like?”; “Is there really such a thing?”—and
we can investigate these questions only because we ourselves are always
in question. When the question about us is formulated in language, it
needs to take a special form: not “What am I?” but “Who am I?”—and
5. Against the paradigm of information processing, see Richard Polt, “A Heideggerian Cri-
tique of Cyberbeing,” in Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Mo-
ral Psychology: Essays in Honor of Charles Guignon, ed. Megan Altman and Hans Pedersen
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2015).
6. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), §4, §9 (hereafter “SZ”).
“Who are we?”7 Because the camera cannot even begin to ask who it is—
because it is ontologically incapable of being a “who” of any sort—it is
also incapable of inquiring into the being of any of the beings around it.
The camera is oblivious to the presence and essence of itself and of other
things. Only we, the ones who can ask who we are, have been given the
responsibility for drawing out the being of beings.
How, then, do we draw the line between being and nonbeing? What
difference does it make to us that there is something instead of nothing?
How do we draw the line between who we are and who we are not? What
are the contours of our own identity? Who we are and what being means
to us are questions that go hand in hand. One cannot be decided with-
out the other. And because, whoever we are, we are a We—a community
whose members have to draw on shared, inherited meanings within a
shared set of possibilities—the question of being has to be political.
Landmarks
A few moments in the story of Heidegger’s response to the joint ques-
tions “What does being mean?” and “Who are we?” can further orient us
before we focus on the 1933–35 texts. These are not principles of a system,
but landmarks that come into view along Heidegger’s path. Of course,
my selection of these landmarks is already an interpretive act that tries
to draw out Heidegger’s own being.
From the start, Heidegger is an enemy of rationalism and intellec-
tualism, which fail to acknowledge our indebtedness to the prerational,
usually unconscious process of presentation. Things come to be given to
us through events of meaningful differentiation, but we inauthentical-
ly take this process for granted—as if things were simply, automatically
available for our use and inspection. Being and Time points to this pre-
rational meaningfulness and to its fragility: it is subject to dissolution in
experiences such as anxiety.
Section 74 of Being and Time is the rhetorical and philosophical cli-
max of the text. Here Heidegger refers to the joint happening of Dasein
as a Volk, whose destiny is discovered, in his resonant but unexplained
phrase, through communication and struggle (Kampf ). Some kind of
7. See Richard Polt, “Heidegger in the 1930s: Who Are We?,” in The Bloomsbury Compa-
nion to Heidegger, ed. François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
112 Richard Polt
communal authenticity is possible, he suggests: being-with

is not simply
the anesthetized indecisiveness of das Man or the cultural background
against which an individual develops authenticity. Some common an-
swer to the question of “who,” some shared way of dealing with our be-
ing as an issue, can emerge.
The lecture course of 1929–30 risks a step into shared communication
and struggle: after providing an almost comically extended phenom-
enology of boredom, Heidegger makes the bold move of claiming that
deep boredom is the defining mood of “our” age.8 He had noted in Being
and Time that moods can be shared, but this is a new venture into broad
cultural diagnosis.9
Deep boredom reflects a lack of urgency, the absence of a compelling
mission. Throughout the 1930s, Heidegger describes this situation as die
Not der Notlosigkeit, the emergency of the lack of emergency.10 If a genu-
ine crisis impelled us to ask “Who are we?” then our own being, and the
being of all beings, would become an urgent issue. Rather than speak-
ing, as he sometimes had in the 1920s, as if our implicit understanding
of being simply needs to be made explicit, Heidegger desires a transfor-
mative event that would cast us into the problem of being.11 What if a
whole community, which shares an inherited prerational meaningful-
ness, could recognize the fragility of that meaning and cultivate it cre-
atively? What if the community could free itself from intellectualist ab-
stractions—principles with no living roots in the emergence of meaning?
This would imply a politics that would have to be nationalist in some
sense—grounded in the living, shared meanings of a particular group.
That group would have to come alive to itself as a problem so that it could
participate in the “happening of being.”12 In short, a revolution was re-
8. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,

trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
160–67.
9. SZ 138.
10. E.g., Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Ro-
jcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 99.
11. On the “future-subjunctive tonality” of Heidegger’s reflections on the transformative
event, see Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy”
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 86, 98–107.
12. The shift in Heidegger’s thought from the 1920s to the 1930s is a move vom Seinsverstän-
dnis zum Seinsgeschehnis; see Einführung in die Metaphysik, ed. Petra Jaeger (Gesamtausgabe 40)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 219. On this shift see Richard Polt, “From the Under-
quired—in philosophy, in politics, and in poetry. Heidegger, Hitler, and

(from the grave) Hölderlin would found a new, shared authenticity for
the Germans.
Gradually, Heidegger turns away from this vision.13 In the Contribu-
tions to Philosophy (1936–38), das Ereignis is “the event of grounding the
‘there,’ ” but it is not clear that any individuals can initiate this event, or
what its concrete political aspect might be.14 By the late 1930s, Heidegger
is characterizing “planetary criminals” (presumably including Hitler) as
functionaries of the will to power: they are living out the modern project
of representation and control, not pointing the way to any alternative.15
Racist and nationalist ideology does not open us to the process of presen-
tation and meaning, but freezes and denies any such process.
But despite his view that Nazism is the ultimate manifestation of late
modern “machination” (Machenschaft), Heidegger sees nothing prefer-
able in other political systems, and in a journal entry from the late thir-
ties he declares his continuing “affirmation” of Nazism.16 As I see it, this
allegiance is based on his idea that modernity must be brought to its ex-
treme so that it may collapse and a new inception may take place.17
The Country Path Conversations, composed in the final stage of the
Second World War, reject the revolutionary altogether and suggest that
will itself is evil. Willfulness springs from a malignancy in being itself—
a blockage and concealment within the very process of presentation.
We need “pure waiting,” a releasement to the event that releases us into
the open.18 Heidegger thus turns against his own earlier celebration of
struggle and power to emphasize Gelassenheit and play. We have already
standing of Being to the Happening of Being,” in Division III of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”:
The Unanswered Question of Being, ed. Lee Braver (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015).
13. See Richard Polt, “Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger’s Secret Resistance,” Inter-
pretation 35, no. 1 (Fall 2007), 11–40. I would no longer characterize Heidegger’s growing dis-
tance from Nazism as “resistance,” due to his statement of “affirmation” as explained below.
14. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 195.
15. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 69)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998), 77–78. A direct criticism of Hitler can be found
in Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 66)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 122–23.
16. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39), ed. Peter Trawny
(Gesamtausgabe 95) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2014), 408 (hereafter “GA 95”).
17. On the need for a downfall (Untergang), see, e.g., GA 94:277 and GA 95:50, 403, 417, 427.
18. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 2010), 140.
114 Richard Polt
almost reached the famous statement from 1967: “Only a god can still
save us.”19 Human calculation and action cannot rescue humanity, be-
cause the illusion of self-sufficiency
is just an effect of the very devasta-
tion from which we need to be rescued.
What remains constant is Heidegger’s attention to the differentiation
between what is and what is not, who we are and who we are not. That
differentiation is always seen as prior to a calculating, objectifying, or
purely willful attitude. How are we to participate fully in this happen-
ing? How can we fulfill our responsibility for drawing out being? Perhaps
through a personal crisis; through a shared crisis; through poetic cre-
ativity; or through meditative dwelling. Among these options, the shared
crisis points most clearly to a political revolution. Because such a revo-
lution would have to respond to a heritage rather than appealing to ab-
stract principles or the idle talk of the majority, an authoritarian nation-
alism seems to fit. After the realities of Nazism disappoint Heidegger, he
does not draw any closer to the other political alternatives, but tries to
transcend concrete politics altogether for the sake of an insight into the
deeper “history of being.” With these broader themes and trajectory in
mind, we can turn to a few facets of the seminars and lectures delivered
at the height of Heidegger’s political enthusiasm.
“The Fundamental Question of Philosophy”

“The Fundamental Question of Philosophy” (summer semester 1933) is
Heidegger’s first lecture course as rector and the first text included in
the volume Being and Truth.20 It begins with a dramatic description of
the historical moment: the German people is finding itself by finding its
vocation (3)—discovering the mysterious “destiny” that Heidegger had
spoken of in Being and Time. This discovery is not factual knowledge of
the future, which would suffocate all action by removing risk (4), but a
readiness to ask who we are and to take up the mission we have inher-
ited. Heidegger asserts that we (any community) are by asking who we
19. “Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Fi-
gal, trans. Jerome Veith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 326.
20. Parenthetical page numbers in this section and the next refer, unless otherwise indi-
cated, to Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloom
ington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
are—more specifically, by demanding what will be, quarreling with what

is in the accepted present, and honoring what has been (4).
What has been is the “inception” (Anfang), which is never exhausted
by what comes after it. The inception enjoins us to “create the spiritual
world that is still latent in the happening that is coming to be” (6). At
the time, German academics were often critical of liberal democracy, but
mistrusted the violent, anti-intellectual
tendencies of the National So-
cialists; the call was to vergeistigen the Nazi revolution, that is, provide it
with some intellectual content and direction. Heidegger was elected rec-
tor in part because his colleagues thought he might provide a scholarly
bulwark against Nazi crudity, but he turns out to have no interest in de-
fending what he sees as a bankrupt academic establishment. Intellectuals
have no true concept of what spirit is. Heidegger glosses Geist as “breath,
gust, astonishment, impulse, engagement” (6).
For the inception that will guide their creation of the new world that
is half-awake
in the spirit of the revolution, the Germans should look
to Greek thought as “the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence
and Being of beings” (7). This philosophical struggle is never done. Phi-
losophy “arises from the ownmost urgency and strength of humanity,
and not of God. It is not absolute knowledge either in its content or in its
form. Proper to it is the highest essentiality, and thus necessity, but not
therefore infinity” (8).
Obviously Heidegger is rejecting Hegel here, and soon the project of
this lecture course becomes clear: a confrontation with Hegel, who rep-
resents the culmination of the tradition that was built on the Greek in-
ception but fell away from the original urgency of that inception (10–11).
If we fail to come to grips with this decline and seize our destiny, then—
Heidegger repeats a passage from his rectoral address nearly word for
word—the West will crack at its joints and collapse (11).21
After a critique of Descartes and pre-Kantian German metaphysics,
Heidegger has to conclude his course without adequately confronting
Hegel, but he ends with a strong contrast between Hegel and the origin
of philosophy. In the Greek inception, we find the “deepest urgency of
questionworthiness in the struggle with the unmastered powers of truth
and errancy”; at the end, with Hegel, we find the “empty eternity of the
21. “Rectorship Address,” in The Heidegger Reader, 116.

116 Richard Polt
decisionless” (61). There is no emergency anymore; nothing is really at

stake.
Heidegger ends with a call to engage “in the essentially uncertain”
(63). We must leap into the obscure new reality and create a new world,
including a new metaphysics—for, as he says in his almost humorous
conclusion, the German people has not lost its metaphysics. It cannot
lose its metaphysics—because it has never had it! (Apparently the meta-
physics of Wolff, Baumgarten, Kant, and Hegel are not truly German.)
There is little in this lecture course that can be called specifically Na-
tional Socialist, except perhaps the emphasis on the Volk and the rejec-
tion of modernity, and thus implicitly of modern liberal politics. Much
of what Heidegger says here could have been said at the moment of any
revolution. We can taste the fervor, the sense of momentous decisions
and great opportunities—but this revolutionary mood is not linked to
particular policies or ideological schemes. One could almost take Hei-
degger to be celebrating an abstract revolutionary spirit rather than this
particular revolution and its programs.
“On the Essence of Truth”

Heidegger’s next lecture course, “On the Essence of Truth” (winter se-
mester 1933–34), is largely based on his 1931–32 course on Plato’s allego-
ry of the cave and Theaetetus. Heidegger would usually prepare a whole
new course every semester, but evidently the duties of the office of rec-
tor made this impossible. He does improvise some new material, which
has been recorded in student notes, and he begins with an extensive and
important introduction. Why repeat this particular course? It is not ac-
cidental that the Republic explores the relation between politics and phi-
losophy, that there is a significant political dimension to the allegory of
the cave, and that Heidegger saw himself in a somewhat Platonic light
(consider the echo of the three classes of Plato’s just city in the rectoral
address).
In his introduction to the course, Heidegger raises the question of the
essence of truth, and immediately addresses the objection that this is an
impractical, abstract inquiry, remote from the urgent needs of the peo-
ple (67). The objection assumes that essence is an abstraction, a universal
representation, whereas essence “essences” only when human beings put

essence to work (69–70).
But what is the essence of beings? We can answer the question only
by appropriating the Greek inception in a German way. Here Heidegger
indulges in his own version of Nazi rhetoric: we must “draw on the fun-
damental possibilities of the proto-Germanic
ethnic essence [des urger-
manischen Stammeswesens] and . . . bring these to mastery” (71).
In his previous course, Heidegger had characterized the Greek incep-
tion as the ceaseless struggle over being. He now focuses on struggle itself
by selecting Heraclitus’s fragment 53 as “the first and the decisively great
answer to our question about what the essence of beings consists in” (72):
“polemos is the father of all and the king of all; some it has shown as gods
and others as men; some it has made slaves and others free.” Heidegger
translates polemos as Kampf in the sense of “standing against the enemy”
(72–73). What follows may be the most chilling passage in Heidegger’s
writings, and it demands to be read in full (73):
An enemy is each and every person who poses an essential threat to the Dasein
of the people and its individual members. The enemy does not have to be exter-
nal, and the external enemy is not even always the more dangerous one. And
it can seem as if there were no enemy. Then it is a fundamental requirement to
find the enemy, to expose the enemy to the light, or even first to make the ene-
my, so that this standing against the enemy may happen and so that Dasein may
not lose its edge.
The enemy can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a
people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against it. The
struggle is all the fiercer and harder and tougher, for the least of it consists in
coming to blows with one another; it is often far more difficult and wearisome
to catch sight of the enemy as such, to bring the enemy into the open, to harbor
no illusions about the enemy, to keep oneself ready for attack, to cultivate and
intensify a constant readiness and to prepare the attack looking far ahead with
the goal of total annihilation.
Heidegger scholars are only beginning to deal with this text. Sever-
al excuses lie at hand: Heidegger cannot mean “annihilation” literally;
he surely cannot be referring to the Jews; he must mean inauthenticity
as the internal enemy that lies within each of us. Such readings are too
quick to dismiss what he says: the Volk may have to “make” an internal
118 Richard Polt
enemy—invent one—in order to keep its “edge,” and then these persons
must be rooted out, eliminated with no mercy whatsoever.
One could fairly point out that just before the passage, Heidegger says
that polemos “does not mean the outward occurrence of war and the cele-
bration of what is ‘military’ ” (72), and just afterwards he says that Hera-
clitus’s saying “does not only deal with struggling as a human activity;
it deals with all beings” (73). One could also observe, correctly enough,
that Heidegger is characterizing the Greeks, and that he explicitly says
that the point is not “to become Greeks and Greek-like” (72). Neverthe-
less, to take up the Greek inception might very well mean to adopt the
Greek insight into the necessity of enmity and make it our own.22 Fur-
thermore, even if struggle is not reducible to obvious human warfare, it
does not exclude such warfare, either. War, including the persecution of
an internal enemy, might very well be one way to put the essence of be-
ings to work.
Let us remember the reference to Kampf in Being and Time, and con-
sider its connection to truth as unconcealment. The term a-letheia, Hei-
degger writes, implies that truth must be wrested from unconcealment,
that it is a sort of robbery.23 It takes work, struggle, to draw things into
presentation. Likewise, Heidegger now says that through struggle, beings
come into visibility, perceptibility, or “is”-ness (74). Thus “the essence of
Being is struggle” (75), and polemos is crucial to unconcealment (92).
Now we are surely onto a central Heideggerian thought—and a ter-
rible suspicion may steal over us. When Heidegger speaks in stirring but
abstract language about unconcealment, decision, and confrontation, can
he have in mind something as horrible as this: the destruction of scape-
goats for the sake of drawing the “truth” of the victorious group into the
light? Through struggle, which can apparently mean the slaughter of in-
nocents, a group can define who they are and thus draw the line between
what is and what is not—including what is worthy of being and unworthy
of being. Unconcealment at least has the potential to take the form of this
specific, violent action. We are sometimes too quick to understand the
22. In this connection one could ask: who are the essential enemies of the Greeks? Hei-
degger refers to “the Asiatic” as “the unrestrained” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, 74)
and contrasts “Asiatic” fatalism with Greek fate as vocation. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins
Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” ed. Susanne Ziegler (Gesamtausgabe 39) (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1980), 134, 173 (hereafter “GA 39”).
23. SZ 213.
talk of “violence” (Gewalt) in texts such as Introduction to Metaphysics

metaphorically or “spiritually.” But Heidegger is flirting—or worse—with
a point of view that deliberately casts morality aside and envisions what
would normally be considered beyond the pale.
Heidegger claims that an insight into polemos as unconcealment
“compels us into struggle and transposes us into decisions that grasp out
into the future and prefigure it” (93). As an example, he cites the struggle
against liberalism—“a marginal epiphenomenon, a very weak and late
one at that, rooted in great and still unshaken realities” (94). Presum-
ably he means that liberalism understands the subject as an atomistic in-
dividual who is free to form judgments and intentions about the objects
presented to him. But truth does not arise in judgments or intentions;
truth is the process whereby the objects get presented in the first place,
and that process involves struggle—quite possibly a kind of struggle that
runs roughshod over liberal sensibilities.
I would argue, then, that in the passage on polemos as Kampf, Hei-
degger is both touching on some central themes in his thought and em-
bracing the most sinister currents in the party that he has joined. One
can fairly accuse him of having adopted and encouraged, in this passage,
the mentality of persecution that was to culminate in the so-called
Final
Solution. The vehemence of the passage, its rhetorical force, suggests the
sort of excitement that comes with the knowledge that one has violated
morality.
For Emmanuel Faye, this passage is a direct vision of the real Hei-
degger—the murderous core of his thought. While I sympathize with
Faye’s outrage, it seems forced to take the passage as the key to Hei-
degger’s philosophy in general.24 The idea about enemies here seems to
owe more to Carl Schmitt than to major trends in Heidegger’s own phi-
losophy. We know that in the early 1930s, Heidegger paid close attention
to Schmitt’s uncompromising assault on liberal political theory and his
harsh reduction of the political to the friend-enemy distinction—and
24. A full account of Heidegger’s occasional use of the term “enemy” would require a sep-
arate study, but according to my research, it is only in this passage that the term has a vividly
concrete and contemporary significance. Heidegger often develops his thoughts by struggling
against opponents (ideas, trends, or advocates of certain positions) toward which he adopts a
polemical and sarcastic tone, but his endorsement of physical persecution in the passage we
are considering is extraordinary. In the Black Notebooks, he wishes for worthy opponents: “I
still do not have enough enemies” (GA 94:9).
120 Richard Polt
Heraclitus served as a common reference for Heidegger’s and Schmitt’s

thoughts on struggle. In a letter to Schmitt from August 22, 1933, Hei-
degger thanks Schmitt for quoting the polemos fragment, presumably in
a letter or in an inscription on a copy of the 1933 edition of The Concept
of the Political.25 In the 1933–34 lecture course, Heidegger does not men-
tion Schmitt, but he seems to relish developing a somewhat Schmittian
idea about enemies. As we will see, in the following year Heidegger at-
tributes the friend-enemy theory explicitly to Schmitt and subjects it to
some criticism.
“On the Essence of Truth” continues with the question of wheth-
er Heraclitus’s saying is true. Heidegger stresses that we find ourselves
thrust in advance into some understanding of truth and being (79). If we
were not “transposed into the superior power of Being” (80), we would
be presented, at most, with “some hazy rush or some unbearable confu-
sion—which could only be endured in madness” (79).
Heidegger now turns to language as a crucial form of this bond to be-
ing. He proposes that language is founded on silence—a deep reticence
that is open to beings, yet self-collected: “the gathered disclosedness for
the overpowering surge of beings as a whole” (87). The word depends on
silence and “breaks” it—but can perhaps bring silence along with it, if it
is a poetic and disclosive word (88–90). This problematic of silence can
raise many questions, including political ones.26 Is keeping silent sim-
ply the act of an individual, or can a community experience silence? Can
there be a silent politics?
In this connection, consider the fall 1933 text “Why Do I Stay in the
Provinces?” This piece deftly if somewhat kitschily portrays Heidegger’s
existence among the peasants of the Black Forest. He faces a choice be-
25. Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, ed. Hermann Hei-
degger (Gesamtausgabe 16) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 156; C. Ulmer, “Hei-
degger and Schmitt: The Bottom Line,” Telos 72 (Summer 1987): 132. Heraclitus is not men-
tioned in The Concept of the Political itself; Schmitt discusses domestic enemies briefly, but
in general the enemy is presumed to be external to the political community. In a 1936 essay,
Schmitt takes Heraclitus as emblematic of a “warlike” attitude, for which war is an end in it-
self; for “political” thinkers (such as Hitler, says Schmitt), war is only a means to an end. Carl
Schmitt, “Politik,” in his Staat, Großraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. Günt-
er Maschke (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1995), 137.
26. For a more thorough discussion of language and silence in Heidegger’s thought at this
time see Richard Polt, “The Secret Homeland of Speech: Heidegger on Language, 1933–34,”
in Heidegger and Language, ed. Jeffrey Powell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
tween accepting an invitation to teach in Berlin and keeping his appoint-

ment in Freiburg, with its proximity to his mountain cabin. Heidegger
makes the case that he would be betraying his own vocation if he became
a citified professor, for his “work remains embedded in the happening of
the landscape.”27 His “struggle to mold something into language” is quite
unlike the urban tourist’s “long conversation with a peasant.” Heidegger,
in fact, mostly says “nothing at all,” but smokes in “silence” when he
spends time with his rural neighbors.28 In the conclusion of the piece, Hei-
degger gets advice from a septuagenarian farmer on whether he should
move to the capital. “Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on
mine, and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faith-
ful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. That meant:
absolutely no!”29
For Heidegger, the peasants who waste few words are rooted in the
unspoken sense of things that is their heritage as members of the Volk.
Since the farmers inhabit a common earth and are each tied silently to it,
there is no need for them to talk their way into a mock belonging. Does
language play no role in opening the world, then? Is Heidegger wasting
his time as he writes his manuscripts? No—he would presumably say—
because his language springs directly from the silent rootedness of the
people, and questioningly articulates what is experienced in it. Everyday
gossip and assertion are superficial, but rare forms of language such as
poetry and philosophy that draw directly on primordial silence have a
special role to play in fulfilling a people’s destiny. Could a political move-
ment also manage to maintain its connection to the people’s silent roots?
Heidegger’s reluctance to move to Berlin already indicates his doubts.
In the lecture course, after suggesting that language is rooted in si-
lence, Heidegger turns to the allegory of the cave, where he thinks we
can witness the struggle between unconcealment and correctness. The
allegory is a story of liberation. As we would expect, Heidegger rejects a
merely negative conception of liberty—the removal of chains—and in-
sists that genuine liberation requires struggle, courage, and even a cer-
tain violence that the liberator wields against the will of the benighted
27. Martin Heidegger, “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Hei-
degger, Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen (London: Continuum, 2003),
16 (translation modified).
28. Ibid., 17.
29. Ibid., 18.
122 Richard Polt
prisoner (110–14). He associates this thought opaquely with “this tremen-

dous moment into which National Socialism is being driven today . . . the
coming to be of a new spirit of the entire earth” (116). Only Nazism, we
might infer, embraces struggle in the appropriate way. Liberalism rests
satisfied with negative freedom, while the Marxist concept of ideology
depends on Hegelian idealism, which in turn depends on an inadequate
appropriation of the Platonic doctrine of ideas (115, 118).
But if freedom is not negative, what is it for? “For the light,” says Hei-
degger: “putting oneself under the binding obligation of what the things
in the light demand, and willing this” (124). In this positive freedom,
man “sets his Being back into the roots of his Dasein, into the funda-
mental domains into which he is thrown as a historical being” (125).
Heidegger denies that he is saying this for purposes of the Gleichschal-
tung, or the Nazi ideological “alignment” of German institutions (126),
but we cannot miss his antimodern, anti-liberal thrust. His reference to
“roots” emphasizes the prerational nature of the struggle for unconceal-
ment, which cannot be explained in terms of abstract values or norms.
This abstract way of thinking draws on the Platonic forms, interpreted
as moral standards. “In the Enlightenment and in liberalism, this con-
ception achieves a definite form. Here all of the powers against which
we must struggle today have their root. Opposed to this conception are
the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings” (129). For Hei-
degger, then, the promise of National Socialism was that it acknowledged
thrownness: no one is a human being in general, making unhampered
choices and forming beliefs on the basis of pure reason; everyone begins
as a member of a community with a heritage. “Each individual . . . is al-
ready born into a community; he already grows up within a quite definite
truth, which he confronts to a greater or lesser degree” (136). “Openness
is always limited, definite” (172).
But growing up within a given truth is not enough to be free: we have
to confront truth, or struggle on the basis of our thrownness to project a
vision of being. This creative “catching sight” (ersehen) is the true mean-
ing of the Platonic notion of the idea (133, 135). The ideas are not “a set of
rules posted somewhere” (133)—objective “ideas in empty space, values
in themselves” which might generate culture (134). But the ideas are not
a subjective fantasy, either (133). They transcend the subjective-objective
distinction—much as the act of drawing is neither arbitrary will nor pas-
sive reception. When we accept the responsibility to catch sight of being,

we decide who we are (136–37). “The human being engaged in struggle
must . . . decide for reality in such a way that the truly determinative forc-
es of Dasein will illuminate the history and reality of a people” (142).
The philosopher, then, recognizes the need to struggle for truth in
this way. He is solitary, but will be ready to speak at the decisive moment,
to descend into the cave in order to liberate (141). It is telling that at this
point Heidegger disregards an important point in Plato (as he had two
years earlier in his original lectures on the allegory): one will initially
be blinded by the darkness when one returns to the cave.30 That is, the
philosopher will fail to see the concrete situation as it is experienced by
people every day, but will see only his own, purified truth. This, one can
argue, is precisely what happened to Heidegger.
Heidegger does emphasize that the liberator is threatened with death
“at the hands of the powerful cave dwellers who set the standards in the
cave” (140). One day, he arrives late and delivers an agitated attack on
one such troglodyte: Erwin Kolbenheyer. Kolbenheyer was the author of
several popular historical novels, who chose to support the Nazis and
whom the party eventually glorified as one of the nation’s great artists.
We can judge his success by the fact that by 1935, a book about him, Kol-
benheyer und das neue Deutschland, was in its fifth printing and one of
his pamphlets had been lauded by a Nazi newspaper as revealing “the in-
nermost grounds of our movement and its success, and the fundamental
significance it has not just for us, but for Europe and indeed for all white
humanity.”31 Kolbenheyer evidently offered an interpretation of Nazism
that was easy to understand and adopt.
On January 30, 1934, the first anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as
chancellor, Kolbenheyer spoke in Freiburg on “The Value for Life and
Effect on Life of Poetic Art in a People.” The lecture was composed in
1932. Kolbenheyer advocates “life philosophy” (3), which cuts through
rationalist concepts to get in touch with deeper vital impulses. Life must
“naturally” be understood with “the systematic tools of the science of
life-biology” (4)—which tells us that poetic art must have some function;
30. Plato, Republic 516e, 518a.

31. E. G. Kolbenheyer, Lebenswert und Lebenswirkung der Dichtkunst in einem Volke (Mu-
nich: Albert Langen and Georg Müller, 1935), publisher’s advertisements. Citations from Kol-
benheyer’s speech in my next paragraph refer to this edition.
124 Richard Polt
it must contribute to the “self-assertion of a people” (5). Kolbenheyer de-

fines the Volk as the largest human unit that we can experience directly.
We cannot have an “international, supraethnic [übervölkliches] experi-
ence” of humanity as such (7), but at moments of crisis—such as the out-
break of the Great War—we can directly feel the Volk (8). The progress
and preservation of the species requires “differentiation, individuation,
and not amalgamation” (8): each separate people needs to form its spe-
cific “life-domain” (7). The role of poetry is to seize us as “an awakening,
arousing, captivating event [Ereignis] . . . a deeply moving experience of
real existence [Dasein]” (12). Poetry moves our feelings—and they, rather
than our “logical consciousness,” are what reveal our dependence on the
communal realities that “constitute the sense and value of our existence”
(16). If a poet does not work to support the “struggle for existence” of the
people to whom he owes his life, “he becomes unfree”; so the poet’s work
must be evaluated in terms of whether it enhances or depresses the peo-
ple’s emotional life (20). This evaluation is not easy, for even the healthi-
er members of a people may include elements “inherited from an earlier
world of an inferior humanity [Untermenschentum].” In an anticipation
of the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibit, Kolbenheyer argues that the urgent
“struggle of life against inferior humanity” in this time of crisis requires
us to minimize the effects of “devastating art” and to ensure that art ful-
fills its responsibility to the people (21).
Heidegger can hardly contain his fury when he denounces Kolben-
heyer to his class the next day. He had already said earlier in the semes-
ter that “race and lineage” are to be interpreted “from above,” from the
relation to truth and being, and not “by an antiquated biology based on
liberalism” (138). This resistance to biologism is a constant in his thought.
But in what sense is biologism “liberal”? Presumably the Darwinian or-
ganisms, struggling to survive and reproduce, are like liberal individuals
with private desires. This understanding of life misses the animal’s rela-
tion to its environment (its impoverished world, as Heidegger had put
it in 1929–30). And even a sufficient understanding of animals is inad-
equate to human existence; our being is supported by the body, but not
determined by it. Biology can never explain “the decision for a particu-
lar will to be and fate—engagement of action, responsibility in endur-
ance and persistence, courage, confidence, faith, the strength for sacri-
fice” (160)—in short, spirit, which is based on freedom, not life. Freedom
determines the meaning of bodily action, and not the other way around
(161). Heidegger argues that biologism is no different from “the psycho-
analysis of Freud and his ilk” or Marxism: the spiritual is reduced to a
function of the subspiritual (162).
There could be no clearer evidence that even at the time of his great-
est support for Nazism, Heidegger was opposed to biological racism; he
saw it as an unphilosophical ideology that failed to do justice to human
freedom. Of course, we should not rush to assimilate his point of view
to liberal sentiments. Heideggerian freedom is the positive freedom to
be bound to the power of being, rooted in our heritage, and destined to
decide who we are through a struggle. He does not reject racism in the
name of a universal human essence or human rights, but in the name of a
less universal, more historically situated and particular community. This
is why he denounces Kolbenheyer’s thoughtless adoption of the catego-
ries of nineteenth-century biology (and it is indeed thoughtless: Kolben-
heyer does not reflect on the contradiction between denouncing “ratio-
nalism” and interpreting life by means of the rational science of biology).
We should also note that Kolbenheyer’s standpoint is close to Hei-
degger’s in some ways: there is a sense of struggle and crisis, concern
with defending the particularity of a people, and opposition to rational-
ism, liberalism, and negative freedom. There is a significant overlap in
their vocabularies: Dasein, Volk, Kampf, Selbstbehauptung, even Ereig-
nis. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s approach is essentially more philosophi-
cal. For Kolbenheyer, the question “Who are we?” seems settled, and we
need only draw the line in practice between volksverantwortlich art and
art that threatens the people. For Heidegger, the very act of drawing such
a line is questionable. Although his critique of Kolbenheyer can be con-
sidered a dispute between National Socialists, the basis of his critique is
not Nazistic: a human being is neither a thing nor a beast, but a “who”—
“a self,” as Heidegger puts it here, “a being that is not indifferent to its
own mode and possibility of Being; instead, its Being is that which is an
issue for this being in its own Being” (163). The question is not what we
are, but who we are. This fundamental way of being, Heidegger says, is
the “condition of possibility of the political essence of man” (220, cf. 166–
67). One might agree with this while rejecting Heidegger’s political com-
mitments.
The lecture course on Plato goes on to explore unconcealment as a
126 Richard Polt
“happening” (170) that calls on us to project a world. The Führer, Hei-

degger says, envisions a “total transformation, a projection of a world, on
the ground of which he educates the entire people. National Socialism
is not some doctrine, but the transformation from the bottom up of the
German world—and, as we believe, of the European world too.” He then
reminds us that “Truth, for the Greeks, is nothing but the assault on un-
truth” (172).
Let us pause again to consider what this “assault” might mean. Hei-
degger often emphasizes that the a- in aletheia is a privation, a robbery,
a struggle against concealment. But what does this mean concretely?
Does it simply mean a strong mental effort to remove confusions and let
the phenomena speak for themselves? Or are there no phenomena ex-
cept within a world, a world that is “projected” by a people that decides
who it is—or by the leader, who “educates” the people? A chilling suspi-
cion comes over us again: if struggle is not an innocuous intellectual ef-
fort but the actual persecution of designated enemies, then the assault
on “untruth” might mean the elimination of human beings who do not
fit the leader’s vision of the identity of the Volk.
This troubling suspicion cannot be ruled out as an interpretation of
how Heidegger understands truth at this juncture. We need not agree
with it, though, in order to appreciate his general point that unconceal-
ment is a happening. As he puts it with reference to the aporetic nature
of the Theaetetus, “The answer lies precisely in the confrontation, not in
some flat proposition that gives the definition at the end” (179). To draw
on the analogy to drawing once again: the truth of drawing lies in the act
of finding the contours of the beings one is drawing, and not in the final
object, the graphite-smeared paper. A viewer might encounter that prod-
uct aesthetically and be struck by its “realism” without ever appreciating
the happening in which the artist found her way to reality.
The question is what this act of “drawing” means in the political
sphere. It has to mean something concrete, because Heidegger insists
that the struggle against untruth “is always a specific struggle. Truth is
always truth for us.” Historical man “exists in the togetherness of a his-
torical people, with a specific, historical mission, and exists in the pres-
ervation of the forces that carry him forward and to which he is bound”
(200). He asks “whether the people is strong enough—whether it, in it-
self, has the will to itself, to stand up to the will to its own essence . . .
[whether we will] take on as our task this knowing and will to know in
their full intensity and hardness” (201).
The irony is that this urgent call for “specific struggle” remains com-
pletely abstract. Heidegger does not spell out what the mission is—other
than to find the people’s essence, whatever it may be—what the preserv-
ing forces are, or what “hard” tasks are required. The darkest interpre-
tation, again, would see Heidegger as steeling himself and his audience
against weak moral sympathies and preparing them for violence against
supposedly un-German elements. The Vernichtung passage tends to
spread its shadow on everything else that Heidegger says in this course.
When his statements seem vague and indeterminate, his reference to the
enemy of the people threatens to provide what we now know would be-
come an all too concrete content.
The Seminar on “The Essence and Concept

of Nature, History, and State”
Concurrently with the course on “The Essence of Truth” (winter semes-
ter 1933–34), Heidegger conducted an Übung or seminar on “The Essence
and Concept of Nature, History, and State.” It exists today in the form of
student protocols that Heidegger reviewed.32 Although it may have be-
gun in a relatively Socratic fashion, the protocols suggest that the semi-
nar soon became another lecture series by Heidegger, where he attempts
nothing less than to lay the foundations of a political philosophy that is
in tune with the new regime.
The first few sessions seem to have been intended to fend off a re-
ductive interpretation of human being by questioning the essence of na-
ture, providing historical perspective on the concepts of physis and na-
tura, and emphasizing the qualitative difference between historical and
nonhistorical beings.33 Historical, human time requires decision; in this
32. Martin Heidegger, “Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte, und Staat,” in
Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus I: Dokumente. H eidegger-Jahrbuch 4, ed. Alfred Denker
and Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2009). Parenthetical page numbers in this sec-
tion refer to the English translation: Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State: 1933–1934, trans.
and ed. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
33. This is the only aspect of the seminar that Heidegger mentions in his circa–1945 retro-
spective on his teaching: it was a “critique of the biologistic view of history.” Martin Heidegger,
Seminare: Hegel—Schelling, ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 86) (Frankfurt am Main: Klos-
termann, 2011), 898 (hereafter “GA 86”).
128 Richard Polt
sense, animals have no time (33). These thoughts fit perfectly with Hei-
degger’s rejection of biologistic points of view such as Kolbenheyer’s.
When Heidegger turns to the state, he avoids traditional approaches
to political philosophy—questions such as, “What is the state’s purpose?”
“What is its origin?” or “Who will rule?”—because they do not yield es-
sential insights (38). An ontology of the state demands that we reflect on
the people, since the people is “the supporting ground” of the state (43).
Heidegger mentions the racial concept of the Volk as “the tie of the unity
of blood and stock [Band der Bluts- und Stammeseinheit]” (43), but this is
only one concept among others.
Heidegger’s train of thought becomes more provocative when he de-
scribes the state as the very being of the people. “The people that turns
down a state, that is stateless, has just not found the gathering of its es-
sence yet; it still lacks the composure and force to be committed to its
fate as a people” (46). A people without a state is not yet, in the sense that
it has not yet found fulfillment as a community.
Heidegger briefly mentions two other concepts of the political.
Schmitt’s friend-enemy concept comes in for some criticism when Hei-
degger emphasizes that in Schmitt’s view, “the political unit does not
have to be identical with state and people” (46). A group based on soli-
darity against an enemy is then less fundamental than a Volk. Heidegger
also criticizes Bismarck’s concept of politics as the art of the possible,
which depends too much on “the personal genius of the statesman” (46).
But this remark should not lead us to expect an anti-dictatorial point
of view; in fact, Heidegger’s views easily lend themselves to a personal-
ity cult. He proposes that there can be a born leader, an individual who
“is marked out as a leader by the form of his being.” This leader under-
stands and creates what the people and the state are. A born leader needs
no political education, but ought to be supported by an educated elite,
a “band of guardians” that helps to take responsibility for the state (45).
Heidegger seems to envision something like Plato’s “perfect guardians,”
the philosopher-rulers, but they are in service to a creative leader who
knows instinctively, not philosophically, what to do. This leader “brings
about” what the people and the state are—these words were added by
Heidegger himself to the student protocol (45). The born leader drafts the
state and people: he draws the line between who we are and are not.
Heidegger elaborates: because our own being is an issue for us, we
each have consciousness and conscience. We care about our own being,
we want to live, and we love our own existence (Dasein). In just the same
way, the people loves its state: “The people is ruled by the urge for the
state, by erōs for the state” (48). This is why we care about the form of
the state, or the constitution—which is not a contract or a legal arrange-
ment, but “the actualization of our decision for the state; [constitutions]
are factical attestations of what we take to be our historical task as a peo-
ple, the task that we are trying to live out” (48–49).
There seems to be little room for debate and disagreement within
Heidegger’s complex of people, state, and leader. “Only where the leader
and the led bind themselves together to one fate and fight to actualize one
idea does true order arise” (49). He envisions “a deep dedication of all
forces to the people, the state, as the most rigorous breeding, as engage-
ment, endurance, solitude, and love. Then the existence and superiority
of the leader sinks into the Being, the soul of the people, and binds it in
this way with originality and passion to the task” (49). The leader and the
led are devoted together to realizing one idea and one task, ready to sac-
rifice themselves in the face of “death and the devil—that is, ruination
and decline from their own essence” (49). This passage illustrates the no-
tions of decision and crisis that are so pervasive in Heidegger’s work of
the 1930s, but puts them in the service of a totalitarian and purist point
of view.
The eighth session focuses on the political meaning of space. In all of
Heidegger’s thought, space is meaningful: it is not a geometrical abstrac-
tion, but a complex of places where things and human beings belong—
or fail to belong. Here he develops two aspects of the space of a people:
homeland and territory. The immediately familiar homeland, the locality
into which one is born, is small, not just in its measurements but in the
coziness of its familiarity. The proper relation to it is Bodenständigkeit, or
rootedness in the soil. (A good example might be the silent peasants on
Todtnauberg.) But there is another impulse, which Heidegger calls Aus-
wirkung in die Weite, “working out into the wider expanse.” The space of
the state, the territory, requires this extended “interaction” (Verkehr). “In
a certain sense, [territory] is the fatherland,” says Heidegger (55); this is
his only use of the term, it is qualified, and it receives no further expla-
nation. In any case, only when homeland is supplemented by interaction
does a people come into its own.
130 Richard Polt
This passage exemplifies a dialectic between home and homelessness

that is at work in many of Heidegger’s texts. In Being and Time, one must
experience the uncanniness of anxiety before one can return authentical-
ly (eigentlich, “own”-ly) to one’s familiar environment. If we were com-
pletely ensconced in our surroundings, they would be our habitat and
we would be mere animals, not Dasein. As Heidegger puts it in Introduc-
tion to Metaphysics, “we cannot wholly belong to any thing, not even to
ourselves.”34 And yet we do belong finitely to our home. The key to au-
thentic dwelling is precisely the recognition that this dwelling is finite and
contingent. Accordingly, “When one is put out of the home . . . the home
first discloses itself as such.”35 Admittedly, interchange with a wider terri-
tory is not the same as the abyss of anxiety, but both involve a step beyond
the immediately familiar.
What are the concrete implications of Heidegger’s thoughts on politi-
cal space? He makes two telling remarks. First, Germans who live out-
side the boundary of the Reich cannot participate in the extended space
of state-governed interaction. And if the state is the very being of the
people, these groups (say, the Sudeten Germans) are being “deprived of
their authentic way of being” (56)—prevented from fulfilling themselves
as Germans. Their politico-ontological erōs is being thwarted. Second-
ly, different peoples have different relations to their spaces, and affect
the landscape in accordance with these relations. Heidegger contrasts
a bodenständig people to a nomadic people that tends to desertify any
place it goes—and, he adds, perhaps “Semitic nomads” will never under-
stand the character of “our German space” (56).
These passages fit all too easily with the Nazi call for Lebensraum
and Hitler’s already evident ambitions to unify the German “race” under
one state. Heidegger’s comment on Semitic nomads fits all too well with
his characterization of modern rootlessness and with the anti-Semitic
stereotype of the wandering Jew.36 Yet we have to admit that there is
34. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 31.
35. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 178. On this theme see Richard Capobianco,
Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), chap. 3.
36. Heidegger’s statement on Semites and space is a mild version of a cliché that Schmitt
expresses with full anti-Jewish venom during the war: “The peculiar misrelation of the Jewish
people to everything that concerns soil, land, and territory is grounded on its style of politi-
cal existence. The relation of a people to a soil formed by its own work of settlement and cul-
ture, and to the concrete forms of power that result from this, is unintelligible to the mind of
truth in some of his ideas, and that in the abstract, they are not necessar-
ily a nti-Jewish.37 The idea that a people needs a state and a space of its
own would be completely endorsed by Zionism. Heidegger also directly
warns his students against assuming that he is referring to measurable
territory and distances himself philosophically from the contemporary
slogan “people without space”—a people necessarily has some space of its
own (53). The concrete implications of his remarks are not so easy to see.
But it would surely be fair to say that he is toying with a philosophical
justification of Nazi expansionism and notions of German superiority.
Returning to the relation among state, people, and leader, Heidegger
raises the question of the nature of the will of the people, but does not re-
solve it: “It is a complicated structure that is hard to grasp” (60). He pre-
fers to emphasize the inseparable, “single actuality” of people and leader
(60). To be led, says Heidegger, is not to be oppressed: the true leader will
show the led the path and the goals, rather than coercing them (62). But
what about those who cannot recognize the path, who disagree with the
goals? Heidegger seems not to care what will become of these dissidents.
Instead he looks to the glorious deeds that manifest “the soaring will of
the leader” (62). Heidegger does briefly discuss resistance, or will that is
contrary to the leader’s, but seems to see it purely as a negative phenom-
enon that requires reeducation. Education at all levels is “at bottom . . .
nothing other than the implementation of the will of the leader and the
will of the state, that is, of the people” (63). Heidegger ends the seminar by
praising the Führerstaat as the culmination of a historical development
the Jew. And he does not even want to understand all this, but only to dominate it conceptually
in order to put his own concepts in their place. ‘Comprendre c’est détruire,’ as a French Jew has
admitted. These Jewish authors, of course, were as little responsible for creating the theory of
space up to now as they were for creating anything else. But here, as elsewhere, they were im-
portant in fermenting the dissolution of concrete, spatially determined orders.” From “Völk-
errechtliche Großraumordnung” (1941), in his Staat, Großraum, Nomos, 317–18. For another
translation see Carl Schmitt, Writings on War, trans. and ed. Timothy Nunan (Cambridge: Pol-
ity, 2011), 122.
37. The Black Notebooks make it clear that Heidegger had an antipathy to “world Jew-
ry,” which he accuses of “uprooting all beings from being.” Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze
Hefte 1939–1941), ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 96) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
2014), 243. Nevertheless, he calls anti-Semitism
“foolish and abominable”: Anmerkungen
I–V (Schwarze Hefte 1942–1948), ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 97) (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2015), 159. His comments on Jews are not based on racist theories, and they of-
ten seem like offhand, careless remarks rather than an ideological obsession; still, they are
telling and troubling. Heidegger expresses no sympathy for the millions of victims of Nazi
anti-Semitism, but sees the events of the war through a cold and remote metaphysical lens.
132 Richard Polt
that has reconstructed community after the Middle Ages were dissolved
by modernity (64).38 Fortunately, Heidegger’s reflections on the Volk do
not stop here, but become more subtle as he is dazzled less by Hitler.
Logic as the Question Concerning

the Essence of Language
The summer semester 1934 course on Logic explores the connection be-
tween language and people. Heidegger later characterized this course as an
act of resistance against Nazism.39 The truth is more ambiguous. He con-
tinues his critique of biological reductionism but accepts the premise that
a people needs a state that establishes an “order of rank” (137) rather than
a liberal society grounded on a social contract (119).40 Heidegger’s argu-
ments are politically charged and laced with contemporary imagery, such
as service in the SA (44, 63) or Hitler’s visit to Mussolini (71). But the text
rises above the level of propaganda, as Heidegger refuses to let his audience
rest content with one-dimensional concepts of people and race (53–54, 57).
Heidegger’s train of thought in these lectures must be understood as
a sequence of questions (summarized at 67, 81–82, 95–96). What is logic?
The question of logic is rooted in the question of language (11), which in
turn brings us to ask what humanity is (23). To be human is to be a self,
an entity whose own being is at stake. A human being is thrown into the
question, “Who am I?”—but also, as a member of a community, into the
question, “Who are we?” (32). We are a people—but what is that? Belong-
ing to the people is a matter of decision, says Heidegger. We decide to tes-
tify that “We are here!” and we affirm the will of a state that wills that the
people become its own master (50, cf. 55).
Heidegger argues that no one can know whether someone else has
38. Compare the thought in the Black Notebooks that “socialism” means the “commit-
ment of all to their task in each case, according to their responsibility and type within the
whole of the people, dividing all according to their places and levels” (GA 94:124). The idea re-
calls the medieval social order as well as political justice as defined in the Republic.
39. Martin Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,”
in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1993), 64.
40. Within this section, all parenthetical references are to Martin Heidegger, Logic as
the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne
Unna (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). The translation has been modified in
this case.
made the decision to stand by the state, or whether his attitude is a front
(51–52, translation modified):
Even you cannot say how I myself have held my lecture, whether decisively or
simply as a report, or as stock phrases. . . . We are properly ourselves only in the
decision, namely, each one singly. . . . In willing to be he himself, [the individu-
al] is sent out precisely beyond himself into the belonging to which he submits
himself in the decision. In the decision, each is separated from each, as only a
human being can be separated. . . . Despite the fact that individuals are separated
in decision, a concealed unison takes place here, whose concealedness is an es-
sential one. This unison is fundamentally always a mystery.
Decision brings us into history, Heidegger continues. But what is his-

tory? Is it inseparable from humanity? Heidegger considers some ob-
jections to this proposition in a passage that has drawn considerable
criticism since its publication: what about “Negroes like, for example,
Kaffirs,” who are not historical (69, cf. 71)? What about objects such as
the propeller of a plane, which becomes historical when it takes the Füh-
rer to Mussolini (71)? And do plants and animals not have a history (69)?
Since this last suggestion is clearly one that Heidegger does not endorse
(75), we should not simply assume that he is making a racist or Eurocen-
tric assertion when he entertains the objection about Africans.
We can at least say that history is temporal. But what is time? Original
time is the future of having-been
(98), and in this sense we must realize
that we ourselves are time’s “temporalizing” (100) or “time-formation”
(104). The question of logic, then, has brought us to language, humanity,
people, decision, history, and time, with the question “Who are we our-
selves?” as the crux of the whole reflection (82).
In conclusion, Heidegger points to the “world-forming power” of po-
etic language (141). The true poet is never contemporary, but reaches into
the past and the future, alerting us to the being that has long been as-
signed to us, but which we have never yet reached (141–42). The conclu-
sion of this course thus anticipates Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin.
The Hegel Seminar of 1934–35

Heidegger’s notes for a 1934–35 seminar on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right are
available along with student transcripts and protocols. The seminar ex-
134 Richard Polt
plores the contemporary relevance of Hegel, and Heidegger is clearly at-

tracted to a “right Hegelian” point of view, as he emphasizes Hegel’s cri-
tique of a liberalism divorced from community and history (e.g. 150, 605,
650).41 But we can hardly call the text a Nazification of Hegel. Particularly
in his notes, Heidegger takes an open-ended
and exploratory approach.
Without becoming a Hegelian, he takes Hegel as the occasion for rethink-
ing the phenomena of people and state. It is rarely clear where Heidegger
himself stands on these issues. His main goal seems to be to persuade
his students that (contrary to American pragmatism, he says) books and
thoughts do matter, even in revolutionary times (95, 109–10, 155).
In one of the more significant developments here, Heidegger draws
on Hegel to critique Schmitt’s supposedly still “liberal” concept of the
political (174).42 The otherness of the enemy has to be understood in
terms of more fundamental phenomena such as recognition (or the lack
thereof) and being-with;
these phenomena in turn are based on care
(174, cf. 162). Heidegger also traces the friend-enemy
relation back to the
more basic phenomenon of “self-assertion”: “Because the state is this
self-assertion of the historical being of a people and because one can call
the state polis, consequently the political shows itself as the friend-enemy
relation” (609). Self-assertion
combines eleutheria with autonomia (655).
None of this denies the reality of the friend-enemy
relation; Heidegger
still sees this phenomenon as a real consequence of the political, but de-
nies that it constitutes the essence. Heidegger also criticizes Schmitt’s
views on the role of a leader: “How is the higher rank of leadership as
such to be grounded [according to Schmitt]? What does grounding mean
here? Self-grounding?” (170).
Leadership, Heidegger says, has its own forms of “revelation and con-
cealment” (169). Although he has hardly abandoned his support for Hit-
ler at this point, he seems to be asking what will come of the new or-
der. He remarks in his notes that the consolidation of formerly separated
powers in the Führer is “the beginning of . . . an originally new—but still
41. Citations in this section refer to GA 86; translations are mine. For another translation
of Heidegger’s seminar notes, see Martin Heidegger, On Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”: The 1934–
35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
42. Leo Strauss shares Heidegger’s view that Schmitt’s “critique of liberalism occurs in the
horizon of liberalism.” Strauss, “Notes on The Concept of the Political,” in Carl Schmitt, The
Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 122.
undeveloped inception” (73). He still insists that the people “comes to it-
self” in the will of a true leader (169), and still hopes that the Nazi revolu-
tion is what he will later call an Ereignis: “the advance effect [Vor-wirken]
of the inception and origin, and thus grounding!” (75). If the revolution
and the leader express the essence of the people, then “this binding of the
state to the essential being of the people makes an arbitrary recognition
or rejection by an individual citizen impossible. The citizen can reject
or validate a government [Regierung], an institution of the state, but by
no means the state” (641). The passage seems to make some room for the
possibility of rejecting the Nazi regime; everything depends on identi-
fying “our German essence” (640) and deciding whether the regime ex-
presses that essence.
Heidegger’s sympathies remain authoritarian, as we can see in his
remark that the expression “total state” is a pleonasm (74). Yet he asks,
“What is the ‘total state,’ in positive terms?” This requires “essential re-
flection of the metaphysical sort” (606). Later in the 1930s, Heidegger will
develop a metaphysical critique of the concepts of totality and totalitari-
anism, in part through his critical interpretation of Jünger’s concept of
“total mobilization.”43
What does Heidegger mean by the provocative statement that on Jan-
uary 30, 1933—when Hitler seized absolute power—Hegel did not die (as
Schmitt had said), but first came to life (85, 606)? This may sound like
sheer glorification of the Führer, but given Heidegger’s ambiguous rela-
tion to Hegel, the meaning of the remark is not so clear. Heidegger writes
in his notes that the revolution cannot be a “renewal” of Hegel (85). After
all, in 1933 he had attacked Hegel’s “empty eternity of the decisionless.”44
Heidegger is not interested in reviving the ontotheological rationalism of
the Hegelian system, but in paying fresh attention to the phenomena that
Hegel discussed, such as people, state, freedom, and self-determination.
If the new movement turned into a mere “renewal” of Hegel, it would be-
come just another chapter in the story of modern efforts to objectify the
world. This is, in fact, how Heidegger eventually came to judge the actu-
ality of Nazism.
43. Martin Heidegger, Zu Ernst Jünger, ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 90) (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 2004). Cf. Polt, “Beyond Struggle and Power,” 24–29.
44. Heidegger, Being and Truth, 61.
136 Richard Polt
Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine”

What strikes one immediately in the first Hölderlin course, which dates
from the same time as the Hegel seminar (1934–35), is that Heidegger
stresses the mystery of the German essence.45 The course begins with
a reference to the fatherland as a riddlesome “silent origin” and “forbid-
den fruit” (4); it ends with Hölderlin’s saying that what is most difficult
of all is the free use of the national (290–94). In the middle of the course,
Heidegger uses a Kafkaesque image: the being of the people is a closed
door, and it will remain closed—but the poet can point us toward it (120).
The mood of the lectures is a painful longing, a feeling of abandonment
and forgotten possibilities endured with forbearance. Not only do we not
know who we are, we have forgotten how to ask who we are (49–50)—
and forgotten that the question “Who are we?” has to remain a question
“for our whole brief lifetime” (59). The West, says Heidegger, has grown
afraid of questioning (134).
This melancholy evocation of a secret Germany is an awkward fit
with what Heidegger calls “noisy patriotism” (120) and “the needs of the
day” (4).46 The creator of a state is mentioned a few times in the abstract,
but Heidegger does not name Hitler—although we could speculate about
his remark that a Führer is not a God, but finite (210). Heidegger “has
no need to talk about the ‘political’ ” (214), and looks down on political
machinations: “The crude alignment of the all-too-many
into a so-called

organization is only an auxiliary, preliminary movement, but not the es-
sence” (8). The Germans are gifted with the ability “to order to the point
of organizing,” but their greater task is to be touched by being (292).
Still, Heidegger’s lectures concern “politics” in a higher sense (214):
the question of who the German people are and can be. “We do not want
to make Hölderlin fit our time; to the contrary, we want to bring our-
45. GA 39. The other Hölderlin courses are Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” (1941–42),
ed. Curd Ochwadt (Gesamtausgabe 52) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1982); Hölderlins
Hymne “Der Ister” (1942), ed. Walter Biemel (Gesamtausgabe 53) (Frankfurt am Main: Kloster-
mann, 1984).
46. On Heidegger’s allegiance to the idea of geheimes Deutschland that was adopted by the
Stefan George circle and stems from Hölderlin, see Theodore Kisiel, “The Siting of Hölderlin’s
‘Geheimes Deutschland’ in Heidegger’s Poetizing of the Political,” in Heidegger und der Natio-
nalsozialismus II: Interpretationen. Heidegger-Jahrbuch 5, ed. Alfred Denker and Holger Zabo-
rowski (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2009), 145–54.
selves and future generations under the measure of the poet” (4). The
poet—like the thinker and the statesman, but more primordial than
both, it would seem (51, 144)—stands on the “peaks of time” (52) where
he insistently waits upon “the event” (56). The poet’s primordial language
founds the historical being of a people; in everydayness, this language is
degraded into prose, and finally into idle talk (64). But at the peaks of
time, time itself comes to be (109)—ecstatic, historical time that retrieves
what has been for the sake of what may be. The poet, dwelling on such a
peak, challenges us to attain this primordial historicity and enter a space
where the divine may appear or disappear (111, 147).
Heidegger comments that race theorists have no sense of this mis-
sion. Alfred Rosenberg would take poetry as expressing the experiences
of the soul of the race or Volk (26); but this is no better than taking po-
etry as expressing the experiences of individuals, the masses, or a cul-
ture—poetry is still understood in terms of lived experience (Erlebnis)
instead of as a power that founds a people’s way of being. Heidegger now
quotes the speech that Kolbenheyer delivered in Freiburg: “Poetry is a bi-
ologically necessary function of the people.” This would apply just as well
to digestion, says Heidegger; “All this is so hopelessly false that we would
prefer not to speak of it” (27).
Heidegger remains concerned with the distinctive mission of Ger-
many, but this mission is starting to seem distinctly less militaristic. He
claims that both Hegel and Hölderlin stand under the power of Hera-
clitus, in different ways (129), and glosses a few Heraclitean fragments,
including the polemos fragment (125–26)—but Kampf now seems more
distant from physical violence. Heidegger dreams of an “unarmed” great-
ness that no longer needs “defense and resistance . . . that triumphs by
being-there, inasmuch as, by working to stand in itself, this being-there
lets beings appear as they are” (289). It would seem that the question of
who we are is not to be decided by a war against the other, but by asking
who we ourselves are in a profound way—and this question requires an
encounter with the other, at least in the form of the Greeks. The Germans
and the Greeks share the Urdrang zum Ursprung, the “primal drive for
the origin,” but they have their separate paths (204–5).
138 Richard Polt
Open Questions and Dead Ends

As Heidegger remarks, not only is there is no Sophocles in himself, but
if Sophocles could read the attempts to formulate “the essential Sopho-
cles,” he would find them insufferably dull.47 The point is not that we
can assign any meaning we like to a text, but that human meanings and
essences are historical: they are an inheritance that keeps appealing to
us to draw new possibilities from them. Likewise, there is no Heidegger
in himself; there is the letter of what he said, but the meaning, truth,
and falsehood of the words operate within a range of darker and bright-
er possibilities that his texts make available. Let us end by considering
which of these possibilities remain worth pursuing, and which appear to
be dead ends.
Heidegger’s constant concern was how we find ourselves faced with the
question of being: our own being and, with it, the being of everything and
everyone in our world. The most troubling passage we have considered en-
visions addressing this question by drawing a line with a sword: in order
to keep its “edge,” a people needs to identify an inner other who must be
sacrificed. Are persecution and murder necessary to define who “we” are?
Do we have to exclude some of “us” in order to define the rest? Heidegger
was right to ask “Who are we?” but all too ready to lend a hand to a move-
ment that tried to answer this question by inventing enemies of the people.
Heidegger’s approach starts to become more cautious by 1934–35. He
seeks a subtler understanding of communal existence—a sense of shared
selfhood that looks primarily to poetry and thought, and that remains
essentially open. The line between who we are and who we are not can-
not be drawn definitively, as if we were objects.
In Heidegger’s postwar thought, the “we” becomes more diffuse—it
looks beyond Germany to the West at large, and even to the whole plan-
et—and human beings cannot answer the “who” question even by draw-
ing a tentative line. The human condition becomes a painting, as it were,
rather than a drawing: what matters is less the outline of our identity
than the color of it, and we must learn to appreciate that tone—even if it
is a drab gray—as the gift of a destiny larger than ourselves.
In this late stage, Heidegger has withdrawn from Nazism, as from
all concrete politics. But we might well ask, looking back over his career,
47. GA 39:145.
whether his drawings of humanity are too schematic and his paintings
too monochromatic. Heidegger has a tendency to portray the what-being
without carefully consulting the that-being. There is a leveling and over-
simplification in his view of politics, both early and late.
To return to the question “Who are we?”: it is an excellent question,
but we must also ask who gets invited to ask it in the first place. Heidegger
asks what “we” connotes, but barely considers whom it denotes.48 Are
German Jews called to ask the question? What about Turkish Germans
today? How about South Tyroleans or German-Americans? Heidegger
never thought through the problem of the internal multiplicity and mul-
tivalence of every community, not to mention its diaspora and its min-
gling with other communities. A nuanced understanding of these phe-
nomena is indispensable to any grasp of actual politics—the politics that
plays itself out in “the cave.”
Heidegger’s failure to reflect in depth on the so-called
will of the
people is another crucial weak point in his reflections. If we have no ac-
count of how this will is to be ascertained, how disagreements are to be
expressed and resolved, and when a leader’s will transgresses its prop-
er limits, then we have no philosophical bulwark against tyranny and
demagoguery. Heidegger’s attitude in texts such as the 1933–34 seminar
on nature, history, and state seems all too typical of the times, when too
many were ready to abandon the unruly pluralism of the Weimar Re-
public and submit to a dictator. The people and state are then put in the
hands of an absolute leader who is to decide their essence thanks to his
inborn superiority and towering will.
In contrast, we must expect true politics to involve a plurality of wills.
Heidegger eventually tries to find a way beyond willfulness itself, seeing
it as a symptom of modern devastation; but Arendt is closer to the mark
when she accepts will and action as part of the human condition, but em-
phasizes the interpersonal character of action and its irreducibility to a
single actor’s will or plan. The initiative is the actor’s, but the course of
the action and even its meaning are shared and unpredictable, as long as
we are talking about true praxis rather than technical production.49
48. In the Contributions to Philosophy, however, he at least asks, “which ones do we mean
in speaking of ‘we’?” (39).
49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 220–36.
140 Richard Polt
The problem of plurality raises its head again in connection with lan-
guage and silence. As we have seen, the 1934 Logic course bases belong-
ing to the Volk on a mysterious unison among secret individual choices.
“Each must himself venture the leap, if he wants to be a member of a
community.”50 The idea echoes a comment on authentic being-with in
Being and Time.51 Notably, it also appears in the 1933–34 seminar, where
Heidegger appeals in a similar way to an inner choice: “The true imple-
mentation of the will [of the state] is not based on coercion, but on awak-
ening the same will in another, that is . . . a decision of the individual.”52
Heidegger envisions complete unanimity as the ideal: “Only where the
leader and the led bind themselves together to one fate and fight to real-
ize one idea does true order arise.”53 So although community depends
on individual decisions, any such decision that contradicts the will of the
state, which is identical with the will of the leader, is out of order and
amounts to a betrayal of the people. In short, Heidegger’s authoritarian-
ism at this time is allied to a quasi-Kierkegaardian
inwardness: public ut-
terances and behavior are genuine only if they are supported by the indi-
vidual’s secret, silent decision to support the new state.
This totalitarian individualism, so to speak, may seem bizarre, but it
is a logical consequence of tyranny: when public discourse does not tol-
erate dissent, private consciousness becomes a matter of intense interest
both to citizens and to authorities. What has been lost in this situation is
a genuine public sphere—neither a private mind nor a governmental sys-
tem, but an arena where individuals can display themselves. Such a dis-
play should not be understood simply as the expression of a preexisting
inner consciousness; in a vital public sphere, individuals discover them-
selves and become themselves in their public acts. As Arendt argues in
a line of thought directly aimed at the totalitarian error, the specifically
political realm is this public arena of free initiative and self-revelation.54

In Nazi Germany, such a realm was supplanted ever more forcefully by
orders and propaganda.
If a healthy public sphere and public discourse are essential to po-
50. Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, 16.
51. SZ 122.
52. Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 62.
53. Ibid., 49.
54. Arendt, The Human Condition, 175–81, 199–207.
litical existence, we cannot agree that a community is ultimately bound

together by reticence, or by the creations of solitary thinkers and poets.
The peasants smoking silently around the hearth certainly share a world,
and without a shared world, there is no polis. But we cannot conclude
that silent coexistence is more authentic than discourse. If a dispute aris-
es among the peasants about whether someone’s cattle have the right to
graze on a certain pasture, words will become necessary in order, as Ar-
istotle says, to discover the just and the unjust (Politics 1.2). This pub-
lic discourse binds the peasants more fully into a community. That does
not mean unanimity, or common devotion to a single idea, but participa-
tion in a plurality, with all its friction and faction. The specifically politi-
cal being of a community does not consist in what goes without saying,
but on its members’ readiness to define themselves through speech in the
public realm. This line of thought is essentially anti-totalitarian: freedom
of speech and association are necessary conditions for us to have an op-
portunity to take up our own being as an issue.
When we try to found politics on the conditions of possibility for free
action, we are, of course, dealing in the universals of the Enlightenment.
Is such an approach compatible with the radically finite, historical point
of view that Heidegger espouses? Recall that he contrasts “the finitude,
temporality, and historicity of human beings” with the ahistorical ratio-
nalism of “the Enlightenment and . . . liberalism.” “Here all of the pow-
ers against which we must struggle today have their root.”55 Heraclitean
struggle, the fight against concealment, is supposed to be the finite coun-
terpart to the in-finity
of Hegelian truth—the apotheosis of truth as cor-
rectness, a misconception of truth that is also manifest in liberalism.
But does a proper appreciation of our finitude exclude all norms and
institutions that respect human rights, simply because such norms and
institutions appeal to truths about the universal human condition? This
would be the case only if our finitude cut us off from any insights what-
soever into the human essence—but Heidegger himself tried to glean
such insights. After all, the concept of human finitude is itself supposed
to apply universally to all human beings. A universal assault on univer-
sality soon becomes incoherent. We do not have to pretend to a divine
point of view in order to affirm that human beings are not gods—that
55. Heidegger, Being and Truth, 129.

142 Richard Polt
they depend on diverse others as they make their incomplete efforts to

define themselves. We can recognize the universal truth that humanity
has no right to declare, “I am that I am,” but only to ask, “Who am I?”
and “Who are we?” We do not, then, have to escape our finitude in order
to recognize that liberty, not dictatorship, is best suited to that finitude.
That is a line that we are entitled to draw.
Richard Velkley
Remarks on Heidegger and Strauss
Richard Velkley
7 S Political Philosophy and the

Ontological Question
Preliminary Remarks on Heidegger and Strauss
I
What place does thinking about politics have in Heidegger’s philoso-
phy? If that place cannot be called “political philosophy,” what might
it be called instead? What are the implications for political philosophy
of Heidegger’s thought? A doubt could be raised about whether a posi-
tive relation exists between Heidegger’s ontological inquiry and politi-
cal philosophy. Certainly Heidegger does not use a term like “political
philosophy” or Rechtsphilosophie for any aspect of his thinking, which
is focused on renewing the question “What is Being?” as forgotten in its
true character since the beginning of Western philosophy. Heidegger’s
use of the term “politics” and its cognates is often disparaging. Heidegger
clearly has only contempt for the academic discipline of the study of poli-
tics which he claims lacks a primordial-existential approach to the in-
terpretation of Dasein (human existence as “Being-there”).1 Surely he is
on safe ground in regarding contemporary social science as philosophi-
cally insufficient. But one might think that the analysis of Dasein’s mode
of existing as “care” points toward a central place for political thought
and action. For in this analysis Dasein, confronting the temporal hori-
1. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 19th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 16 (hereafter
“SZ”), translated as Being and Time by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and
Row, 1962), 37.
143
144 Richard Velkley
zon of its existence as limited by death, understands itself in terms of its

possibilities which, in its authentic stance, it regards as radically unlike
mere entities that are present at hand. Dasein “has the state-of-Being of
an entity for which its Being is an issue.”2 The analysis seems to entail a
certain privileging of deliberation and action over the attitude of con-
templation. The account of being-in-the-world gives priority to the en-
gagement with pragmata, things as ready-to-hand, over things as objects
of beholding and perception, things present-at-hand.
But the analysis of
Dasein, Heidegger underlines, is not undertaken for the sake of anthro-
pological investigation, as it “uncovers time as the possible horizon for
any understanding whatsoever of Being.”3 Heidegger states that care as
“a primordial structural totality lies ‘before’ every factical attitude and
situation of Dasein” and “this phenomenon by no means expresses a pri-
ority of the ‘practical’ attitude over the theoretical. When we ascertain
something present-at-hand
by merely beholding it, this activity has the
character of care just as much as does a ‘political action’ or taking a rest
and enjoying oneself. ‘Theory’ and ‘practice’ are possibilities of Being for
any entity whose Being must be defined as ‘care.’ ”4
Notably, though, Heidegger places the terms “theory” and practice”
in quotation marks, indicating that he puts in question the traditional
distinction. One might recall in this context his interpretation of ph-
ronesis in the sixth book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Heidegger
regards Aristotle’s account of human engagement with the environing
world in deliberative circumspection (Umsicht) as a mode of revealing
truth and as the key to the understanding of theoria as the most intense
form of world-engagement by Dasein.5 Strikingly absent from Hei-
degger’s interpretation are the political aspects of Aristotle’s account of
phronesis. Prudence in Heidegger is not, as it is in Aristotle, directed to-
ward given ends, above all the end of the common good. The intellec-
tual virtue of practical judgment does not rest on moral virtues such as
courage, moderation, and justice which for Aristotle belong essentially
to the character of the agent who judges prudentially. One is tempted
to say that if Heidegger denies that he places practice above theory, it
2. SZ 193 (238).
3. SZ 1 (1).
4. SZ 193 (238).
5. Martin Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler (Gesamtausgabe 19) (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 1992), 132–88.
Remarks on Heidegger and Strauss 145
is because theory has been transformed and reinterpreted as a mode of

being-in-the-world not essentially distinct from a kind of practice, and
practice itself has been transformed and reinterpreted so as to divest it of
the political aspects of deliberation and action for the sake of the prac-
tical good, of which the highest form is the common good of the com-
munity or city. With the analysis of Dasein seeming to point away from
everything distinctively political, one is inclined to endorse the state-
ment of Leo Strauss that “there is no room for political philosophy in
Heidegger’s work.”6
But the mention of Strauss brings us to a paradox. In the generation
of students deeply affected by Heidegger’s teaching in the 1920s were sev-
eral who under his influence moved toward practical philosophy and
indeed in some cases political philosophy, with a strong impulse com-
ing from Heidegger’s readings of the Greeks. Besides Strauss one can
mention Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Gerhard
Krüger, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse. As this list covers several of
the best-known
figures to emerge from Heidegger’s circle of students,
one might conclude, if one were not acquainted with his writings and
knew only the writings of these students, that Heidegger was not princi-
pally concerned with the metaphysical tradition but was a political phi-
losopher or at least a practical philosopher in some recognizable and tra-
ditional sense. Accordingly, one might suspect there is something wrong
with my initial presentation of Heidegger. Indeed there is. The more ac-
curate presentation will acknowledge that Heidegger’s thought, from its
very beginnings, had a deep engagement with political questions, albeit
understood from a special standpoint, the analysis of a comprehensive
crisis of Western civilization. All of the students mentioned drew from
Heidegger’s analysis some related understandings of the Western crisis,
but they all departed significantly from his view of the role of politics,
in the narrow sense, in that crisis and in its possible overcoming, and
thus in various ways they also departed from his account of the crisis
itself. We shall see that when Strauss writes that Heidegger’s work has
no room for political philosophy, he does not mean that Heidegger’s
thought has no political dimension or that it lacks all relevance for the
concerns of political philosophy. On the contrary, Strauss regards Hei-
6. Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1983), 30.
146 Richard Velkley
degger’s thought on the Western crisis as being of first importance for

his own renewal of Socratic political philosophy.7 My primary intent
in this essay is to throw a bit of light on that complex state of affairs. But
I must precede that discussion with further comments on the relation of
the question of Being to politics in Heidegger’s philosophy.
II
That Heidegger ventured some major gestures in the arena of national
politics is, of course, extremely well known. All the same, it is sometimes
denied that his philosophic thought had any relation to his political in-
volvement, a position that cannot hold up under even moderate scrutiny
of the relevant sources. Heidegger’s own statements clearly rule out this
assessment. I will of course not attempt to deal with the vast literature
on this subject. I shall deal with the subject briefly but I hope not too su-
perficially. For philosophical reasons Heidegger turned to the theme of
the fate of Europe and therewith the West as dependent on the fate of
Germany, and in this way his philosophic thought (in teaching and pub-
lications) made an explicit turn toward political questions. Not just coin-
cidentally, he at the same time became practically engaged with the Na-
tional Socialist movement. There was a long preparation for this step in
Heidegger’s history, as has been expertly shown by Holger Zaborowski.8
Before the First World War, before Heidegger broke with the Catholic
church and before his mature philosophy was formed, Heidegger wrote
numerous pieces, some scholarly and some of a popular character, fo-
cusing on the problems of modernity in a highly critical spirit. What he
called the “autonomism” of modern culture, the emphasis on feeling and
subjectivity, and the naturalism of the social sciences, were the targets of
his attack. His thinking was deeply informed by conservative Catholic
tradition, although Protestant theology, Kant, and Nietzsche played roles
before the actual break with the church. The Destruktion of the tradi-
tion that Heidegger undertook as a mature thinker in the 1920s has some
continuities with this beginning. However, in this later period Heidegger
7. For a fuller account see the author’s Heidegger, Strauss and the Premises of Philosophy:
On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
8. Holger Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?”: Martin Heidegger und der Natio-
nalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2010), 85–113.
articulated the failures of modernity as rooted in the rationalism of Greek

antiquity.
The entire metaphysical tradition arising from the Greeks, Heidegger
claims, overlooked the meaning of truth as unconcealedness which emerg-
es in Dasein’s attitude of care. In the authentic mode of care, Dasein expe-
riences its thrownness into the world and confronts the fact of mortality.
The authentic temporality of living toward death is the presupposition of
all understanding of Being. But the metaphysical tradition concealed this
presupposition by its emphasis on Being as present-at-hand or as eternal-
ly present, amenable to Dasein’s correct asserting and calculative think-
ing. Western metaphysics and even more its offspring modern science take
flight from the anxiety of temporal-mortal
existence. Heidegger uses this
analysis to attack the foundations of modern mass-culture
and bourgeois
society, for such is clearly his intent in the description of the inane distrac-
tions and idle chatter of Das Man (“They”). It is not difficult to find in this
account possible implications for action against the political-cultural
sta-
tus quo, although Heidegger at the time does not give any clear pointers as
to where resolute rejection of the present age would lead.
His explicit and highly public engagement with politics took place in
1933, as he assumed the rectorate of the University of Freiburg. It is a mis-
take to regard this move as mere opportunism, a chance for Heidegger
as leader of a major university to play on the bigger stage of national
politics. An indication of Heidegger’s philosophic intent is given in the
inaugural address of 1929, “What Is Metaphysics?,” where he discusses
the plight of the modern university as lacking a philosophic account of
truth to ground and unify the scattered plurality of disciplines. The uni-
versity must discover the deep source of its unity in metaphysical ques-
tioning so as to guide the nation in the renewal of the European spirit.
Heidegger offers more clarity about the development of his thinking as
leading toward National Socialist politics in an essay published after his
death titled “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts.”9 There he re-
lates how he and a small circle discussed the writings of Ernst Jünger in
the early 1930s, wherein Heidegger saw that “an essential understanding
of Nietzsche’s metaphysics was expressed,” in whose horizon the present
9. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität. Das Rektorat 1933/34
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990). These pieces are reprinted in GA 16.
148 Richard Velkley
and the future of the West was seen and foreseen. With the declaration
“God is dead,” Nietzsche made manifest a new reality: the collapse of
Christianity and the supersensible world amid the universal dominion of
the will to power in the form of planetary technology.10 With deepened
awareness of nihilism as the destiny of the West, Heidegger saw the ur-
gency of radicalizing the search for the ground of the sciences and the
revival of the university. The reflection on the overcoming of the meta-
physics of the will to power through a conversation with the Western
tradition was to be the core of the assertion of the university’s leadership.
Heidegger writes that “with the assumption of the rectorate I dared to
make the experiment to save, purify and secure the positive [in the Na-
tional Socialist movement].”11 His conviction then and also later, with
some significant modification, was that Germany had to play the leading
role in renewing the West, for the Germans have a distinctive character
among modern peoples as the most philosophical people, related to the
ancient Greeks.12 All human greatness, and preeminently philosophy,
arises out of rootedness in a particular people. The German folk, with its
traditions of thinking and singing, alone could resist the “dreary techno-
logical frenzy” and organized domination of the average man found in
America and Russia. For the sake of philosophy this people must rise up
against the egalitarianism, technological flattening, and spiritual trivial-
ity of the threatening forces of democracy and communism.
Strauss states memorably how Heidegger experienced the technologi-
cal world society as a nightmare: “It means unity of the human race on
the lowest level, complete emptiness of life, self-perpetuating doctrine
without rhyme or reason; no leisure, no elevation, no withdrawal; noth-
ing but work and recreation; no individuals and no peoples, but instead
‘lonely crowds.’ ”13 One of course detects in this eloquent statement some
sympathy on Strauss’s part. Strauss also notes that Heidegger became dis-
illusioned with the Nazis and abandoned all hopes of making the need-
ed transformation through politics. “One is inclined to say,” he writes,
“that Heidegger learned the lesson of 1933 more thoroughly than any
10. Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung, 13, 24–25.

11. Ibid., 26.
12. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 7–9, 28–
29, 34–37.
13. Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: Essays and Lectures, ed. Tho-
mas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 42.
other man.” But Strauss continues: “Surely he leaves no place whatever

for political philosophy.”14 The room for political philosophy “is occu-
pied by gods or the gods” as Heidegger’s thinking prepares for the return
of the gods. By the absence of political philosophy Strauss does not in-
tend merely the lack of theoretical treatment of politics. To grasp the true
bearing of Strauss’s critique is the major concern of what follows.
III
Among the leading thinkers of the twentieth century seeking to reach
new insight concerning the roots, the meaning, and the fate of Western
rationalism, Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss were the two to develop
the most searching analyses of the philosophic tradition as originating
in radical questioning and undergoing forgetting. Both rethink the pos-
sibility of philosophy through recovering its original starting points, as
they view the present age as a wholly new crisis in the tradition of ra-
tional inquiry, compelling philosophy to reconsider the most elementa-
ry premises on which its tradition is based. Both question the ability of
modern science to account for the humanness of the human; they criti-
cize the modern idea of progress and the modern philosophical assump-
tions underlying it; they are philosophically estranged from the modern
world, and regard it as forgetting fundamental insights that were once
alive in Greek antiquity; they see history as a major problem in that it
forms layers of traditional thought that conceal original insights, which
layers need to be uncovered and removed so as to gain a true view of the
origins; they concentrate on the texts of great philosophers for making
these discoveries, and although they display astounding linguistic com-
petence, they reject the historical erudition that deals with minor figures
and movements; they see the great philosophers as the central players in
Western history, the thinkers who determine enormous turns in the way
human destiny unfolds; they both appeal to the thought of Nietzsche as
an inspiration that points beyond the failings and blindness of moderni-
ty toward a renewal of philosophy that breathes the great spirit of antiq-
uity; at the same time they see Nietzsche as a provocation who also leads
astray; they criticize the idea that philosophy is an instrument for the
14. Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 30.

150 Richard Velkley
increase of human power, and see it rather as concerned with a contem-

plative stance toward Being or the whole, although they do this in quite
different ways; they are attempting to understand how a genuine philo-
sophic life is possible if all traditional metaphysical groundings of that
life are questionable.
Strauss has Heidegger in mind when he writes that “the crisis of our
time may have the accidental advantage of enabling us to understand in
an untraditional or fresh manner what was hitherto understood only in
a traditional or derivative manner.”15 In a letter to Hans-Georg Gadam-
er, Strauss employs Heidegger’s language to characterize the crisis: “It is
necessary to reflect on the situation that demands the new hermeneutics,
i.e., on our situation; this situation will necessarily bring to light a radi-
cal crisis, an unprecedented crisis and this is what Heidegger means by
the world night.”16
But long before writing this, Strauss claims in 1930 something simi-
lar while referring to the disturbing force of another thinker. “Through
Nietzsche, tradition has been shaken to its roots. It has completely lost
its self-evident truth. We are left in this world without any authority, any
direction. Only now has the question pos bioteon again received its full
edge. We can pose it again.”17
These two figures, Nietzsche and Heidegger, are from Strauss’s ear-
ly years the presiding spirits of late modern thought, at once threaten-
ing and liberating, who expose the failures of the modern rationalist
tradition and point problematically toward a new beginning. They are
not merely destructive forces since they make possible the raising of new
questions and giving new life to old questions. Strauss writes in 1932 that
Nietzsche uncovers the neglect of the Socratic question even as he de-
nounces it, and Heidegger reveals the neglect of ontology, the question of
Being, as concealed by centuries of metaphysical tradition.18 By showing
modern philosophy to be a destructive process, they do not provide new
certainties but rather allow one to escape the power of the certainties of
15. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), 9.
16. Leo Strauss, “Correspondence with Hans-Georg
Gadamer concerning Wahrheit und
Methode,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5–12.
17. Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften 2, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 289.
18. Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 406
(letter to G. Krüger, November 17, 1932).
the present age. Strauss writes: “To me modern philosophy appears to

have come to its end, to lead to the point at which Socrates begins.”19
If Nietzsche and Heidegger were the deepest and most radical critics
of modernity in the first decades of the century, they were not the only
developments in the German situation to assault the prestige of modern
science and modern philosophy, including the doctrines of Enlighten-
ment liberalism. The catastrophe of the First World War set in motion a
whirlwind of doubts about the soundness of the foundations of Western
civilization. In the thought of Max Weber, the leading German liberal of
the age, modern science at the highest level showed itself unable to jus-
tify the choice of itself as a way of life or to offer any wisdom. Edmund
Husserl’s phenomenology belongs to the context of this questioning. He
exposed the inadequate starting points of all modern philosophic and
scientific explanation and called for a return to “the things themselves”
by careful description of the prescientific understanding of the world.20
Husserl proposed a new form of “rigorous science,” and his intent was to
justify the meaning of reason as able to grasp the irreducible intelligible
structure of things, in opposition to positivist and empiricist reductions
of knowledge to psychological processes. But the prevailing mood was
to turn away from all science to other grounds of authority, either rev-
elation (as in the “new thinking” in theology of Karl Barth and Franz
Rosenzweig) or the absolute obligation to the state (Carl Schmitt).21
Strauss studied briefly in the early 1920s under Husserl, Heidegger, and
leading neo-Kantians,
and he reflected on all the tendencies of his time,
but as supporter of the Zionist cause his chief concern was the paradoxi-
cal effort of the Jewish Enlightenment and Zionism to fuse orthodoxy and
rationalism.22 His early studies of Spinoza and the German Enlighten-
ment were in accord with the “new thinking’s” criticism of rationalism,
19. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 415 (plan for letter to G. Krüger, December 12, 1932).
20. Strauss claimed that Husserl’s analysis of the origins of modern science in the trans-
formation of geometry underlying Galileo’s physics was of “unsurpassed significance.” Leo
Strauss, “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the
Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137; Leo Strauss,
The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss, 28–29; Strauss,
Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 34–37.
21. Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. Sinclair (New York: Schocken,
1965), preface; Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
22. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on F. H. Jacobi for Ernst Cassirer.
152 Richard Velkley
although Strauss maintained great sympathy for the dialectical spirit of

Lessing.23 The alleged defeat of the God of revelation by rationalism was
effected through a mere construction of nature supported only by an act
of will. It showed itself to be a form of faith no less than the faith it sought
to defeat, and the triumph of reason over prejudice was thus a hollow vic-
tory. Later Strauss modified this critique of the modern foundations with-
out abandoning its core. He did, however, move away from his defense of
orthodoxy after writing his 1928 book on Spinoza. In the autobiographical
preface of 1962, Strauss states that he saw the danger in a critique of ratio-
nalism that could justify any orthodoxy and that “it would be unwise to
say farewell to reason.”24 This was of course also the period of the rise of
Nazism. In a “change of orientation,” Strauss began to question the prem-
ise that a return to premodern philosophy is impossible, and to consid-
er whether “the self-destruction
of reason was the inevitable outcome of
modern rationalism as distinguished from pre-modern
rationalism.” At
this time he began to recover premodern accounts of the relation between
philosophy and revelation in medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, a re-
lation in which philosophy is not entangled in the battle against universal
prejudice and seeks instead only to liberate philosophic individuals from
the power of opinion. He realized he was recovering the Socratic and Pla-
tonic understanding of “the strictly esoteric character of the theoretical
analysis of life.”25 But as he recovered the lost premodern justifications of
philosophy, he saw more clearly the deficiencies not only of modern phi-
losophy but of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Strauss’s own radical reflection
on the tradition had the effect of diminishing the apparent radicality of the
two thinkers who above all others had led the revolt against rationalism.
Nietzsche and Heidegger make one aware of “the unradicality of
modern philosophy” which consists in its belief that “it can presuppose
the fundamental questions as already answered, and that it can therefore
‘progress.’ ”26 This is an early formulation of a reflection on history that
is of importance to both Strauss and Jacob Klein. Radical philosophic
23. Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern
Jewish Thought, ed. K. H. Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 462; Strauss,
“Reason and Revelation,” in Meier, Leo Strauss and the Th eologico-Political Problem, 178–79.
24. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 30–31.
25. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 26.
26. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 406.
questioning is subject to deformation and forgetting as it becomes a tra-

dition resting on received premises which go unexamined. It was the in-
tent of the great founders of modern philosophy to erect foundations of
knowledge on unquestionable premises, and because the most funda-
mental of thoughts, Being, is always problematic, the founders had to es-
tablish certainties whose truth is independent of the nature and essence
of Being. Klein exposed the key to this step in the new symbolic, that is,
non-ontological, account of number, which becomes identified in Des-
cartes with the object of scientific knowledge.27 The dogma of progress
is powerful only so long as the evasiveness of these premises is ignored
and not seen as a problem. But even as Nietzsche and Heidegger call into
question the dogma of modernity’s progress over antiquity, these phi-
losophers, the young Strauss remarks, remain entangled in the project
of modern philosophy to overcome Christianity, whereby they still think
within a framework defined by Christianity in which religion and phi-
losophy are fused. To that extent they remain under the spell of a cer-
tain conception of progress that underlies all of modern philosophy and
the historicist thinking at the core of what Strauss in 1932 calls the “sec-
ond cave,” the “cave beneath the original cave.”28 In later writing Strauss
argues that Heidegger continues, in a deeper and subtler form after the
famous “turn” in his thinking, to weave together philosophy and rev-
elation, such that the place of political philosophy is “occupied by gods
or the gods.” In claiming that “there is no room for political philosophy
in Heidegger’s work,” Strauss means that Heidegger neglects “the ten-
sion between philosophy and the polis [. . .] the highest theme of political
philosophy.”29
IV
The account just given is a prelude to considering the question: what
role does Heidegger have in the return to premodern philosophy? One
must immediately insert that Heidegger’s importance is philosophic,
not merely critical and destructive, that is, not only a symptom of the
27. Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematics and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968).
28. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 438–39 (review of J. Ebbinghaus).
29. Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 464.
154 Richard Velkley

political-intellectual cataclysm. It is well known that Strauss held that
“the only great thinker of our time is Heidegger.”30 This begs the ques-
tion of whether Heidegger was a philosopher, but Strauss also asserts
that “Heidegger was the first great German philosopher who was a Cath-
olic by origin and training.”31 Writing in his later years about what Hei-
degger called the Destruktion of the tradition, Strauss says that “no one
has questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger” and
that he
intended to uproot Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, but this presupposed
laying bare its roots, the laying bare of it as it was in itself and not as it had come
to appear in the light of the tradition and of modern philosophy.32
By uprooting and not simply rejecting the tradition of philosophy, Heidegger
made it possible for the first time after many centuries—one hesitates to say how
many—to see the roots of the tradition as they are and thus perhaps to know,
what so many merely believe, that those roots are the only natural and healthy
roots.33
Heidegger provided a fundamental stimulus to rethinking the origins

and the meaning of the entire philosophic tradition.
Yet this is not the view of Heidegger that Strauss puts forward promi-
nently in several of his public statements on this thinker. Strauss is better
known as the leading critic of Heidegger’s “radical historicism,” and for
reasons that obviously include Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism, some
of Strauss’s presentations of Heidegger’s thought warn the reader about
the dangers of Heidegger’s relativism as the ultimate consequence of a
process of decline in modern philosophy into nihilism.34 But the state-
ment just quoted on Heidegger’s Destruktion, which occurs in a public
address of Strauss’s final years, shows that the emphasis on relativism is
rather misleading. Insofar as Heidegger sought to uncover the roots of
the tradition “as they are,” and to distinguish them from traditional in-
terpretations, he could not be a relativist of any simple or familiar sort
30. Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 29.

31. Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 450. Strauss adds: “As philo-
sopher Heidegger was not a Christian.”
32. Ibid., 462.
33. Ibid., 450.
34. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 9–34; Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and
Other Studies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 55.
who denies the possibility of transcending the received thinking of one’s

own time. On the contrary, Heidegger intended to uncover a beginning
which had been almost immediately forgotten after its discovery in an-
tiquity, one which in Heidegger’s view Plato and Aristotle failed to sus-
tain. What is more, Heidegger supposed that recovery of this beginning
was crucial to overcoming contemporary nihilism. In general, it might
be said that students of Strauss, with considerable support from some of
Strauss’s prominent presentations, tend to think of Heidegger only as the
most extreme symptom of the crisis of Western philosophy, rather than
as a profound analyst of the crisis, whose analysis is in certain ways con-
tinued by Strauss.
Also, it can easily be supposed that when Strauss and his friend Ja-
cob Klein heard Heidegger lecture on Aristotle in the early 1920s, they
saw him in the following way: Heidegger persuaded them of the inad-
equacy of traditional accounts of the Greek roots, but his new read-
ings, while brilliant, were misguided and thus forced them to develop
counter-readings that uncover the true roots. Strauss’s account of their
early response to Heidegger shows this view is not accurate. “Klein was
more attracted by the Aristotle brought to light and life by Heidegger
than by Heidegger’s own philosophy.”35 The distinction in this sentence
means that Heidegger’s account of Aristotle contained something true
and of enduring worth, apart from whatever had to be rejected in Hei-
degger’s philosophy of existence. Strauss writes elsewhere that Heidegger
revealed that the founders of modern philosophy had refuted only the
Aristotelians of their time without understanding Aristotle himself, and
a thinker “cannot have been refuted if he has not been understood.”36
As Klein saw perhaps more quickly than Strauss, Heidegger was
showing that ancient philosophy is not doctrinaire but attentive to apo-
ria, and is particularly engaged in a dialectical reflection on the relation
between eidetic openness to the world and genetic-causal
explanation.
Strauss asserts that Heidegger’s “destruction” of the tradition led to the
insight that “la querelle des anciens et des modernes must be renewed.”37
The point cannot be that Heidegger’s readings of the Greeks were bril-
liant and provocative but all the same simply wrong. One can approach
35. Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 461–62.

36. Strauss, “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” 134.
37. Ibid., 137.
156 Richard Velkley
the real point by noting another formulation of Strauss: Heidegger had

“opened the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy” with
“full clarity about the infinite difficulties which it entails.”38 Yet he had
opened this possibility “without intending it,” since he sought to go be-
yond or beneath the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The
point of this remark seems to be this: Heidegger had valid, not just bril-
liant and interesting, insights about Greek philosophy but those insights
could be employed to recover and defend Plato and Aristotle, contrary to
Heidegger’s intention. Those valid insights relate to the “infinite difficul-
ties” of the return to classical philosophy, and the fact that those difficul-
ties paradoxically promote a return to classical philosophy, by opening
up unfamiliar conceptions of Plato and Aristotle as aporetic philoso-
phers who in the post-Nietzschean
era can ground a living way of phi-
losophizing.
Strauss writes that Heidegger went further than Husserl in his turn
to “the natural understanding” of the world. “The natural world, the
world we live in and act, is not the object or product of the theoretical
attitude [as in Husserl]; it is a world not of mere objects at which we de-
tachedly look but of ‘things’ or ‘affairs’ which we handle.”39 To expand
this thought a bit: the human relation to the world in which objects or
beings are accessible to the human is not itself another object. The hu-
man as questioning, as open to the whole, is the presupposition of all ac-
counts of beings, but the being of the questioner has been neglected in
the metaphysical tradition. In the 1922 lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphys-
ics which Strauss heard, Heidegger presents the beginning of inquiry in
seeing as a way of actively engaging the world in circumspection (Um
sicht), and treats the theoretical life as the most intense form of practice.40
By his own account Strauss found this to be a fresh and provocative way
of starting in Aristotle, and it no doubt contributed to Strauss’s later ac-
count of political philosophy as the starting point for all philosophy. Yet
one must also note that for Strauss in the 1920s it was not Heidegger but
Nietzsche who focused on what became for Strauss the primary theme
38. Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 450.

39. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 79; Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Ratio-
nalism, 29.
40. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretation ausgewählter Abhandlungen des
Aristoteles zu Ontologie und Logik, ed. Günther Neumann (Gesamtausgabe 62) (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 2005).
of political philosophy: the tension between philosophy and the city, the
fact that “philosophy and the state are incompatible” since the natural
subject of philosophy is the cosmos, not history.41
V
But with this account one has not yet reached the heart of the matter.
Strauss’s mature reflection on basic philosophic questions has a radical-
ity comparable to Heidegger’s, and he was to the end of his life engaged
with Heidegger as the one contemporary thinker with whom his thought
was in essential dialogue. Yet to see this and grasp its meaning one has
to get past the first appearance that Strauss’s writing offers the reader,
namely that the true issue between Strauss and Heidegger is the prob-
lem of relativism, which Strauss would address by the assertion of abso-
lute norms. The genuine issue for Strauss, I argue, is whether Heidegger
remained faithful to his reopening of the aporia of Being and thus the
implications of the crisis of philosophy, and whether Socratic skepticism
provides (as Strauss argues) the more rigorous and consistent response
to the crisis. Strauss formed his account of Socratic skepticism in rela-
tion to the modern crisis, inclusive of Heidegger’s role in the crisis. In
this regard Strauss’s account of “political philosophy” is genuinely novel
and not simply a revival of ancient sources of Socratic thought. The true
bearing of Strauss’s Socratism is obscured by some common misconcep-
tions as well as by some subtler ones. Commonly a political project is as-
cribed to Strauss along the lines of the revival of natural law or natural
right with a central concern for the defense of Western liberal democ-
racy. (One leaves out of view here implausible accounts of Strauss’s ne-
farious political intentions.) But Strauss in a public lecture once declared
that through Heidegger “all rational liberal philosophic positions have
lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one
cannot bring myself to cling to philosophic positions which have been
shown to be inadequate.”42
Strauss does not intend to reverse the contemporary crisis of liberal-
ism through a philosophic defense of its foundations, even as he argues
that liberalism has undeniable strengths compared to the contemporary
41. Strauss, “Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” 137–38.

158 Richard Velkley
political alternatives. Most students of Strauss grasp that at the high-

est level political philosophy for Strauss is not a practical enterprise of
founding regimes or even of putting forward principles that enable such
founding (although it can and should have beneficial consequences for
political life). Rather it is an inquiry into political matters that leads to
the philosophic life and specifically to a way of philosophizing in which
political matters reveal something fundamental about the nature of the
whole. Political philosophy is the political introduction to philosophy.43
Strauss renews the Socratic thought that philosophy is first possible
through reflection on the problems of political life.
A less common error is to claim, as one prominent writer on Strauss
has done, that Strauss turned away from the question of Being to “the pri-
macy of the political,” and that Strauss held it was “Heidegger’s concern for
Being, rather than beings, that led to his indifference to tyranny.”44 How-
ever Strauss makes clear that Socratism as he understands it is centrally
concerned with questions about Being and the whole: “Contrary to ap-
pearances, Socrates’ turn to the study of the human things was based, not
upon disregard of the divine or natural things, but upon a new approach to
the understanding of all things.”45 “In its original form political philoso-
phy broadly understood is the core of philosophy or rather ‘the first phi-
losophy.’ ”46 “We have learned from Socrates that the political things, or the
human things, are the key to the understanding of all things.”47
At the same time, Strauss characterizes the questioning about “all
things,” or the whole, as aporetic. He writes that the foundation of clas-
sical political philosophy is “the understanding of the human situation
which includes . . . the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the
cosmological problem.”48 “Socrates was so far from being committed to
a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance . . .
Socrates, then, viewed man in the light of the mysterious character of
the whole.”49 One could say that through interpreting Socrates and many
43. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 93–94.

44. Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2006), 130.
45. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 122.
46. Strauss, The City and Man, 20.
47. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 19.
48. Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, 39.
49. Ibid., 38–39.
other figures in the tradition, Strauss sought to show that the metaphysi-
cal questions come to light, in their properly aporetic formulation, only
through the ascent from the political. “To articulate the situation of man
means to articulate man’s openness to the whole.”50
That ascent begins with the experience of political life as seen from
the perspective of statesmen and citizens, in order to recover the “sur-
face” of the political phenomena that has been overlaid by the philosoph-
ic and scientific traditions. This recalls Husserl’s suspension of theoret-
ical constructions and his dismantling of “sedimentations” of original
insights, in order to show the genesis of science out of the prescientific
understanding. Classical political philosophy, as founded by Socrates,
did not have to undertake the dismantling of a prior tradition and could
investigate the prephilosophic understanding without the aid of histori-
cal studies. Strauss underlines that our need for historical studies for un-
covering what the classical philosophers could grasp directly from the
political phenomena is a disadvantage we suffer, not a mark of superiori-
ty.51 But it must be noted about Strauss’s “phenomenology,” if one can
speak this way, that it recovers the surface of political life as the home
of problems, not of absolute principles or solutions. As Socratic it is dia-
lectical, exposing the fissures and perplexities of the prephilosophic un-
derstanding. Strauss placed the problems and tensions inherent in po-
litical life under the heading of the “theological-political problem.” It
is a mistake to identify this solely with the dispute between philosoph-
ic reason and piety or revelation. Political life is itself characterized by
unending debate concerning notions of justice, the law, and the good.
“The meaning of the common good is essentially controversial,” Strauss
notes.52 The enduring tensions of political life include the tension be-
tween divinely sanctioned law and the statesman’s need for autonomous
flexibility. The poets have their own accounts of tension between law or
justice and eros or the good. “The ambiguity of the political goal is due
to its comprehensive character.”53 Reflection on the ultimate goal of the
political art gives rise to controversies that do not occur about the ulti-
mate goals of other arts. Thus political life, as a kind of whole, discloses
50. Ibid., 39.

51. Ibid., 77.
52. Ibid., 16–17.
53. Ibid., 17.
160 Richard Velkley
the structure of the cosmos of problems considered by philosophy. Cru-

cial to that structure is a certain duality in the meaning of the gods, as
the ground of the authority of the law and as pointing beyond the law.
The common notion that the just human being needs a higher reward for
sacrifices made for the law’s sake discloses that duality. Strauss sums up
the problem by noting “the city is both closed to the whole and open to
the whole.”54
This paradoxical character of political life, wherein political things
are “the link between what is highest and what is lowest,” entails that
political things and their corollaries are “the form in which the highest
principles first come to sight.”55 It is also this paradoxical character of
political things that discloses they are “a class by themselves, that there
is an essential difference between political things and things which are
not political.”56 Thus Socrates’s turn to investigating the political things
was the same as his turn to eide or the forms of things as revealed in
speeches. His account of noetic heterogeneity was above all focused on
the peculiar difference of the human as political animal. But the exami-
nation of this peculiar class of things shows that “the ultimate aim of po-
litical life cannot be realized by political life, but only by a life devoted to
contemplation or philosophy.”57 Yet philosophy “is essentially a quest,
because it is not able ever to become wisdom.”58 The superiority of the
philosophic life rests not on a claim to be wisdom but on its awareness
of the fundamental problems. Socrates “viewed man in the light of the
unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental and permanent problems.”59
The philosopher’s mark of distinction is knowledge of ignorance, or
knowledge of the fundamental problems. In this light one must view
Strauss’s inquiry about natural right. He writes that natural right is an
“inevitable problem,” one to which “political life in all its forms neces-
sarily points.”60 His Natural Right and History is an inquiry that seeks to
restore knowledge of the “problem of natural right.”61
54. Strauss, The City and Man, 29.

56. Ibid., 132.
60. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 81.
61. Ibid., 7 (emphasis added).
I note that I am only lightly touching upon an immensely important

issue. Strauss’s account of classical philosophy as centrally engaged with
the fundamental paradox of political life enables philosophy to justify it-
self as a way of life against its accusers and detractors. The ground of the
philosophic life is the enduring evidence of insoluble problems (which
evidence the philosopher can no more dismiss than he can reject his
concern with truth) and is not, in my understanding of Strauss, the refu-
tation of the possibility of a mysterious infinite god. As Strauss writes,
“Philosophy cannot possibly lead up to the insight that another way of
life apart from the philosophic one is the right one. . . . The very uncer-
tainty of all solutions, the very ignorance regarding the most important
things, makes quest for knowledge the most important thing, and there-
fore makes a life devoted to it the right way of life.62
VI
Let us return to the question of Heidegger’s relation to this account of
political philosophy and revisit Strauss’s statement that “certainly no one
questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger.” Hei-
degger’s questioning of the premise is not the same as rejecting it from
a nonphilosophic standpoint, as I have noted. Strauss identifies the fun-
damental premise of all rationalism as the axiom that “nothing comes
into being out of nothing or through nothing,” and accordingly “the
fundamental principle of philosophy is then the principle of causality,
of intelligible necessity.”63 In Heidegger’s view Greek philosophy nev-
er adequately examined this principle, committing a certain circle of
thinking in supposing that the fundamental disclosedness of Being or
the whole, which makes possible access to beings and principles, could
be grounded in the highest beings or principles. Heidegger’s account of
the problem of Being lies directly behind Jacob Klein’s development of
the aporia in Greek philosophy concerning the relation between eidetic
and genetic senses of being. Klein, it could be said, ascribes more con-
sciousness to the Greek philosophers, especially Plato, of their own apo-
ria than does Heidegger, and Strauss follows him in this. Interestingly,

63. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 89; lecture version of his Natural Right and History,
2:3 (Strauss Archive, Chicago).
162 Richard Velkley
Strauss in correspondence with Klein proposes that the causal problem

exposed by Heidegger is the same as that of “Kant, or the unsolved Hu-
mean problem,” granting to the Scottish thinker a depth that Heidegger
rarely accords to a soul from the British Isles. Strauss also claims in a
public lecture that “in all important respects Heidegger does not make
things obscurer than they are,” and that Heidegger is “sensible” in argu-
ing that “man participates in the inexplicability of Sein [Being].”64 How-
ever, Strauss also makes clear that he does not follow Heidegger in his
response to this insight, and suggests that Socratic philosophy, perhaps
especially in its Xenophontic form, contains a response or at least the ba-
sis for a response superior to Heidegger’s. In very compressed fashion he
opposes the Socratic response to the responses of Kant and Heidegger,
who are akin in treating some version of freedom or practical reason
as the source of grounding for human thought. Similarly, Strauss’s So-
cratic position rests on a very different view of Socrates from that of Ni-
etzsche in The Birth of Tragedy: the optimistic rationalist who supposed
that “thinking can not only fully understand being but can even correct
it; life can be guided by science.”65 Unlike the Socrates of Nietzsche, that
of Strauss is free of all moralism.
The same issues arise, if in a more understated way, in Natural Right
and History, where Heidegger is not named but his thought is discussed
under the rubric “radical historicism.” Strauss writes there that in histor-
icist thought there is an “absolute moment” in which “the insoluble char-
acter of the fundamental riddles has become fully manifest.”66 It seems
at first as though Strauss thinks that this claim of insolubility must be re-
futed by showing “the possibility of theoretical metaphysics and of philo-
sophic ethics or natural right,” on whose denial “historicism stands or
falls.” But instead he proceeds to say in the next paragraph: “One might
realize the insoluble character of the fundamental riddles and still con-
tinue to see in the understanding of these riddles the task of philosophy;
one would thus merely replace a non-historicist and dogmatic philoso-
phy a non-historicist and skeptical philosophy.”
Historicism goes beyond skepticism in claiming that the effort of
philosophy to replace opinions about the whole with knowledge about
64. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” Interpretation 22, no. 3 (1995): 319–38, here 324–30.
65. Ibid., 323.
66. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 29–30.
the whole rests on premises that are “historical and relative.” The non-
historical, nonrelative knowledge put forth by Strauss is not a knowledge
of absolute standards of right (such as so many readers hope to find in
this book), but something more fundamental: “In grasping these [fun-
damental] problems as problems, the human mind liberates itself from
its historical limitations. No more is needed to legitimize philosophy in
its original, Socratic sense: philosophy is knowledge that one does not
know; that is to say, it is knowledge of what one does not know, or aware-
ness of the fundamental problems and, therewith, of the fundamental al-
ternatives regarding their solution that are coeval with human thought.”67
In spite of his insight into the insolubility of the fundamental rid-
dles, Heidegger remains a dogmatist of sorts in his reading of history as
culminating in an absolute moment of definitive insight. In this regard
he completes the eschatological tradition of German philosophy, whose
historicism must be distinguished from conventional cultural relativism.
The German tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche emerged out of the
modern conception of philosophy as assuming the largest responsibili-
ties for human welfare, the “relief of man’s estate,” in which philosophy is
synthesized with religion. Strauss claims that Heidegger’s thought seeks
to prepare the arrival of a new world religion that unites the deepest ele-
ments of East and West, and Strauss reads both Nietzsche and Heidegger
as holding that “the philosopher of the future, as distinct from the clas-
sical philosopher, will be concerned with the holy.” At the same time,
Strauss holds that Heidegger “is the only man who has an inkling of the
problem of a world society.”68 Whereas Strauss acknowledges the depth
of thought behind Heidegger’s project, it is in Strauss’s view a task for
which philosophy is not suited. Philosophy cannot be wholly at home in
the political world, dwelling in harmony with the gods, traditions and
folkways of peoples, yet the heart of Heidegger’s inquiry is a longing to be
granted a human dwelling in which the highest thinking is at home pre-
cisely in this way. Philosophy cannot render the realm of history whole
and meaningful. Strauss notes that for the classical authors history is “a
sequence of Thereafters,” of contingencies.69 Heidegger’s misjudging of
67. Ibid., 32.

68. Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, 41–44; Strauss, Studies in Plato-
nic Political Philosophy, 30–34.
69. Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates,” 325–26.
164 Richard Velkley
the significance and potential of National Socialism was directly relat-

ed to his hope of redeeming Europe and the West through philosophy.
Strauss faults Heidegger not for his insight into the fundamental aporia
of philosophy, but for his stance toward that aporia in which he failed
to see its moral and political implications. Instead of harboring skepti-
cism about the possibilities of action, Heidegger sought a supra-ethical

confirmation of action from Being as historical. His later stance of hope-
ful awaiting is but another form of understanding philosophy as the re-
sponse to historical fate, whereby a soteriological role is again ascribed to
philosophy or the successor to philosophy.
In knowledge of the permanent limitations of politics and philoso-
phy, Strauss sees the source of transhistorical reflection on human dual-
ity. Philosophy has access to a thinking that unlike Heidegger’s reflection
on Being is not an Ereignis, a gift of Being. This is not to say that Strauss
has no concern with history. “The distinction between philosophic and
historical cannot be avoided, but distinction is not total separation.”70
Strauss’s Socratism must exist in a new kind of cave, one based on his-
torical thinking in which all traditions are eroding. Strauss, like all phi-
losophers before him, must devise rhetorical strategies appropriate for
leading the potential philosophers from their particular cave. The high-
est subject of philosophy is the philosophic life itself, which is always a
particular effort in particular circumstances to attain an end that is radi-
cally universal: to be at home not in the city but in the whole.71 But phi-
losophy itself, as awareness of the fundamental human problem, is not a
destiny or fate sent by history. Philosophers have a permanent, natural
fate as exiles operating in the midst of the political realm that provides
them with their questions and problems—a fate that can be experienced
only by individuals, not by epochs or cultures.
70. Ibid., 335.

71. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. V. Gourevitch and M. S.
Roth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 212.
Holger Zaborowski
Holger Zaborowski
8 S Technology, Truth, and Thinking

Martin Heidegger’s Reading of Ernst Jünger’s
The Worker
From the Citizen to the Worker: Ernst Jünger’s

Phenomenology of the Superman
In fall 1932, Ernst Jünger, hero of the generation of the First World War
and a prolific writer who was already well established in German conser-
vative circles, published one of his most important political books, The
Worker (Der Arbeiter).1 The subtitle of this book is Dominion and Form
(Herrschaft und Gestalt) and, however cryptic it may at first appear, it cap-
tures acutely the content of Jünger’s book, a widely-read polemic pamphlet
of a very complex—and now, of course, antiquated—but still intriguing
character. The book shows how “the worker” has come to dominion such
that whoever wants to understand the contemporary age needs to know
about the worker. However, in The Worker, Jünger, the poet-thinker,
does
1. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007),
English trans., The Worker: Dominion and Form, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming, trans. Bogdan
Costea and L. P. Hemming (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming). For a comprehen-
sive introduction to Jünger’s life see Helmuth Kisiel, Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie (München:
Siedler, 2007), and Heimo Schwilk, Ernst Jünger. Ein Jahrhundertleben (München: Piper, 2007).
For a discussion of Jünger’s The Worker see Marcus Paul Bullock, “Flight Forward. The World
of Ernst Jünger’s Worker,” Utopian Studies 23, no. 2 (2012):450–71; David C. Durst, Weimar
Modernism. Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany 1918–1933 (Lanham, Md.: Lexington,
2004), 155; Werner Hamacher, “Working through Working,” trans. Matthew T. Hartmann, Mo-
dernism/Modernity 3, no. 1 (1996): 23–56 (this essay also examines Heidegger’s thought of 1933
and 1934). For a short interpretation of The Worker in the context of Jünger’s oeuvre see also
Kisiel, Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie, 384–99. Translations from the German here and in the fol-
lowing pages are my own if not otherwise indicated.
165
166 Holger Zaborowski
not limit himself to political questions. He critically deals with questions

of culture, aesthetics, sociology, history, and, indeed, philosophy. It is
therefore easy to find many parallels between Jünger’s book and other ex-
amples of cultural criticism, so prevalent in Europe in the 1920s and early
1930s. Nevertheless, there is one feature that distinguishes Jünger’s book
from other such works. For the claim of his book is almost phenomeno-
logical. Jünger is interested in the “worker” not so much as a sociological
category, even though he constantly touches the borders of sociological
analysis. He does not have normative interests either. Nor does his main
interest lie in political activism (it is, however, clear what kind of activism
his work would evoke). Jünger is chiefly interested in describing as accu-
rately as possible the worker as a key to understanding his age in a way
that also has at times prophetic nuances. What he presents, as he argues
in the preface of the first edition, are not “new thoughts or a new system,”
but a “new reality” that is in need of careful examination.2 This is why
Jünger suggests sharp description without getting lost in prejudices, theo-
ries, or different party positions; an unprejudiced seeing of what is there,
in front of everyone’s eyes, but, as he holds, largely unnoticed.3
Jünger’s is a thinking that, being indebted to his reading of Plato and,
primarily, Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Oswald Spengler, focuses on
the “form” (Gestalt) of the worker, that contains more than the sum of its
parts.4 This kind of morphological approach to reality, he argues, is not
open to what he calls the “anatomical age.”5 The age of anatomy is the
modern age that favors the method of dissection and reduces all phenom-
ena to nothing but sums of their parts. It is the age of the “citizen” who de-
velops concepts or ideas within the reductive horizon of reason (Vernunft)
and sensitivity (Empfindsamkeit).6 Who follows this kind of modern and
analytical thinking—the thinking of citizens that is, as Jünger argues,
product of a spirit (Geist) that has become “self-aggrandizing” (selbstherr
lich)—will never be able to understand the worker.7 The simple reason for
this is that the worker is of another stature and rank than the citizen.8 He
2. Jünger, Der Arbeiter, 9.

3. Cf. ibid.
4. Ibid., 33–48.
5. Ibid., 33.
6. Cf. ibid., 38.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 19.
Heidegger’s Reading of The Worker 167
is capable of a liberty that is totally different from any kind of bourgeois

liberty, and will soon seize full power, Jünger argues, and replace the citi-
zen.9 What Jünger describes, therefore, is the end of the bourgeois age.
Bourgeois society and the ideas and ideals of modernity, including liberal
democracy, he forcefully argues, are “sentenced to death.”10
Who, then, is the worker? Jünger’s description of the worker is ex-
tremely rich. Nonetheless, he does not provide a definition of the work-
er, neither in the beginning of his book nor any time later. This does not
come as a surprise. Given his methodological self-understanding, he could
never have done so. He understands “the worker” as an “organic concept”
that is being transformed in the course of its description. It is, of course,
not possible in this context to provide an adequate account of almost three
hundred pages of his meticulous examination, but it is feasible to highlight
three of Jünger’s perhaps most important claims, in addition to his funda-
mental thesis that the worker characterizes the new post-bourgeois era as
the “highest reality that is the origin of meaning.”11
First, the worker claims totality in that he understands himself as
an agent, or representative, of a superior form than the form of the citi-
zen, because he leaves modern individualism behind. Second, the worker
stands in a new relation to the elementary (das Elementare) and to power
as the representation of the form of the worker.12 Third, the worker mo-
bilizes the world through technology that is not merely a means nor a
neutral instrument, but stands in a special relation to the worker and is
almost teleologically directed toward its own perfection.13 The worker,
then, is the new man, the Nietzschean superman who leaves the bour-
geois “last man” far behind.
One could see, as Jünger argues, examples of the worker in the
trenches of the First World War, a war in which soldiers seemed not in-
dividuals so much as mere representatives, or parts, of a powerful supe-
rior whole and in which modern technology played a yet unknown role.
For Jünger, one could equally see the significance of the worker in the
rise of different workers’ parties in Europe—Communists, Socialists,
and Social Democrats on the one side, and the National Socialist Ger-
9. Cf. ibid.
10. Ibid., 23.
11. Ibid., 308.
12. Cf. ibid., 48–52 and 70.
13. Cf. ibid., 155.
man Workers Party on the other.14 What this rise really means beyond
the analysis of everyday politics, what the Gestalt of the worker is, is the
very subject of Jünger’s book.
Heidegger’s Initial Interest in Jünger’s

The Worker as a Retrieval of Nietzsche’s
Philosophy
Martin Heidegger read Jünger’s The Worker immediately after its pub-
lication in 1932.15 His infamous “Rectoral Address,” delivered in May
1933, shows clearly the extent of Heidegger’s proximity to Jünger and to
his description of the contemporary age as the age of the worker. In this
programmatic speech—one of the most ambiguous texts that Heidegger
ever wrote—he argues that the life of the students should be character-
ized by three different services: knowledge service (Wissensdienst), work
service (Arbeitsdienst), and military service (Wehrdienst).16 Commenta-
tors on this text have noticed the Platonic dimension of Heidegger’s ideas
14. Cf. for the rise of workers’ parties, ibid., 73.

15. For the comparison and the relation between Heidegger and Jünger see particularly
Antoine Bousquet, “Ernst Jünger and the Problem of Nihilism in the Age of Total War,” The-
sis Eleven 132 (2016): 17–38; Michael Auer, Wege zu einer planetarischen Linientreue? Meridiane
zwischen Jünger, Schmitt, Heidegger und Celan (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2013); Patrick Nerhot,
La question de la technique: A partir d’un échange épistolaire entre Ernst Jünger et Martin Heide-
gger (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2012); Peter Trawny, “ ‘Was ist ‘Deutschland’?’ Ernst Jüngers
Bedeutung für Martin Heideggers Stellung zum Nationalsozialismus,” in Heidegger und der Na-
tionalsozialismus. H eidegger-Jahrbuch 5, ed. Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg:
Karl Alber, 2009), 209–34; Laurence Paul Hemming, “Work as Total Reason for Being: Heideg-
ger and Jünger’s Der Arbeiter,” Journal for Cultural Research 12, no. 3 (2008), 231–51; Wolf Kitt-
ler, “From gestalt to Ge-stell:
Martin Heidegger reads Ernst Jünger,” Cultural Critique 69 (2008):
79–97; Daniel Morat, Von der Tat zur Gelassenheit. Konservatives Denken bei Martin Heidegger,
Ernst Jünger und Friedrich Georg Jünger 1920–1960 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007); Vincent Blok,
“Heideggers Begegnung mit der metaphysischen Grundstellung Jüngers in den dreißiger Jah-
ren,” in Heidegger und Aristoteles. Heidegger Jahrbuch 3, ed. Alfred Denker, Günter Figal, Franco
Volpi, and Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2007), 310–16; Martine Béland, “Heideg-
ger en dialogue: par-delà Ernst Jünger, un retour à Nietzsche,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophi-
cal Review 45, no. 2 (2006), 285–305; Vincent Blok, Rondom de Vloedlijn. Filosofie en Kunst in
het machinale tijdperk. Een confrontatie tussen Heidegger en Junger (available at www.academia
.edu/1953676/Rondom_de_Vloedlijn._Filosofie_en_Kunst_in_het_machinale_tijdperk._Een_
confrontatie_tussen_Heidegger_en_Junger); Martine Béland, “Martin Heidegger, lecteur et cri-
tique d’Ernst Jünger,” Horizons Philosophiques 14, no. 2 (2004): 57–80; Friedrich Balke, “Martin
Heidegger und Ernst Jünger. Kontroversen über den Nihilismus,” in Heidegger-Handbuch. Le-
ben—Werk—Wirkung, ed. Dieter Thomä (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 363–73.
16. Martin Heidegger, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität,” in his Reden und
concerning the three different kinds of service.17 It is as if the students

now ought to integrate in just one person the three different classes of
people of which Plato speaks in the Republic. They ought to be at the
same time producers, guardians, and future philosophers, that is, stu-
dents who know and learn not just something, but what Heidegger con-
siders most important, how to face Being and its claim.
There can be no doubt, however, that Jünger’s The Worker, too, stands
behind Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address.” For if the worker, as a “form,” not
merely as a sociological phenomenon, has come to power (Jünger’s view),
then the students, too, need to be understood as workers and therefore
work or work service, as Heidegger concludes, must be required of them.
Heidegger was also, like Jünger, critical of individualism and the modern
understanding of the role of the citizen. Therefore, he was critical of an
understanding of the university and of academic freedom that was based
on such assumptions. For Heidegger, the students should understand
their position and their duties within the totality of their Volk. This is
to say that they are not primarily to be considered individuals and as
such free citizens of a liberal state, but ought to be understood as schol-
ars, workers, and soldiers who belong to a superior whole, the German
Volksgemeinschaft, and, through their services, actively support it.
Heidegger fleshed out his idea of the student worker even more ex-
plicitly in another speech that he gave during his rectorate, entitled “Der
deutsche Student als Arbeiter” (The German Student as Worker).18 The
title of this speech indicates that Heidegger’s position is now even more
radical than in the “Rectoral Address.” Work service is now not one of
three different services that are required of the student. The student as
student needs to be understood as a worker. It is difficult to see how Hei-
degger could have developed this radical idea without the influence of
Jünger’s morphology of the worker. A closer interpretation of both the
“Rectoral Address” and the speech “The Student as Worker” could show
andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Gesamtausgabe 16)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 107–17 (hereafter “GA 16”).
17. For an interpretation of Heidegger’s “Rectoral Address” see the author’s “Eine Frage von
Irre und Schuld?” Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch, 2010), 260–330.
18. Martin Heidegger, “Der deutsche Student als Arbeiter (Rede am 25. November 1933),”
in GA 16:198–208. For a detailed discussion of Jünger’s influence on Heidegger in his speech
“The German Student as Worker” see Peter Trawny, “ ‘Was ist ‘Deutschland’?’,” 217–23.
many more striking parallels between Heidegger’s and Jünger’s mor-

phology—from the all-pervasive emphasis on power, will, and decision
up to the use of many militaristic metaphors.
It is not difficult to understand why Jünger’s The Worker could draw
Heidegger’s interest (and this can perhaps even partly explain his joining
the National Socialist Workers Party in 1933). It is not only Jünger’s quasi-
phenomenological method, or at least his methodological self-understand-
ing, that made The Worker a book of great interest to Heidegger. There is
another, more important reason. His later notes—there are no notes avail-
able dating from 1932 or 1933—show why Heidegger took Jünger more se-
riously than other contemporary writers. Jünger provided, for Heidegger
and for many others, a comprehensive and intellectually satisfying frame-
work for an understanding of the political and historical situation of the
early 1930s. To Heidegger, The Worker appeared particularly to be a proper
retrieval of Nietzsche’s philosophy. This is to say that for Heidegger, by no
means a political thinker in the strict sense of the word and at least until
the end of 1932 almost not all interested in current politics, Jünger was not
just another cultural critic, as, for example, Oswald Spengler. Heidegger,
as is well known, did not think very highly of the kind of cultural criti-
cism found in Spengler’s Decline of the West, even though there is no doubt
that he was influenced by, and came often close to, this kind of criticism.19
It was less Spengler’s cultural pessimism and rather what Heidegger con-
sidered to be the former’s lack of adequate philosophical foundations that
aroused concern. Jünger’s book, it must have seemed to Heidegger in 1932
and 1933, did not share the shortcomings of Spengler’s book and of a great
many similar accounts of the cultural situation of the early twentieth cen-
tury. However, in his notes, he would critically count Jünger, too, among
the “culture philosophers”—because, as will be shown, he lacked insight
into the history of Being, which more and more moved into the center of
Heidegger’s attention.20
This reading of Jünger’s thought is, on the one hand, uncontroversial.
There is no doubt about the significant influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
19. For Heidegger’s critical reading of Spengler in the 1930s see Martin Heidegger, Überle-
gungen VII–IX (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39), ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 95) (Frankfurt am
20. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Zu Ernst Jünger, ed. Peter Trawny (Gesamtausgabe 90) (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 2004), 109 (hereafter “GA 90”): “Dagegen noch Jünger im
Rahmen der ‘Kulturphilosophie’ denkend.”
thought on Jünger. He belonged to the generation of German writers

and thinkers who took Nietzsche’s philosophy as a key to understand-
ing their personal and historical experience—the experience of the First
World War, of the crisis and collapse of traditional structures of order and
meaning, and of the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic. Nietzsche’s
“will to power,” for instance, plays an important background role for
Jünger’s considerations about the relation between the worker and pow-
er. The same influence of Nietzsche can be found in his criticism of the
citizen and of bourgeois attitudes, in his combination of description and
prophesy, and even in the very style of his writing. On the other hand,
Heidegger’s interpretation is indeed quite controversial. For according to
Heidegger, Nietzsche is not primarily a cultural critic, political thinker or
“amoral moralist,” as one could argue, but the last metaphysical thinker
who completes the history of Western metaphysics in that he proposes an
interpretation of Being—that is, the Beingness of being—as will to power.
Jünger’s The Worker, then, is for Heidegger a work, like Nietzsche’s, that
belongs to the history or, to be more precise, to the completion of West-
ern metaphysics.21 As precisely such a work, The Worker could become
a work of crucial significance for Heidegger and for his attempt to un-
derstand the history and destiny of metaphysics. (It needs to be said that
Jünger openly acknowledged the metaphysical character of his book; he
does, however, have a different understanding of the history of metaphys-
ics from Heidegger.)
It is important to note that Heidegger’s reading of Jünger’s The
Worker changed as he distanced himself from the rectorate, from his
own writings of this time, and from National Socialism altogether. Hei-
degger’s initial reading of Jünger, one can argue with respect to the im-
plicit resonances of The Worker in his rectoral writings, is considerably
positive. Jünger provided him with an important conceptual framework
to interpret the National Socialist revolution on the one hand and the
role of the university and of students (and professors) in Nazi Germany
on the other. Heidegger’s reading of The Worker after 1934, however, is
increasingly critical. It is less a work to be embraced and to be adopted
than a work to be analyzed with respect to its position within the histo-
ry of Western metaphysics as the history of Platonism and, therefore, as
21. For a discussion of this reading of Jünger’s The Worker see, particularly, Hemming,
“Work as Total Reason for Being.”
Heidegger holds, as the history of the forgetfulness of Being.22 If, accord-

ing to Heidegger, Jünger stands in what he calls the fundamental meta-
physical position of Nietzsche, his thought is “essentially,” not just acci-
dentally, limited and wrong in its claim to be able to provide a solution
to the crisis of modernity. But even in its limited character, it could help
Heidegger in his own thinking—as the critical encounter with Nietzsche
in the 1930s was of crucial significance for Heidegger and the develop-
ment of his later philosophy, too. For it was particularly Jünger whose
thought could help Heidegger to formulate important insights into key
ideas of his later philosophy about technology and its essence.
Heidegger’s “Question Concerning the

Essence of Technology”: Thinking with
and against Jünger
Heidegger’s discussion of modern technology is a well-known
feature of
his later philosophy. It is, first of all, important to note that he is asking
the question concerning the essence (Wesen) of technology, that is, he is
not mainly interested in providing an analysis of technological things, of
their concrete historical genesis or of the social, political, or cultural im-
plications of their use for contemporary culture. Heidegger has a differ-
ent interest in asking a question that only the philosopher as a thinker, as
he maintains, can ask (and, indeed, must ask) because the sciences can-
not, by definition, that is, by their specific outlook on reality, raise this
kind of question. However, Heidegger is also not focusing on some kind
of Platonic idea of technology, an abstract and eternal nature of all things
technological. For Heidegger, Wesen is to be understood with respect to
its verbal, that is, temporal dimension (which is why sometimes Wesen
is translated as essencing, not as essence). In asking the question con-
cerning the essence of technology, Heidegger is also not leaving phenom-
enology behind, but transforming it. This is why he is interested in what
happens and shows itself in technological things. Based on this particu-
lar interest, Heidegger questions two common views of technology—the
anthropological and the instrumental interpretation of technology. We
must, Heidegger argues, understand technological things not merely and
22. For a discussion of this new interpretation see Trawny, “ ‘Was ist ‘Deutschland’?’,” 223–32.
not primarily as means to an end—the instrumental definition of tech-

nology—nor merely as human or manmade products—the anthropolog-
ical definition of technology. Heidegger, of course, would not deny that
such definitions can be considered correct (richtig). But they are, as he
holds, merely correct. They are not true (wahr) and do not even bring us
closer to what he considers the true essence of technology.
The essence of technology is, as he argues, a way or mode of reveal-
ing. Nature—physis—is a mode of revealing, too. But while nature reveals
what brings itself forth, technology, he writes, “reveals whatever does not
bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look
and turn out now one way and now another.”23 It is in this context that
Heidegger introduces the difference between modern and premodern
technology. He even thinks that only an understanding of technology as
a mode of revealing can make it possible to comprehend modern tech-
nology: “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challeng-
ing, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply ener-
gy which can be extracted and stored as such.”24 This mode of revealing,
Heidegger points out, is different from the mode of revealing of, for exam-
ple, an “old windmill”: “Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left
entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy
from the air currents in order to store it.”25 Modern technology, in oth-
er words, reveals what is as “standing-reserve.”26 “Everywhere,” so Hei-
degger argues about modern technology’s mode of revealing, “everything
is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there
just so that it may be on call for further ordering.”27
In this context, Heidegger also questions the widespread interpreta-
tion of the relation between science and technology in modernity. Ac-
cording to his interpretation, modern science is not the presupposition
of modern technology. Heidegger knows well that, from a merely histori-
cal point of view, modern science precedes modern technology.28 Tech-
23. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in his Basic Writings, ed.
David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial Modern Thought Edition, 2008), 307–41, here
319. In this context, see particularly Kittler, “From gestalt to Ge-stell.
”
24. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 320.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 322.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 326.
nology can then be understood as the mere application of a specific kind

of scientific knowledge. But Heidegger suggests, from his philosophi-
cal point of view, a different relation that is based on his understand-
ing of the essence of technology as a mode of revealing. According to
this interpretation, a specific technological mode of revealing is always
at work in the modern sciences: “Because physics, indeed already as pure
theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable
in advance, it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking
whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.”29
Heidegger’s argument can only fully be understood if one takes into
account his idea that modern technology and, consequently, modern sci-
ences, too, need to be understood in the context of the history of Western
metaphysics. This is for Heidegger not merely a history of human ideas and
concepts. It is the history of the forgetfulness and the withdrawal of Be-
ing. This is why how the sciences and technology developed in modernity
needs to be understood being-historically,
as event in the history of Being.
Heidegger extensively focused on the “question concerning technolo-
gy” in his postwar writings. It is not only his main concern in the famous
lecture “The Question Concerning Technology,” but in many other texts
written and published by Heidegger after 1945. This very question, how-
ever, became important to him much earlier. The posthumous publica-
tion of his Contributions to Philosophy. From Enowning (Beiträge zur Phi-
losophie. Vom Ereignis), of Mindfulness (Besinnung), and of many other,
less frequently discussed volumes of Heidegger’s collected works shows
his concern with the question concerning modern technology since the
mid-1930s.30 This concern of his is intimately related to his increasing
criticism of National Socialism, which is in turn closely linked to his new
attempt at an understanding of Western thought at large and his idea
that Western metaphysics finds its completion in Nietzsche’s nihilistic
philosophy of the will to power. While Heidegger thought in 1933, when
he took over the rectorate of Freiburg University, that National Social-
29. Ibid.
30. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 65) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostemann, 1989), newly translated as
Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela V allega-Neu (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 66) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostemann, 1997), translated as
Mindfulness by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006).
ism could indeed help to overcome modern nihilism and provide a new
source of meaning in a time of crises, it did not take long for him to real-
ize that this was a serious misunderstanding. He then realized that Na-
tional Socialism, too, was a manifestation of nihilism, rather than a rem-
edy for it. One aspect of crucial significance in Heidegger’s critical view
of National Socialism is its relation to modern technology as the culmi-
nation of modern subjectivism and of the will to power. It is exactly this
understanding of technology that leads back to Ernst Jünger’s The Work-
er and Heidegger’s interest in this book.
In a letter to his friend Elisabeth Blochmann written in 1947, Hei-
degger talks about his interest in the question concerning technology
and mentions that he has been thinking about this question for the past
fifteen years, that is, exactly since the publication of Jünger’s The Worker
(which he does not explicitly mention in this letter).31 The Worker was
in fact so important for Heidegger that he wrote more than two hundred
notes, totaling two hundred pages in print, between 1934 and 1940 about
Jünger in general and about The Worker in particular. Some of these
notes are very short, others are almost short essays, as if Heidegger had
planned to write an essay or monograph about Jünger’s book. In Janu-
ary 1940, Heidegger conducted a seminar, or Aussprache (debate), for col-
leagues—not for students, presumably because of the critical character of
the seminar (Heidegger criticized National Socialism via Jünger)—about
The Worker.32 So there is clear evidence that even almost eight years af-
ter its publication, Heidegger considered this book to be worth close
scrutiny.33 Other occasional references to The Worker also show the sig-
nificance that Heidegger attributed to this book well beyond his initial
enthusiasm for Jünger’s position in 1932 and 1933.
Why did Heidegger have such a lasting interest in Jünger’s The Work-
er? If Nietzsche’s metaphysics, as Heidegger aimed to show, not only con-
tinued the history of Western metaphysics but also completed it, and if,
therefore, there is metaphysically nothing new in Jünger’s The Worker,
this question can hardly be avoided. For even if Jünger’s works expresses
31. Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918–1969, ed. Joachim W.
Storck, 2nd ed. (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), 93.
32. Cf. GA 90:209–66.
33. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed.
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 7) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
2000), 70.
the spirit of the completion of metaphysics, what need is there for Hei-
degger to devote careful attention to his writings over such a long period
of time?34 Why did he not limit himself to a short period of interest im-
mediately after the publication of Jünger’s book in order to focus then
exclusively on the “critical encounter” with Nietzsche that stood in the
foreground of several of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the 1930s?
Heidegger’s notes on Jünger provide the answer to this question.
“Jünger’s book,” Heidegger argues, “is important because it achieves what
all ‘Nietzsche literature’ failed to accomplish: to mediate an experience of
being and of what ‘is’ in the light of Nietzsche’s concept of being as will to
power; this experience of beings is the securing of the human being amidst
himself.”35 This is to say that, even though Jünger, as Heidegger argues,
merely continues what Nietzsche already said and therefore stands in the
same fundamental metaphysical position as Nietzsche, something new
seems to be happening in The Worker: the mediation of a new experience
of being such that Heidegger could even argue that “Jünger’s attitude . . . be-
gins the extension of the end,” meaning the end of metaphysics.36 Jünger,
as Heidegger convincingly argues, understands Nietzsche’s superman as
“worker.”37 In so doing, Heidegger further maintains, he concretizes Ni-
etzsche’s metaphysics in the context of the twentieth century and shows
what Nietzsche could not have seen yet, that is, how “in the form of the
worker,” the “subjectivity of humankind” achieves is completion into the
unconditional and the extension into the planetary.”38 Although Jünger
says nothing new metaphysically in comparison to Nietzsche’s philosophy,
he nonetheless contributes to a deeper understanding of the modern age as
the very age that is characterized by the “unconditional anthropomorphic
character of extreme subjectivity.”39
34. Cf. GA 90:31: “Zeigen: wie Jüngers Haltung in das Ende der Metaphysik gehört und
den Ausbau dieses Endes beginnt.”
35. GA 90:27: “Jüngers Buch ist wichtig, weil es das leistet, was alle ‘Nietzsche-Literatur’
nicht vermochte: eine Erfahrung des Seienden und dessen, was ‘ist’, zu vermitteln im Lichte
des Nietzscheschen Entwurfes des Seienden als Wille zur Macht; diese Erfahrung des Seienden
ist Bestandsicherung des Menschen inmitten seiner.”
36. GA 90:31. On the modernity of Jünger’s position, see in particular GA 90:28, 45, 80,
137, 144, 154, 214, 259.
37. GA 90:44.
38. GA 90:40: “In der Gestalt des Arbeiters erreicht die Subjektivität des Menschentums
ihre Vollendung ins Unbedingte und die Ausbreitung in das Planetarische.”
39. GA 90:35.
Jünger’s deeper understanding, as it were, concerns particularly the

“appearances of technology as the fundamental mode of setting up and
of securing reality as will to power.”40 It is therefore, one can argue, Hei-
degger’s discovery of technology as a topic worth serious philosophical
consideration that is indebted to his reading of Jünger, although one could
mention other possible sources for his turn toward the issue of technolo-
gy—there is, after all, an extensive discussion about technology and its
implications in Germany and beyond in the 1920s and early 1930s from
Spengler and Guardini to Cassirer and Jaspers. There are also significant
traces of Heidegger’s later interest in technology to be found in his work
of the 1920s. With that said, The Worker was particularly instrumental
for Heidegger’s formulation of his critique of a limited understanding of
technology in the form of its anthropological and instrumental defini-
tions and for developing the insight that modern technology transcends
human beings and their individual possibilities. Jünger thinks, like Hei-
degger, that a merely technical understanding of technology is not suf-
ficient.41 Human beings, he argues, must not immediately be related to
technology, as the very subjects of technology, whether one affirms or re-
jects technology, whether one interprets the human being as the victim or
as the creator of technology.42 According to Jünger, the human being is
related to technology in a mediated way. For “technology is the manner in
which the form [Gestalt] of the worker mobilizes the world.”43 According
to this view, technology primarily belongs to the form of the worker, not
to the human being as such, and can only be understood with respect to
the will to power that finds expression in this form. Technology is thus it-
self a metaphysical phenomenon, not, in Jünger’s words, a “neutral power,
not a reservoir of efficient and useful means, out of which each and every
traditional power could help itself according to its own will.”44
There are, however, also important differences between Jünger’s and
Heidegger’s understanding of technology. The most important difference
concerns Heidegger’s understanding of the event, or happening, of truth
in modern technology. For technology, as Heidegger writes, “comes to
40. GA 90:264: “. . . die Erscheinungen der Technik als der Grundweise der Einrichtung
und Sicherung des Wirklichen als Wille zur Macht.”
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place,

where aletheia, truth, happens.”45 Truth, or aletheia, is according to Hei-
degger, revealing.46 In introducing this being-historical
understanding
of truth, Heidegger criticizes what he takes to be the common metaphys-
ical understanding of truth as “correctness of representation.”47 Truth,
then, happens where the Being of beings is revealed as standing-reserve
or as will to power. Jünger, Heidegger maintains, “does, from the outset,
not get involved with the question of truth, provided that he understands
it at all.”48 But he speaks at least implicitly about truth, in the context of
his Nietzschean metaphysics of the will to power. Heidegger, therefore,
finds in The Worker what he calls a “specific truth about being in gen-
eral,” insofar as “power itself in the sense of Nietzsche’s will to power is
posited as being and, in the context of modernity, understood as form.”49
This is why for Heidegger, The Worker still belongs to the history of meta-
physics; Jünger is, therefore, incapable of seeing his own being-historical
position.50
It is not a rejection of Platonism, however much it may appear, or
claim, to be so. It is merely the “inversion of Platonism”—as is Nietzsche’s
metaphysics.51 Heidegger consequently argues that Jünger’s description
of power is conceptually insufficient and also indicative of Romanticism,
such that “everything remains in the dark.”52 Although Jünger often
45. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 319.

46. Ibid., 318.
47. Ibid.
48. GA 90:58: “Jünger läßt sich auf die Wahrheitsfrage—gesetzt, daß er sie überhaupt be
greift—von vornherein nicht ein.” Cf. also 13 and 57: “Die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit
wird nirgends gefragt.” Cf. for Heidegger’s poignant critique of Jünger, also 92: “Der sich in
einen Bereich wagt, für den ihm die Rüstung fehlt, wobei nicht an sachliche Kenntnisse gedacht
ist, sondern an Grunderfahrungen und Schärfe und Klarheit und Übersicht des Fragens!”
49. GA 90:173: “Dieses alles aber durch eine bestimmte Wahrheit über das Seiende im
Ganzen; und diese besteht darin, daß die Macht selbst im Sinne des Nietzscheschen Willens
zur Macht als das Sein gesetzt und neuzeitlich als Gestalt begriffen ist.”
50. GA 90:52: “. . . er die Metaphysik noch zum Grunde seiner Stellung hat; dies gerade
hindert ihn daran, den seynsgeschichtlichen Standort zu sehen, den er inne hat: die Vollen-
dung der Neuzeit.”
51. Cf. GA 90:16, 22 for Jünger’s “inversion of Platonism.”
52. GA 90:177; for Jünger’s “romanticism” see also 79 and 183: “Der Romantiker ist nicht
Nietzsche, sondern Jünger, der wieder trotz aller Verwahrung aus dieser Wirklichkeit noch
eine ‘Utopie’ macht, wenngleich mit dem Vorzeichen des heroischen Realismus.” GA 90:176:
“. . . aber zufolge der unzureichenden Begrifflichkeit bleibt alles dunkel.”
speaks about power and technology, he fails according to Heidegger fully

to determine the “essence of power”53 or of technology.54 This full under-
standing, Heidegger claims, can only be achieved “within the question
concerning the essence of Being—that is, being-historically.”55
In other
words, even though Jünger provided important insights into key features
of the early twentieth century and particularly into technology and pow-
er as the Being of beings, he failed to ask the question concerning the
history of Being. However, particularly in not doing so, he may well have
fostered Heidegger’s insights into what he calls the history of Being. Fo-
cusing on this history requires, so Heidegger maintains, a different kind
of thinking that is not to be confused with philosophy as traditionally
conceived.56 It is the kind of thinking that he is on the way to in his later
thought—again with and against Ernst Jünger.
The Task of Thinking Truth v is-à-vis

the Task of Working
Heidegger examines what he means by thinking not through abstract
methodological considerations, but simply by thinking himself: “We
come to know what it means to think when we ourselves think,” as he
states in the first sentence of “What Calls for Thinking?”57 For Hei-
degger, thinking points the way toward a new relation to Being and
its truth. The question “what calls for thinking” is, therefore, a “ques-
tion about what calls upon us to think.”58 Heidegger does not hold that
merely in thinking, or in introducing a new understanding of thinking,
he could himself overcome modernity or even Western metaphysics. He
is concerned with a kind of thinking that has a transitional character
and somehow must oscillate between metaphysics and the kind of utterly
53. GA 90:176; cf. also 179.

54. Cf. GA 90:6: “Deshalb wesentlich Technik, aber tieferen Wesens, als Jünger meint; der
hier in einem flachen Zirkel sich dreht und nicht den Wirbelwind spürt.”
55. GA 90:176: “Das Wesen der Macht lässt sich nur bestimmen aus der Frage und in-
nerhalb der Frage nach dem Wesen des Seins—also seynsgeschichtlich (vgl. Besinnung; die
Geschichte des Seyns).”
56. For the difference between philosophy and thinking see Martin Heidegger, “What
Calls for Thinking,” in Basic Writings, 365–91, here 369; “The End of Philosophy and the Task
of Thinking,” in ibid., 431–49.
57. Heidegger, “What Calls for Thinking,” 369.
58. Ibid., 390.
new thinking that is yet to come. We cannot, he argues, force anything to

happen or intentionally overcome metaphysics in a manner reminiscent
of, say, Hegel. This would mean to continue the metaphysics of the will
to power. The transformation he has in mind is, rather, something that
we need to let happen by listening to poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin.
However, not only Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s poetry from 1934
onwards, but also his encounter with The Worker was crucially impor-
tant for his transition from philosophy to the thinking of Being. Given
the metaphysical dimension of Jünger’s work, this statement may come
as a surprise. Yet there are several reasons for the significance of Jünger
for Heidegger’s understanding of what thinking is.
As has been shown, during the 1930s Heidegger read The Worker as
exhibiting the signature of its age as the age of completed metaphysics.
His initial positive reading, as evidenced in some of his rectoral writings,
is replaced by a critical reading. There can be no doubt, however, that his
criticism of Jünger during the course of the 1930s is at the same time an
implicit criticism of his own appropriation of Jünger’s ideas in the early
1930s. Heidegger saw increasingly not only the limits, but the utterly prob-
lematic presuppositions of his own Nietzschean and Jüngerian attempts to
redefine and to politicize philosophy and to develop a metaphysics of the
worker in 1933 such that a new kind of thinking beyond the restraints of
metaphysics seemed necessary. Heidegger, to be sure, could also derive the
outline of what is needed in order to prepare for a transition toward a new
understanding, or hearing, of Being from Jünger’s description of the do-
minion of the “form” of the worker. If, under this dominion, even philoso-
phy can be understood as work and is increasingly understood as work,
that is, as technically or technologically producing something and as ex-
pressive of the will to power, what is needed in order to go beyond this un-
derstanding of philosophy is thinking as a kind of “counter-work.”59 Hei-
degger’s comments on thinking in his later writings can be understood as
attempts at outlining such “counter-work.” Wherever he emphasizes the
distinctly nonwork character of thinking, he is doing so against the back-
ground of The Worker and its very emphasis on work.
59. Cf. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 434: “Philosophy
turns into the empirical science of man, of all that can become for man the experiential object
of his technology, the technology by which he establishes himself in the world by working on it
in the manifold modes of making and shaping.”
In his thinking about thinking, Heidegger does not intend to return

to theory, understood along the lines of a classical premodern under-
standing of theoria as opposed to practice. In the “Letter on Humanism,”
Heidegger explicitly rejects such a possibility. He argues that even the
interpretation of thinking as theory presupposes a technical interpreta-
tion of thinking.60 His aim is more radical, as it were. He aims to leave
all technical, that is, metaphysical interpretation of thinking—of think-
ing as working—behind. If thinking is not understood as theoria in op-
position to, but still presupposing, praxis and poiesis, it can still be inter-
preted as an “action,” as Heidegger argues: “Such action is presumably
the simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the
relation of Being to man.”61 This kind of action is not to be confused with
any kind of work: “all working or effecting,” Heidegger holds, “lies in
Being and is directed toward beings. Thinking, in contrast, lets itself be
claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being.”62 Only thinking
as radically different from working is, in other words, open for the call of
Being and its truth.
It needs to be asked, though, if Jünger also left behind the position
of The Worker and moved toward a similar position during his “inner
emigration” in the 1930s and early 1940s and particularly after the Sec-
ond World War.63 Jünger, to be sure, became increasingly critical of the
central role that he attributed to the worker and considerably changed
his position after the publication of The Worker. He turned toward a cri-
tique of the impact of modern technology and toward a thinking of mel-
ancholic detachment from the public. Heidegger recognized this move,
but criticized Jünger as not reaching a sufficiently fundamental under-
standing insofar as his thought was still conditioned by the framework
of a metaphysical interpretation of Being and a subjectivist emphasis on
a problematic concept of freedom.64 Jünger, he thought, was still heavily
indebted to the subjectivism of modernity so that one could think that
60. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 213–65, here 218.

61. Ibid., 217.
62. Ibid.
63. For Jünger’s “inner emigration” and his writings during this time see Kisiel, Ernst Jün-
ger. Die Biographie, 404. For the character of his postwar writings see Peter Uwe Hohendahl,
“The Future as Past: Ernst Jünger’s Postwar Narrative Prose,” Germanic Review 88, no. 3 (2013):
248–59.
64. For Heidegger’s comments on this move, see GA 90:225.
it was important to demolish the foundations on which Jünger stands,

that is, “metaphysics as such (Platonism) and the modern metaphysics of
subjectivity.”65 For Jünger still thought that one could actively overcome
modernity and its crisis. This is why, for Heidegger, his thought still be-
trayed modern subjectivism. If we follow Heidegger, however, such a de-
molition is not necessary (nor possible). “Another” “ ‘overcomes,’ ” as he
says, without mentioning the object. The “Other” is what he calls the
“other beginning.”66 This other beginning, however, cannot be created
or autonomously fabricated. According to Heidegger, one can only wait
for it and practice a thinking that is open to its coming, that is, open to
the possibility of a change that cannot be brought about by human ef-
forts. But despite the limitations of his position, Heidegger sees the need
for figures such as Ernst Jünger. It is important, he argued, that they be
heard as “advocates of the eternal.”67 “They prevent contemplation [Be-
sinnung] from beginning prematurely.”68 Heidegger here suggests that
writers such as Jünger who still belong to the history of metaphysics slow
things down and allow a better and not immature transition toward the
“other beginning” and a thinking that is adequate to the call of Being.
Heidegger’s interpretation of Jünger’s thought would never change,
not even in the late 1940s or 1950s when the two thinkers started a cor-
respondence and also occasionally met in person.69 Jünger contributed to
the Festschrift in honor of Heidegger’s sixtieth birthday the essay “Über
die Linie” (About/Beyond the Line).70 The title of this essay is intention-
ally ambiguous. Jünger’s interest lies in an analysis of modern of nihilism.
65. GA 90:28: “. . . dann müßte eben das, worauf Jünger blindlings steht . . ., nämlich die
Metaphysik überhaupt (Platonismus) und die neuzeitliche Metaphysik der Subjektivität ges-
prengt werden.”
66. GA 90:28: “Aber es bedarf nicht der Sprengung; denn an Anderes ‘überwindet’ und
überwindet wesentlich und einzig—der andere Anfang; und der als seynsgeschichtlicher.”
67. GA 90:33: “Deshalb liegt viel daran, daß solche Erscheinungen wie Ernst Jünger auftre-
ten und als Anwälte des ‘Ewigen’ gehört werden.”
68. GA 90:34: “Sie verhindern, daß frühzeitig eine Besinnung anfängt.”
69. For a brief discussion of their postwar relation see Trawny, “ ‘Was ist ‘Deutschland’?,’ ”
232; for the continuously radical character of their positions see Daniel Morat, “No Inner Remi-
gration: Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and the Early Federal Republic of Germany,” Modern
Intellectual History 9 (2012): 661–79; Constantin Goschler, “Radical Conservative Thought in
the Intellectual Constellation of the Early Federal Republic,” Cultural Critique 69 (2008): 1–21.
70. Ernst Jünger, “Über die Linie,” in Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1949–1975,
ed. Günter Figal (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2008), 103–49; first published in Anteile. Martin Heide-
gger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Armin Mohler (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), 245–84.
He distinguishes between a time of increasing and a time of decreasing

nihilism, separated by the zero baseline that is mentioned in the title of
this essay. He does, however, not limit himself to talking about the zero
baseline. He also talks about a movement that leads, or has already led,
beyond the zero baseline. As he argues, humankind has already crossed
the line such that there is reason to be more optimistic. Nihilism, Jünger
suggests, is increasingly being overcome and left behind. It is as if Jünger
interprets nihilism as a human development that can also be undone by
humans.
It does not come as a surprise that Heidegger does not share this view.
He responds to Jünger’s essay by writing an extended letter to Jünger
on the occasion of the latter’s sixtieth birthday. The letter, published in
the Festschrift in honor of Jünger, is entitled “Über ‘Die Linie’ ” (About/
Beyond “The Line”), thus indicating not only his intention to deal with
Jünger’s ideas, but also his attempt to go beyond them. Jünger’s under-
standing of nihilism, so Heidegger argues, is very problematic. He won-
ders if the question really is whether or not humanity has already crossed
the line and raises the question if not only a new turn, or attention, of
Being toward us brings the moment of the crossing of the line.71 What
Jünger seems to consider a question of human action, Heidegger consid-
ers a question of the call of Being.72 It seems that the opportunity of a real
encounter, a real conversation between the thinker and the writer went by
unseized.
71. Martin Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” in Jünger/Heidegger, Briefe 1949–1975, 150–96; also
published in Heidegger, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 9)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 385–426.
72. Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” 193.
Theodore Kisiel
Technological Globalization vs. Localization
Theodore Kisiel
9 S How Heidegger Resolved the Tension

between Technological Globalization
and Indigenous Localization
A Twenty-First-Century Retrieval
Martin Heidegger got as far as the atomic-space-cybernetic

age in his
meditations on technicity and modern technology. We ourselves have
been able to experience the marvels of the twenty-first-century
advance
into the Internet revolution and its instantaneous global reaches, such
that, for example, we and the entire world with us were virtual witnesses
of the events in May 2011 that transpired in Abbottabad, Pakistan, almost
immediately after they happened.1 We twenty-first-century
citizens of
the world take for granted the convenience of stratospheric transpor-
tation networks and the satellitic transmission of instantaneous media
events that enwrap the “global village” at every hour of every day on vid-
eo news channels. But modern technology had advanced sufficiently in
Heidegger’s day for him to be struck by the same drastic foreshortening
of time and space and its global reach brought on by the radio technol-
ogy of his time. Accordingly, what he had to say to us about the essence
of modern technology in the twentieth century appears to apply as well,
with some minor adjustments in terminology, to the more enhanced and
advanced technological realities of the twenty-first
century.
1. This talk, first delivered in abbreviated form on May 25, 2011, to the Heidegger Forsch
ungsgruppe meeting in Messkirch, Germany, took as its example of virtually instantaneous
global communication the raid on the compound of Osama bin Laden that took place in the
early hours of May 2, 2011, East Asian time.
184
Technological Globalization vs. Localization 185
Such adjustments can easily be made in the single hyphenated word by

which he defines the essence of modern technology, almost as ingenious as
the single hyphenated word that defines his entire way of thought, name-
ly, Da-Sein. For modern technicity, his one word is of course Ge-Stell.
In the last three decades of his life, Heidegger repeatedly tells us what
Ge-Stell is, and repeatedly notes that it is to be sharply distinguished from
the ordinary everyday senses of Gestell, as in Büchergestell (bookcase) and
Brillengestell (frame for eyeglasses). It must therefore be emphatically stat-
ed that Ge-Stell is simply not “frame, framework, or enframing,” the cur-
rent English translations drawn directly from German-English diction-
aries. What then is Ge-Stell in its global essentiality? It is, in Heidegger’s
breakdown of this single word, “die versammelnde Einheit aller Weisen
des Stellens” (the collective unity of all modes of setting in place, posi-
tioning, positing).2
Im Ge- spricht die Versammlung, Vereinigung, das Zusammenbringen aller
Weisen des Stellens. (The prefix Ge- speaks to the gathering, unification, bringing-
together of all kinds of placing and positioning.)3
Das Ge-Stell ist die Versammlung, die Gesamtheit aller Weisen des Stellens,
die sich dem Menschenwesen in dem Maße auferlegen, in dem es gegenwärtig
ek-sistiert. (Ge-Stell is the gathering, the integration of all the modes of placing,
positioning, and positing that impose themselves upon the human being in the
manner in which the human being presently ex-sists.) 4
Against the current English favorite of “enframing,” I therefore pro-
pose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell from its Greek and Latin roots
as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing,” where the Greek-rooted
adjective “syn-
thetic” adds the note of artifactuality and even artificiality to the system
of positions and posits. For me, Ge-Stell as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing”
2. Martin Heidegger, Vier Seminare, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Gesamtausgabe 15) (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1977), 104 (hereafter “GA 15”), translated as Four Seminars: Le Thor 1966,
1968, 1969, Zähringen 1973 by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003), 60; the citation is taken from the seminar at Le Thor in 1969.
3. GA 15:129 (75), Zähringen 1973.
4. GA 15:126 (74), Zähringen 1973. The same point was already made in a rich note circa
1955, whose first sentence reads: “Im Wort ‘Gestell’ spricht die Versammlung des Stellens, in
der ‘Versammlung’ spricht das Echo zum Logos, im ‘Stellen’ spricht das Echo der Thesis (Poi-
esis).” Martin Heidegger, Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wis-
senschaft und der modernen Technik, ed. Claudius Strube (Gesamtausgabe 76) (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 2009), 320; see also 327 and 365 (hereafter “GA 76”).
186 Theodore Kisiel
presciently portends the twenty-first-century

globalizations of the Inter-
net with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, the Global Position-
ing System (GPS), interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing

weather maps, around-the-clock world news coverage of cable TV net-
works, etc., all of which are structured by complex programming based
on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital

logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and
non-posit (0). The synthetic compositing of computer logic thus maps out
the grand artifact of the technological infrastructure that networks the
entire globe of our planet Earth.
The phenomenon of technological globalization was already appar-
ent by the time the so-called Great War of 1914–18 came to a conclusion,
which was accordingly renamed the World War. One of the heroes of
this highly mechanized war, Ernst Jünger, in his accounts of “totale Mo-
bilmachung,” the total mobilization that occurred in the last year of the
war, began to attribute this phenomenon to “planetarisches Technik”
and its use in the struggle for “planetarische Herrschaft.” This becomes
Heidegger’s word for globalization in this period to phenomenologically
describe the human experience that results from the network of grids
constructed by modern technology to guide and control the so-called
airwaves that harness the natural electromagnetic radiation occurring
across the surface of our planet Earth for human use and consumption.
Globalization is essentially a time-space term, a dynamic term that spells
out a quasi-infinite velocity in nanoseconds through its virtual abolition
of space into bilocative simultaneity and its instantaneous reduction of
all time differences. By the early twentieth century, radio technology had
advanced sufficiently for Heidegger to be struck by the drastic foreshort-
ening of time and space and its global reach. In the famous “pincers”
passage of 1935, Heidegger dramatically describes the global geopolitical
as well as philosophical situation of a postwar Germany being squeezed
by two international movements, both of them technological jugger-
nauts, on the Western front by American capitalism and on the Eastern
front by Bolshevist communism:
Russia and America, when viewed metaphysically, are both the same: the same
hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the groundless organization of
the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe [“der Erdball,” the ter-
restrial globe versus Heidegger’s beloved terra firma—TK] has been technically
conquered and can be economically exploited; when any incident you like, in
any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like;
when you [by way of radio—TK] can simultaneously “experience” an assassina-
tion attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when
time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history
has vanished from the Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great
man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph;
then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question:

what for? — where to? — and what then? [in short, the question of be-ing in the
twentieth century—TK]5
Clearly, Heidegger was suspicious of this instantaneity and simul-

taneity of the time technologized by global communication primari-
ly because it abolishes the time of situated history, the time of Da-sein.
In 1935, this time-space
abolition results from the medium of the radio
along with the wire services of newspapers, but it just as readily reflects
with uncanny foresight the more advanced digital-media systems of the
twenty-first century. As Heidegger observes in 1949, by plane and by ra-
dio and soon by TV, “all distances in time and space are shrinking.”6
He calls this the phenomenon of the distanceless (das Abstandslose). Dis-
tant locales and exotic places are shown on TV or film so realistically
that you may even feel that you are there (as we were, most recently, in
Abbottabad, Pakistan) and everywhere in a technologically induced bi-
locative simultaneity. Heidegger asks: “What is happening here when, as
a result of the abolition of great distances, everything is equally far and
equally near? What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far
nor near and, as it were, without distance? Everything washes together
into uniform distancelessness [Abstandslosigkeit]. How? Is not this mov-
ing together into the distanceless even more uncanny than everything
being out of place?”7
What Heidegger misses in this all-too-familiar
modern experience
is a genuine experience of nearness, the proximity of be-ing. Because the
5. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 28, trans-
lated as Introduction to Metaphysics by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 2000), 40.
6. Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. Petra Jaeger (Gesamtausgabe 79)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994), 3 (hereafter “GA 79”), translated as Bremen and Frei-
burg Lectures by Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3.
7. GA 79:4 (4).
188 Theodore Kisiel
experience of nearness fails to materialize with this abolition of all dis-

tances, the phenomenon of the distanceless has come to dominate our
lives in the twenty-first
century.8
Heidegger’s own examples of Ge-Stell begin in a farmer’s field about
to be exploited for its mineral deposits, be it for coal or uranium ore. In-
stead of being cultivated, the land is now being challenged (gestellt) to
yield energy, where we set upon the land in order to extract coal or ore
from it, then store this energy resource in order to have it ready for use.9
The hydroelectric plant is set into the Rhine river, thereby damming it up
to build up water pressure which then sets the turbines turning whose
thrust in turn generates and sets the electric current going into the net-
work of long-distance cables, where the systematic transforming, stor-
ing, distributing, and switching of electrical energy takes place.10 Be it
coal or hydroelectric power or atomic energy, in each case “nature is po-
sitioned for its energy,” nature is forced to yield its energy. Nature, thus
held up to yield energy, emerges henceforth as the “storage-place of en-
ergy,” like a global fuel depot or gigantic gas station. Storage of resources,
be it energy or information, becomes a central feature of the Ge-Stell,
which Heidegger calls its fundamental unconcealment. “Everywhere, ev-
erything is ordered to stand by [es wird bestellt, auf der Stelle zu stehen],
to be immediately in position for use, in fact to stand there to be on call
for a further ordering [Bestellen]. . . . Whatever is ordered about in this
way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand].”
And now comes the perhaps surprising denouement of Ge-Stell
from the philosophical perspective: “Whatever stands by in the sense
of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.”11 “Thus
when man, in investigating and observing, ensnares nature as an area
of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of reveal-
ing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until
even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.”12
8. GA 79:20 (19).
9. Here, stellen is translated in various idioms of “to set.” The typical translations of stellen
are “put, place, set, stand,” with strong overlaps with the verbs setzen and legen.
10. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 23–24, citing the
1953 version of “Die Frage nach der Technik,” translated in The Question Concerning Technolo-
gy and Other Essays by William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 16.
11. Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 24 (17).
12. Ibid., 27 (19).
Heidegger in a parallel essay also notes that the most recent cyclo-
tron experiments in nuclear physics likewise encounter this phenom-
enon of the complete disappearance of the object, which hitherto had
been the very hallmark of modern science. But “that does not mean that
the subject-object relation vanishes, but rather the opposite: it now at-
tains its most extreme dominance, predetermined from out of syn-thetic
c om-positing [Ge-Stell]. It becomes a standing-reserve
[Bestand] to be
commanded and placed on order.”13
The subject-object relation now reaches, for the first time, its purely
“relational” character, that is, its character of orderability (Bestellungscha-
rakter), in which both the subject and the object are claimed as standing-
reserves (Bestände). The more modern technology unfolds and develops,
the more objectivity transforms itself into disposability (availability, ac-
cessibility). Gegenständlichkeit is transformed into Beständlichkeit. Now
there are no more objects (no more beings standing over against a subject
that takes them into view)—there are only Bestände, standing reserves
positioned to be available on demand (in short, beings held ready for
plan-directed use). Political economists in fact no longer deal with objects
but instead systematically order the space with an overall plan toward
maximizing the utility of resources. Beings as a whole are aligned and or-
dered within a horizon of usefulness, domination or, better still, the dis-
posability of all that needs to be placed under control. The planners them-
selves are no longer scientifically oriented toward a field of objects but
now emerge in their true gestalt as technicians and even technocrats, that
is, humans who see beings a priori in the horizon of making-them-useful
and available on demand. It can no longer appear in the objective neu-
trality of an over-against. There is nothing other than reserve resourc-
es: warehoused stock, inventories of consumer goods, stores of material
goods, banks of electrical power available on demand, energy reserves,
capital reserves, federal reserve funds, not to mention the quasi-infinite
store of information in the so-called memory banks of the Internet.14 In-
formation has become our most globalized standing reserve, followed by
electronic money kept “liquid” by global holders of reserve funds like the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund, followed by energy re-
13. Ibid., 61 (173), citing the essay “Wissenschaft und Besinnung.”

14. GA 15:105–6 (61–62).
190 Theodore Kisiel
serves made available by increasingly interlocking grids, electrical or oth-

erwise; the last are material goods, called commodities by the markets.
The ontological definition of reserve stock is not the persistence of durable
goods but their character of disposability, the constant possibility of being of-
fered and ordered, i.e., of enduring availability and accessibility. Its constancy
is not that of objectness but that of the standing reserve, a constancy defined in
terms of syn-thetic
com-positing. In disposability, the being is posited as being
exclusively available from the ground up, accessible for use in the planning of
the whole.15
There are no longer any objects but only “production resources” and
“consumer goods” at the disposal of everyone, who themselves are put
into service in the business of production and consumption. In universi-
ties (now called “knowledge industries”) as well as in corporations, per-
sonnel departments are now called departments of human resources.
And since all resources are disposable, they are at once replaceable. This
is clearly manifest in the industry of consumer goods with its abundance
of substitutes and, in an era of mass production, leads to the tendency
to replace rather than repair used goods.16 But extending the same at-
titudes to human resources is fraught with all manners of abuse, the ex-
tremes of which we have witnessed under the totalitarian regimes of the
twentieth century.
The disruption in the global flow of standing reserves caused by the
Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 illustrates another phenome-
non unique to modern technicity, namely, that Heidegger’s broken ham-
mer experience has apparently gone global. The widely adopted Toyota
strategy of just-in-time
inventories for its production lines led, as a result
of the earthquake, to drastic disruptions in the supply lines of numer-
ous automobile production lines around the world. Massive power out-
ages and recent identity thefts of mega-lists
pirated on the Internet are
further examples of the broken hammer experience gone global. Recall
the fears of massive attacks on the Internet by cyberterrorists in the mil-
lennial year of Y2K. Among other things, it conjures the image of the
lightning-speed electronic circulation of vast sums of currency whipping
around the world’s financial markets in a global cash flow whose rever-
15. GA 15:106 (62).

16. GA 15:107 (62).
berations sometimes verge on a cascading collapse. Such a globally im-

pelled crash, whether by impersonal market forces or computer hackers,
would make the worldwide depression of 1929, at least in its velocity of
impact, pale in insignificance. To be sure, all of these examples of glob-
al disruption occur in the high-velocity time-space of modern technic-
ity, which is not at all comparable with the lived-world

time-space of the
broken hammer experience. Recall that the broken hammer experience
retrospectively reminds us of the background context and its referential
connections that the broken hammer interrupts, say, in the work world
of the carpenter. At one point, Heidegger asks what exactly is the “ba-
sic referential context” of a “world” of machination and notes its radi-
cal difference from the referential world of handwork and hand tools by
pointing to the regulated and uninterrupted repeatability “in exactly the
same way” of the “mechanical” motions of the machine and the more
calculative referential relations necessary for its manufacture.17 The
“machine is not an ‘imitation’ of handwork and natural processes but
rather a self-standing
organization of all the processes of beings.”18 And
this “organization of all the processes of beings” in its deliberately calcu-
lated mechanical design is not even a world. Heidegger thus speaks of an
“unworlding [Entweltung] and unearthing [Enterdung] of beings” in the
machinations of Ge-Stell, where beings stand in a state of total abandon-
ment by be-ing
(Seinsverlassenheit).19
We are accordingly moving from the epoch of objectivity (Gegen-
ständlichkeit) to the epoch of disposability and availability (Beständlich-
keit), the most extreme gestalt of the history of the metaphysics of con-
stant presence since the Greeks. “Because we no longer encounter what
is called Ge-Stell within the horizon of representation, the view that al-
lows us to think of the be-ing of beings as presence, Ge-Stell no longer
approaches us as something present and thus seems at first alien and
strange.”20
As the most extreme gestalt of the history of the metaphysics of con-
stant presence, and so the completion and fulfillment of this metaphys-
17. GA 76:307 and 302: “Grundverweisungszusammenhang.”

18. GA 76:308.
19. GA 76:307 and 297.
20. Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 28, translated as
Identity and Difference by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 35.
192 Theodore Kisiel
ics, the Ge-Stell assumes a strange absence which in effect serves to point
it in another direction, to serve as a passage from metaphysics to another
thinking governed by the properizing event, das Er-eignis. The Ge-Stell
is “Janus-faced, it is essentially double-sided
. . . it is so to speak the pho-
tographic negative of the event of be-ing, das Ereignis.”21 Accordingly,
“an outstanding way to draw near to das Er-eignis, the properizing event,
would be to look deeply into the essence of Ge-Stell.”22 The Ge-Stell thus
prompts Be-sinnung, a meditation on its meaning. It is therefore not a
matter of regarding the emergence of technology as a negative event (and
certainly even less as a positive event, as if it were a paradise on earth).
“That in and from which man and be-ing approach and challenge each
other in the technological world claims us in the manner of syn-thetic
com-positing [Ge-Stell]. In the reciprocal self-positing [Sichstellen] of
man and be-ing we discern the claim that defines the constellation of
our age.”23
With the Ge-Stell, it seems that we are on the verge of overcoming the
subject-object relation and entering into the mutual ownership of man
and be-ing
that the properizing event is.
The intimate b e-longing together of man and be-ing in the manner of a mutual
escalating challenge brings us in startling fashion nearer to that and how man is
delivered over to the ownership of be-ing and be-ing
is appropriated to the es-
sence of man. Within Ge-Stell there prevails a rare and exceptional ownership
and appropriation. We must simply experience this owning in which man and
be-ing are proper for one another, i.e., we must enter into what we call the event
of enownment and properizing, das Ereignis . . . a singulare tantum . . . unique . . .
What we experience in Ge-Stell as the constellation of be-ing
and man through
the modern world of technology is a prelude to what is called Er-eignis. For in
the event there resides the possibility that it may turn the sheer prevalence of
Ge-Stell into a more inceptive appropriating. Such a transformation of Ge-Stell
into das Er-eignis would by virtue of this event bring the appropriate recovery—
appropriate, thus never to be made by man alone—of the world of technology
out of its domination to servitude into the realm by which man reaches more
properly into the properizing event.24
21. GA 15:104 (60).

22. Ibid.
23. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 27 (35).
24. Ibid., 28 (36).
Presuming that we could wait in anticipation for the possibility that G e-Stell,
the reciprocal challenge of man and be-ing in the calculation of the calculable,
would address itself to us as the appropriating event that first expropriates man
and be-ing into their proper [element]; then a path would be freed for man to
experience beings in a more inceptive way—the totality of the modern techno-
logical world, nature, and history, and above all their be-ing.25
In Heidegger’s depiction, therefore, at the most extreme extremity of

the history of the metaphysics of constant presence, we find ourselves
poised at the very threshold of crossing over into an authentic experience
of be-ing in the propriating event, das Er-eignis. But despite the apparent
and tantalizing proximity of this experience, we are not given to expect
a smooth gradual crossing over to it simply because of the extremities at
which we are poised: the machinations of technology have resulted in
the complete abandonment of beings by be-ing (Seinsverlassenheit) and
the human being is in peril of not only forgetting his essential be-ing but
even of having forgotten this forgetting of be-ing. “But in this extreme
extremity of destining peril the most intimate relationship [of man and
be-ing] shows itself, but shows itself only as a completely veiled hint.”26
It is necessary to push the ex-peri-ence of the peril of technology to the
extreme to glimpse the e-vent emerging in the Ge-Stell. Accordingly,
Heidegger recommends not attempting to arrest or to master technol-
ogy but to drive it to its extreme in order to ex-peri-ence
it in its full peril
to the human being, and at the same time to meditate on the meaning of
its destining essence.27 To put this extreme experience in another way,
technology in its essence is the “most extreme neglect [Ver-wahr-losung]
of the under-cut
of difference [Unter-schied]. . . . Technology—the neglect
of [nearness], yet accordingly in this neglect [we find] the nearing of the
turn of the forgottenness of the under-cut
of difference.”28
Finally, Heidegger, following Hölderlin, prompts the “sons of the
Alps” to make the perilous crossing “over the abyss on lightly built bridg-
es” by invoking these encouraging lines from Hölderlin’s Patmos: “Wo
aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch” (But where peril is / also
grows the saving). How the extreme peril of technology might allow us to
25. Ibid., 32 (40).

26. GA 76:327.
27. GA 76:255.
28. GA 76:370.
194 Theodore Kisiel
glimpse “the growing light of a saving [power]” is suggested by the hint

that the Greek word technē is the common root of both technology and
art, even the fine arts.29 By way of this hint, Ge-Stell at its extreme of un-
worlding (Entweltung) and unearthing (Enterdung) may well be trans-
formable into the world and earth of das Geviert, the fourfold world of
earth, sky, gods, and mortals.
This crossing over from Ge-Stell to Geviert once again operates be-
tween extremes that, in their very contrast, provide clues for the cross-
ing. How? Consider, for example, the abolition of time and space that
comes with modern technology, where everything is equally far and
equally near, inducing a uniformity in which everything is neither
far nor near, is, as it were, without distance, such that everything gets
lumped together into a uniform distancelessness. What is missing in this
all-too-familiar modern experience of time and space is a genuine ex-
perience of nearness, the proximity of be-ing. But that very experience
of missing the near in its relation to the far in their authentic presential
sense is the beginning of meditative thinking—for which nearness can
become conspicuous by its very absence—and of the turn toward mov-
ing beyond the essence of modern technology as Ge-Stell, which in its es-
sence does not admit of any qualitative nearness or farness.30 Ge-Stell in
its essence disallows nearness. And what nearness (Nähe) truly nears is
the intimacy of a world as a neighborhood (Nähe) in which we can dwell
meaningfully.31 “Ge-Stell as the completed destiny of the forgetting of
the essence of be-ing inconspicuously radiates a ray of the distant arrival
of world. Insofar as world refuses its worlding, what happens with world
is not nothing, but rather from refusal there radiates the lofty nearness of
the most distant distance of world.”32
The arrival of a world as the meaningful context in which we can
live means a return to Dasein as being-in-the-world,
to our own Dasein
as our historical situation. We thus come back to a central opposition
that has already emerged in our first consideration of modern technic-
ity, namely, the contradistinction between the technical time-space of
the distanceless and the time-space of historical Dasein. In his summer
29. Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” 36–43 (28–35).

30. GA 79:45 (42–43).
31. GA 79:46 (44).
32. GA 79:53 (50).
semester 1928 lectures, Heidegger characterized the historical world as

a temporal playing field (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) that grants Da-sein the free-
dom of movement within a finite world of distinct historical possibilities.
One is tempted nowadays to compare this basic contradistinction with
that between the cyberspace of virtual reality and the concrete space
of historical reality, by way of the many recent crossovers from virtual
to historical reality in organizing protest movements online, be it envi-
ronmental, economic, and most recently, the viral spread online and in
reality of the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Wall Street” movements.
The most recent twenty-first-century technologies like the Internet, by
and large, have had a liberating effect as compared to the twentieth cen-
tury, which often employed technology as totalitarian tools of domina-
tion, such as the propaganda propagated by newspapers/radio/film and
the leveling of das Man to uniformity and conformity. Has Orwell’s Big
Brother become a figment of the past now overcome, at least on the glob-
al scale in which he was fictionally portrayed?
When we first introduced the single hyphenated word by which
Heidegger defines the essence of modern technology, it was noted that
the conceptualization of Ge-Stell was almost as ingenious as that of the
single hyphenated word by which Heidegger defines his entire way of
thought, namely, Da-sein. The time has come to highlight that claim.
Heidegger often remarked that every great thinker is defined by a single
thought. If one were challenged to express Heidegger’s central intuition
in a single word, I submit that one could do no better than the hyphen-
ated word Da-sein. The old Heidegger himself, in the text cited in the
publisher’s prospectus to introduce his entire Gesamtausgabe, identi-
fied the guiding star that directed his entire way of thought as the Seins-
frage, the question of being. But I myself prefer the more concrete and
existentially charged Da-sein, which Heidegger himself early on in fact
identifies with the question of being. Da-sein is the experience of “Here
I am!?” Or “Here we are,” the simple raw experience of finding ourselves
already deeply involved in be-ing,
underway and caught up in existing
willy-nilly, thrown into a world we did not make and a life we did not
ask for, finding ourselves already situated in be-ing whether we like it or
not—“I didn’t ask for this!”—where we are in fact on the receiving end of
life, being put upon by life, the great fact of life, facticity. This initial limit
situation of situationality, simply being situated in existence willy-nilly,

196 Theodore Kisiel
is then compounded by the limit situation of death at the other extrem-

ity, and we who exist in-between
are called upon individually to face up
to the question of be-ing,
our very own be-ing.
We thus arrive at the dis-
tributively universal concept of Da-sein as situated ex-sistence, according
to which each of us happens to have been rooted (born, thrown) into our
own unique existential and historical situation, and each of us is called
upon to own up to this particular situation that is most our own and that
in fact constitutes our very identity and be-ing. “I am my time, you are
your time.” Not a generic and common concept, applicable to all indis-
criminately and uniformly, but rather a hermeneutically distributive and
proper concept, applicable to each individually in accord with the unique
temporal context in which each individual happens to be situated. In Be-
ing and Time, this distinction between generic/common and distributive/
proper universals occurs in the distinction between the what- and the
who-question, between categories and existentials, between the uniform
anyone-self of das Man and the proper self of a unique one-time-only

lifetime. “All men are mortal” is generic and common, stating a neutral
scientific fact, while “each of us must die our own death” is distributively
selective and individuating, properly singling out each to come to terms
with their very own facticity of being-here.
Needless to say, the distinction between common and proper univer-
sals is precisely what is operative in our central distinction between our
two ingenious hyphenated words, Ge-Stell and Da-sein, which then ap-
pears in the distinction announced in the title of this talk between techno-
logical globalization and indigenous localization. On other occasions, Hei-
degger describes this contradistinction in terms of technical-functional

relations versus vitally lived relations, or, a bit more deeply, as the contra-
distinction between a technical “world” of functionality and a lived world
of meaningfulness, which are the topics of two radically different kinds
of thinking, calculative thinking and meditative thinking (be-sinnendes
Denken). The latter accordingly meditates on the meaning (Sinn) of our
be-ing: Be-sinn-ung takes us back to the hermeneutic situation of factic
life and original experience, where we as humans live in a linguistically
articulated world of multifarious relations spontaneously charged with
human meaning, and it is this background context of meaning that we
seek, by way of Besinnung, to bring to the fore in coming to terms with
our b e-ing.
In the Der Spiegel interview of 1966, for example, where Heidegger

admits to being frightened (erschrocken) when he first saw the pictures
of the earth taken from the moon, he remarks: “We do not need atomic
bombs at all [to uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All
our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer
upon an earth that man lives today.”33 He finds it uncanny to be living in
a world in which everything is pure function, and this functioning sim-
ply leads to more and more functioning, and this technicity increasing-
ly dislodges humans and uproots them from the earth and their native
roots. This takes us to another formulation of our contradistinction, that
of the global versus the local, which came into currency with the genera-
tion that lived through the personal-computer
revolution but is quite apt
to the old Heidegger’s concerns, as he meditates on the impact of techno-
logical giganticism on local traditions and on the rhythms and ways of
life of the “good old days.”
Heidegger’s First Attempt at a Resolution

of the Global and the Local
Heidegger assumes a less terrified and more meditative and placid
(gelassene) tone toward Ge-Stell in his 1955 talk in Messkirch memorial-
izing the hometown composer Conradin Kreuzer, published under the
title Gelassenheit but whose original title for the hometown crowd that
first heard it was “Bodenständigkeit im Atomzeitalter” (Autochthony in
the Atomic Age). He notes here that it is not only Swabian “Boden” (soil)
that has produced great poets and thinkers, but also the soil of Central
Germany, East Prussia, Silesia, and Bohemia.34 What is this ground that
produces great poets and thinkers? Nothing less than the native lan-
guage in which one finds oneself rooted and which imparts meaning to
our local situation, the earth of language in its dialects in their tonality,
33. “Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger,” in Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Gesamtausgabe 16) (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 669–70 (hereafter “GA 16”), translated as “ ‘Only a God Can
Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966),” by William Richardson in Heidegger: The Man and the
Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), 56.
34. Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 16, translated as Discourse
on Thinking by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 47.
198 Theodore Kisiel
rhythms, and song, in short, the down-to-earth language of original ex-

perience.35
To come to terms with the inexorable onslaught of modern technol-
ogy on his hometown and environs and the inevitable change it is bring-
ing about, Heidegger recommends that his countrymen should strive to
cultivate two basic comportments to meditatively confront the flood of
technical devices that were already working their way into the life and
fabric of the town and gradually making themselves more or less indis-
pensable. The first comportment involves affirming the unavoidable use
of technical devices but denying them the right to dominate our lives,
that is, of letting technical things be what they are but then of willing to
let them go to avoid becoming slavishly dependent on them. Heidegger
identifies this yes-no comportment toward technical devices as the re-
leasement toward things (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen).
Having this comportment we no longer view things merely in a technical
way. . . . We notice that while the production and use of machines demands of us
another relation to things, it is not a meaning-less
[sinn-los] relation. Farming
and agriculture, e.g., have now become a motorized food industry. Thus here,
evidently, as elsewhere, a profound change is taking place in man’s relation to
nature and to the world. But the meaning [Sinn] that reigns in this change re-
mains obscure.36
The issue here, accordingly, is to make sense of all this high-tech in-
filtration into our lives by way of meditative (be-sinnendes) thinking. For
example, what are we to make of the fact that “Nature is becoming a gi-
gantic gas station, an energy source for modern technology and indus-
try,” a storage-place
for energy, thus a “natural resource” subject to the
calculations of those wishing to exploit it for profit or conquest.37
There is then in all technical processes a meaning [Sinn], not invented or made
by us, which lays claim to what we do and leave undone. We do not know the
significance of the uncanny increasing dominance of atomic technology. The
meaning pervading technology hides itself. But if we explicitly and continuously
35. It might be noted here that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who was born and raised
not too far from Messkirch, also developed his poetic sense of the Germany for which he was
willing to fight and die directly from Swabian soil, inspired especially by the poetry of Hölder-
lin and Stefan George.
36. Heidegger, Gelassenheit, 25 (54).
37. Ibid., 20 (50).
heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of
technology we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us,
and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same
time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the com-
portment that enables us to remain open to the meaning hidden in technology,
openness for the mystery [Offenheit für das Geheimnis].38
Releasement to and from technical things and openness for the mys-
tery of the meaning of modern technology: these two comportments
combined serve to promote meditative thinking and so to counter the
threat of becoming so enamored by the marvels of modern technology
that calculative thinking comes to be accepted as the only way of think-
ing. Humans would thereby deny and throw away their essential nature
of being meditative beings in search of meaning and no longer nurture
their capacity for meditative thinking.39 In our present situation, we are
called upon to be open to the mystery of the global domination of tech-
nology and to meditatively ponder the profound changes that it is exact-
ing upon our relations with nature and the world in order that we might
find meaningful ways for us to live in this new world. For these two com-
portments
grant us the possibility of truly dwelling in the world in a totally different way.
They promise us a new ground and foundation [Boden] upon which we can
stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it. . . .
They give us a vision of a new autochthony [Bodenständigkeit] that someday
might even be fit to bring back the old and now rapidly disappearing autoch-
thony in a transformed gestalt.40
If releasement toward things and openness toward the mystery awaken with-
in us, we might arrive at a path that will lead to a new ground and foundation
[Boden]. In that Boden the creativity that produces lasting works could strike
new roots.41
From this, it is clear that the old Heidegger is not a Luddite, rejecting
modern technology and calling for a return to the good old days and sim-
pler ways of life. In fact, his call for openness to the mystery of the radi-
38. Ibid., 25 (55).

39. Ibid., 27 (56).
40. Ibid., 26 (55).
41. Ibid., 28 (56).
200 Theodore Kisiel
cal changes in our ways of life and our relations with nature and world
being exacted by modern technology goes so far that he is open to the
possibility of truly dwelling in the world in a totally different way, which
amounts to a new autochthony, which in effect means a new way of life,
a new Brauch, a new custom, tradition, praxis, and habit of one’s habitat
“that might even see fit to recall the vanishing old autochthony, the old
way of life, the old custom and tradition in a transformed gestalt!”42
Bodenständigkeit
The adjective bodenständig is typically translated as “indigenous, native”
so that the more abstract Bodenständigkeit, often translated as autoch-
thony, etymologically suggests being native to a land or a nation and,
even more starkly (and mythologically), having one’s roots in native soil.
An autochthon, aborigine, or native is someone who supposedly sprung
from the earth that he in-habits
(a favorite topic of ancient myths),
whence the clear possibility of using this term for nationalistic and even
for racist ends, as was the case in Nazi Blut und Boden propaganda. And
Heidegger here is speaking directly to a postwar native German audi-
ence. But it should be noted that Heidegger first used the word often
enough in the twenties in a phenomenological context to connote the re-
duction “back to the origins, roots, native ground” of original experience
as this is expressed in a native language. “This re-duction
is nothing other
than the overhearing of the speaking of natural Dasein to its world, of the
way the communication of Dasein speaks with itself about beings that
are there, of what be-ing
means in this natural intelligibility, which gives
us the possibility of understanding our basic concepts in their raw native
character [Urwüchsigkeit].”43
Heidegger’s favored example of this is Aristotle’s basing his term for
beings and their being on an expression that was prevalent in the ev-
eryday language of his world, namely, ousia, which originally referred to
property: possessions, goods, real estate. In living in the native language
42. Ibid., 26 (55).

43. Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. Mark Michalski
(Gesamtausgabe 18) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 41 (hereafter “GA 18”), trans-
lated as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 30.
that imparts intelligibility to his world and all that is experienced within
it, Aristotle draws on that natural intelligibility of experience to form his
philosophical concepts that accordingly remain indigenous (bodenstän-
dig) to that intelligible world wherein they are rooted and from which
they are drawn.44 This indigenous intelligibility is situated at the level
of our initial familiarity of beings that comes with our natural and spon-
taneous u nderstanding-of-being (Seinsverständnis) as human beings in
our native habitat.
To be sure, this familiarity of beings in the Dasein of human being has its own
history. It is never simply there as neutral and constant throughout the history of
humanity, but is itself rooted in what we call the autochthony of humans: in what
nature, history and beings as a whole are to humans and how they are this.45
When the familiarity of beings in its immediate power is uprooted to this de-
gree as it is today, it is certainly difficult to awaken a real understanding for the
unmediated perceiving of beings and their immediacy.46
It is only the autochthony and force of the Dasein of humans that can decide
the meaning of the objectivity of objects. This originality of the understanding
of being and the power of the familiarity of beings are one and the same, they be-
long together. The more originally the understanding-of-being comes from the
depths of Dasein, the more grounded is the right to the concept of be-ing, i.e.
the necessity of philosophy to bring be-ing to conceptual expression.47
Heidegger is quite open about his own Bodenständigkeit. A 1934 vita

begins by noting that he “stems from allemannisch-schwäbisches peasant
stock, on my mother’s side residing on the same farmland uninterruptedly
since 1510.”48 And a year before, he links his own work to the same affinity:
“The intrinsic belonging of my own work to Schwarzwald and its people
[Menschen] comes from a centuries-long
allemannisch-schwäbischen ir-
replaceable indigenous autochthony.”49 This is where his work truly turns
44. GA 18:24 (18).

45. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet,
ed. Hermann Mörchen (Gesamtausgabe 34) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 208,
translated as The Essence of Truth by Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2002), 150.
46. GA 34:209 (151).
47. GA 34:210 (151).
48. GA 16:247.
49. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger
(Gesamtausgabe 13) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 10.
202 Theodore Kisiel
local, one might even say provincial, notably in his examples. In 1935, van
Gogh’s “shoes” become the shoes of a peasant woman such that his paint-
ing gathers her world in the “cumulative tenacity of her slow trudge” as
she wearily turns home after a day in the fields. “Under the soles slides the
loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes resonates the silent
call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain. . . . The shoes are per-
vaded by the uncomplaining anxiety over the certainty of bread, the word-
less joy of having once again withstood want, the trembling before the im-
pending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.”50
Then there is the two-hundred-year-old
Schwarzwald farmhouse sit-
uated on the wind-sheltered
side of a mountain, with the roof slanted
just right to bear the burden of snow whose walls shield the rooms with
an altar corner, and the hallowed places of the childbed and the “tree of
the dead”—coffin—in a house “thus serving the different generations liv-
ing under one roof to accommodate their journey though time.”51 That
is to say, that was our custom and tradition back then, in the old autoch-
thony. And that was living a deeply meaningful life.
But what would the “lasting works” created out of the new autoch-
thony look like? Would they involve some sort of fusion of technology
and art, some sort of “tech art,” or would it be a leap from technology
to art, which is the way Heidegger takes the ambivalence of the Greek
technē, which means both art and technique/technology? At one point,
Heidegger does hint broadly that an autobahn bridge might be a candi-
date for gathering the fourfold.52 Can a Boeing-787 taking off ever gath-
er the fourfold? We know that Heidegger developed an appreciation for
Paul Klee and modern art later on in life. Would it perhaps also include
an Eastern approach to art, like the Taoism that comes into play in the
jug that jugs? Then there is the feng shui approach to architecture, which
Heidegger spontaneously applies in his account of how a Schwarzwald
farmhouse gathers the fourfold.53 Since the resolution to modern tech-
50. Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in his Holzwege (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1957), 23; translated as “The Origin of the Work of Art” by Alfred Hof-
stadter in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 34.
51. Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in his Vorträge und Aufsätze, 160, trans-
lated as “Building Dwelling Thinking” by Alfred Hofstadter in Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought, 161.
52. Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” 153 (152).
53. Ibid., 161 (160).
nicity is bound to pass to some extent through art, it is worth concluding

by examining Heidegger’s sense of the artwork for clues to the possible
transition from Ge-Stell to das Er-eignis.
How the Artwork Works in Historical Context:

How Can a Global G e-Stell be Transformed
into a Local Gestell?
Heidegger’s early use of the word Gestell in 1935 as it operates in the ge-
stalt of an artwork evokes a 1956 cautionary note from him to distance
this more focused “local” sense from the modern meaning of the hy-
phenated word Ge-Stell operative on a global scale in modern technol-
ogy. But it also opens the opportunity for us to examine the different sort
of gathering of modes of Stellen, the different kinds of settings and posi-
tioning that are operative in an artwork. It may even provide some clues
on how a global Ge-Stell might be transformed into a local Gestell that
could open a path toward das Er-eignis in the new autochthony.
First of all, “To be a work means to set up [aufstellen] a world.”54 In
setting up the world, the work sets forth (her-stellt) the earth, with her-
stellen (to produce) being taken in the strict etymological sense of the
word. The work sets itself back (sich zurückstellt) and thereby sets forth
(her-stellen) the earth into the openness of a world.
That into which the work sets itself back [sich zurückstellt] and which it lets
come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. . . . In setting up a
world, the work sets forth the earth. . . . To set forth the earth means to bring it
into the open as the self-closing.55
The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential traits of
the work-being of the work. They belong together in the unity of being a work.56
The world is the self-opening openness of the broad courses of the simple and
essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spon-

taneous coming forth of the continually self-closing and accordingly covering
and sheltering. World and earth are essentially different from one another and
54. Ibid., 33 (44).

55. Ibid., 35 (46).
56. Ibid., 36 (48).
204 Theodore Kisiel
yet are never separated. The world grounds itself upon the earth and the earth
towers through the world.57
The opposition of world and earth is a strife.58
Inasmuch as the work sets up a world and sets forth the earth, it is an institu-
tion of this strife.59
The work-being of the work consists in the strifing of the strife between world
and earth.60
The strife here is between the self-opening

openness of the world
and the self-closing
closedness and so covering sheltering of the earth,
in short, the strife between unconcealing and concealing, the happening
of truth. “Truth happens only by establishing itself in [both] the strife
and the space of play [Spielraum] that it itself opens up.”61 “Truth estab-
lishes itself in the work. Truth comes to presence [west] only as the strife
of clearing and concealing in the opposition between world and earth.”62
One final setting (Stellen) must be made for the work to do its work
as a happening of truth. Having set itself up (aufstellt) as world and set
itself forth (her-stellt) as earth by setting itself back (zurückstellen) into
the earth, the work must now set and fix in place (feststellen) the strife of
truth in the gestalt. Put another way, the truth must establish itself by be-
ing fixed in place in the gestalt of an artwork. “Art is the setting and fix-
ing in place of self-establishing
truth in the gestalt.”63 The Greek sense
of morphe as gestalt or form is made clear by Ge-stell, understood as the
gathering together of the various settings of truth in the rift-design
of the
bounding outline (peras) of the gestalt.
In creating the work, the strife as rift must be set back (zurückgestellt)
into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth (hervorgestellt) and
used as the self-closing. Such use, however, does not use up or misuse
the earth as matter, mere stuff, but rather frees the earth to be just it-
self. This use of the earth is a working with it that indeed looks like the
employment of matter in handicraft. Hence the appearance that artistic
creation is also craft activity. It simply is not. But it is always a use of the
57. Ibid., 37 (48).

58. Ibid., 37 (49).
59. Ibid., 38 (49).
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 49 (61).
62. Ibid., 51 (62).
63. Ibid., 59 (71).
earth in the setting and fixing in place (feststellen) of truth in the gestalt.
In contrast, making by way of tools and equipment is never immediately
the effecting of the happening of truth. The production of equipment is
finished when a material has been sufficiently formed to have it ready for
use. The equipment’s readiness for use means that it is released beyond
itself to disappear into usefulness.64
In the artwork, by contrast, its matter is not used up and does not dis-
appear but is rather set forth as earth into the openness of the world. Rath-
er than using up words in the manner of everyday discourse, the poet uses
the word “such that the word truly becomes a word and remains a word”
in all its glory and brilliance. This is the autochthony or earth-rootedness

of language so cherished by Heidegger. “The poetizing project of truth,
which sets itself into the work as a gestalt, is never enacted in an indeter-
minate void. Rather, the truth in the work is projected to the coming pre-
servers, i.e. to a historical humanity.”65
The preservers in their Dasein now take their place in the middle of
the strife of world and earth, of unconcealment and concealment. With
the artwork we are in a historical world of a historical people in search of
its destiny, not in the uniform technological time-space of the distance-
less, but rather in the time-space
of historical Dasein. It is the temporal
playing field (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) of history that grants us freedom of move-
ment in and through a historical world of distinct finite possibilities. And
the work of art itself is just one of the forms of the historical happening
of truth, along with philosophical questioning, state-founding
deeds and
essential sacrifice, like the “people-saving death” of Albert Leo Schlag-
eter. “The world is the self-opening openness of the broad courses of
the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people.”66
Such a historical world with its tradition of deeds and sacrifices and con-
cepts offers a people an appointed task (Aufgegebenes) which points them
to their future world of possibilities. This appointed task unique to a peo-
ple at once discloses to them a native endowment (Mitgegebenes) already
given to them on the basis of what they have been. Clearly, the appoint-
ed task of today’s historical humanity is to ponder the profound change
that is taking place by way of the essence of modern technology, Ge-Stell,
64. Ibid., 52 (64).

65. Ibid., 63 (75).
66. Ibid., 37 (49).
206 Theodore Kisiel
and to ready itself to cope with these changes in a way that remains true
to our own unique proper situation of be-ing, in which life itself lays it-
self out, interprets itself, explicates itself. This domain of original mean-
ingfulness which precedes the subject-object
relation is what must be re-
peatedly retrieved and retained so that we may once again learn to live
poetically on the earth in a post-modern
world of technology.
Concluding Diminuendo
From his works of the 1930s, one gets the impression that Heidegger did not
think much of Americans. After all, the technological juggernaut of Amer-
ican capitalism was the force squeezing poor old Germany on the Western
front in concert with a flank on the Eastern front by Russian communism.
He constantly equated the -ism that is Americanism with technological gi-
ganticism, its fabled worship of bigness in its building of skyscrapers, large
dams, and other gigantic technological exploits. But after the war, he met
some non-technocratic
Americans who expressed an interest in his phi-
losophy (and, perhaps more importantly, spoke fluent German) and he be-
gan to realize that they too could be quite good at genuine thinking. This
appreciation reaches its apogee in a letter written in April 1976, a month
before his death, to the Heidegger Circle meeting at DePaul University in
which he poses his question of the end result of modern natural science
evolving into modern technology to the participants: “The rapidly increas-
ing efficiency of these [forces of modern science and modern technology]
drives the forgottenness of be-ing
to the extreme and thus makes the ques-
tion of be-ing
appear irrelevant and superfluous.”
He asks the group to find ways to make the question of be-ing more
compelling in our technological age “and thereby to prepare the possi-
bility of a transformed abode of humans in the world.”67 The next year’s
meeting of the Heidegger Circle at Tulane University devoted itself to
this question and several of the papers moved in the direction of what
might now be regarded as one of the most genuine and sustained Ameri-
can responses to Ge-Stell: the environmentalist movement. Can this be
our appointed task? Is it our native endowment?
67. Martin Heidegger, “Modern Natural Science and Technology: Greetings to the Partici-
pants in the Tenth Colloquium [of the Heidegger Circle on] May 14–16, 1976, in Chicago,” Re-
search in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 3–4.
Charles Bambach
Heidegger’s Poetic Measure
Charles Bambach
10 S Heidegger’s Poetic Measure

An Ethics of Haunting
Measuring the Poetic Measure of Justice

In the “Concluding Remark” to his summer semester 1942 lecture course,
published as Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” Heidegger rounds off his re-
flections on the essence of poetry with a paradoxical gesture. On the
rhetorical note of closure he opens up a fundamental question that, de-
spite its singular precedence, remained concealed in his reflections on
the Ister. The Ister cannot, Heidegger claims, be interpreted as a poet-
ic “symbol” or “image” pointing to “something else.” Rather, as he sees
it, “the essence of the river can, from the outset, be expressed only from
the poetic dwelling of human beings.”1 Poetic dwelling, in turn, does
not signify domestic housing, architectural building, or the securing of
shelter; it denotes the fundamental character of human existence as an
abiding in being. The usual way we pose this question, Heidegger tells us,
must be abandoned if we are to enter into the question of dwelling poeti-
cally. “Poetry demands of us a transformation in our ways of thinking
and experiencing, one that concerns being in its entirety.” To heed the
call of authentic poetic dwelling demands that “we must first altogether
let go of the actuality of such actual things as providing our supposed
measure of truth, so as to enter that free realm in which the poetic is.”
1. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” ed. Walter Biemel (Gesamtausgabe 53)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 204–5 (hereafter “GA 53”), translated as Hölderlin’s
Hymn “The Ister” by William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1996), 166–67.
207
208 Charles Bambach
Yet, given the poverty of our current state of questioning and its entan-
glement in the network of actual things, how can we even begin such a
transformation? As Heidegger formulates this problem: “if this measure
of what is actual and of beings is invalid, then from where are we to take
our measure?”
But what is measure? And how are we to come to terms with mea-
suring? Simply put, was heisst Messen?2 What is, or rather, what calls
for(th) measuring? What does it mean to think measure? To think a po-
etic measure? And how might we come to think the poetic measure of
justice? I raise these questions because I find in Heidegger’s work a way
of thinking about the meaning of poetic dwelling that takes its inspira-
tion from the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. In his 1951 essay “. . . Poeti-
cally Dwells the Human Being,” Heidegger offers an engaged reading of
Hölderlin’s poem “In lovely blueness” as a way of thinking about poet-
ic measure. As Heidegger puts it, “In poetry [Dichten] there occurs [er-
eignet sich] what all measuring [Messen] is in the ground of its being. . . .
Poetizing is, understood in the strict sense of the word, measure-taking

[Mass-nahme] through which the human being first receives the mea-
sure for the expanse of its being.”3
Such a measure can never be fixed as a standard for rules or directives;
it does not allow itself to be measured by the matrices of number and cal-
culation. Poetic measure, as the “taking” of measure (Mass-nahme), “does
not consist in a clutching or any other kind of grasping, but rather is a
l etting-come of t hat-which-is-to-be-allotted [in einem Kommen-lassen des
Zu-Gemessenen].”4 Poetic measure-taking is, then, less a “taking” than a
releasing or a l etting-come of that which cannot be thought in advance: of
that which Schelling calls “the unprethinkable” (das Unvordenkliche).5 In
this sense, poetry takes the measure of that which cannot be taken mea-
sure of; it is incommensurable with any of the common standards of mea-
sure. In the very immeasurability of such measure the poet lets go of any
2. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm

von Herrmann (Ge-
samtausgabe 7) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 200 (hereafter “GA 7”).
3. GA 7:200; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstad-
ter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 221–22.
4. GA 7:203 (224).
5. F. W. J. Schelling, Die Weltalter: Fragmente, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck, 1979),
211. Heidegger treats this in his Feldweg-Gespräche, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler (Gesamtausgabe 77)
(Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), 146, 231 (hereafter “GA 77”), translated as Country
Path Conversations by Bret Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 95, 150.
Heidegger’s Poetic Measure 209
egological gauges for the measure to be taken and opens himself to the
event-character of being as that which conceals itself in withholding or
withdrawal.
Poetic measure attunes itself to what cannot be thought in advance,
to that which has no ground in subjectivity, to what is unknown and hid-
den. Such a measure does not reside in or upon the earth nor in the realm
of the human but, rather, traverses the span of the human being’s dwell-
ing between earth and sky. In this “between” the human being dwells. By
taking measure of such dwelling we come into the proximity or nearness
(Nähe) of our being: “Only insofar as the human being takes the measure
of [ver-misst] its dwelling in this way is it capable of being commensurate
[gemäss] with its essence [Wesen].”6
Heidegger is well aware that this measure-taking is difficult and unusu-
al. He variously terms it “strange” (seltsam), “alien” (fremd), “unknown”
(unbekannt), and “mysterious” (geheimnisvoll). Poetry measures what is
absent, what withdraws, what recoils from being measured. It measures
the withholding power of language and the strange, foreign element of the
invisible and the unthinkable. Poetic measure-taking
is marked by a tem-
porality of remembrance (Andenken) and waiting (Warten), a temporality
of absence that “takes the measure for the architectonic, for the structural
enjoining [Baugefüge] of dwelling.” To release the self to this enjoining of
time’s mysterious order, to give oneself over to the event-character
of being
as a self-manifesting concealing, is to dwell in the space of the “between”
that marks the dimensions of earth and sky. Hence, Heidegger can write:
“Before anything else, poetizing lets human dwelling come into [einlässt]
its essence. Poetizing is originary dwelling as a letting-dwell.”

Yet this poetic measure is nothing that stands as a rule or standard
outside of dwelling, nothing that can be applied to dwelling as an exter-
nal criterion. Rather, the measure of dwelling is a metron of the unknown,
the absential, the concealed, and the withheld.7 In his Heraclitus lectures
of summer semester 1944, Heidegger reflects on measure, claiming “the
essence of metron is the expanse [die Weite], the open [das Offene], the
6. GA 7:199, 206 (221, 227).

7. In his Nietzsche lectures Heidegger writes: “Experienced in a Greek way, the man of the
basic relationship with beings is metron, ‘measure,’ and he lets his confinement to the restric-
ted radius (restricted for each respective self) of the unconcealed become the basic trait of his
essence.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1982),
4:94; Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 2:138–39.
210 Charles Bambach
self-extending, self-expanding clearing [Lichtung].”8 It is a metron that

exceeds the limits of any calculable measuring, a metron whose measure
Heidegger thinks not as distance, depth, height, or amplitude, but as our
very relation to being. In this sense, Heidegger will rethink poetic dwell-
ing as the taking of measure that gauges the essence (Wesen) of the hu-
man being—Wesen understood here not as a fixed, absolute “essence,”
but in its verbal sense as an event or happening (“essencing”), as the self-
manifesting, self-concealing “happening of the truth of beyng.”9 Here the
“essence” of the human being is understood in its Greek sense as ethos,
which Heidegger will translate as Aufenthalt—sojourn, stay, residence,
dwelling, abode. In the “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger will think the
“Wesensaufenthalt des Menschen” (the essential abode of the human be-
ing) as ethos, but not as “ethics” or “ontology.”10 Abjuring the term “eth-
ics” as an impoverished discourse that has become caught up in the en-
tanglements of modern technological enframing, Heidegger will instead
ponder the problems of dwelling and poetic measure, claiming that “only
this measure [the measure-taking of poetizing] gauges [er-misst] the es-
sence of the human being.”11
Poetry—especially the poetry of Hölderlin (whom Heidegger calls
“our greatest poet”)—brings us into proximity with the gods and with
the distance of the gods’ proximity.12 Poetry offers hints (Winke) and
insights into language, opening us to the concealed presence of being’s
reigning power in the ordinary, everyday phrases of our spoken dialects,
dis-closing the world to us in ways that resituate us in our accustomed
8. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit, ed. Manfred S. Frings (Gesamtausgabe 55) (Frankfurt am

Main: Klostermann, 1994), 170 (hereafter “GA 55”).
9. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann (Ge-
samtausgabe 65) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), 288 (hereafter “GA 65”), translated
as Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1999), 202.
10. Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Gesamtaus-
gabe 9) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004), 357 (hereafter “GA 9”), translated as Path-
marks by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271.
11. GA 7:202 (223).
12. Heidegger variously calls Hölderlin simply “the” poet, as well as “the poet of the po-
ets,” “the poet of the essence of poetry,” and “the poet of the other beginning.” Martin Heideg-
ger, Über den Anfang, ed. Paola-Ludovika Coriando (Gesamtausgabe 70) (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2005), 159–60, 166; Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und
“Der Rhein,” ed. Susanne Ziegler (Gesamtausgabe 39) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989),
5 (hereafter “GA 39”).
haunts. In so doing, poetry takes the measure of the world—and there-

with the measure of human being. Heidegger goes so far as to say that
“poetizing first brings the human being onto [auf] the earth and toward
[zu] it and in this way brings it into dwelling.”13 That means that poetiz-
ing opens and shapes a way of being for humans as they inhabit the world
in all its dimensions. But this measuring finds the human being as in-
commensurate with the measure of its own being. In its very haunts, in
the very habitat that the human being inhabits, it is haunted by a sense
of its lack of sense or meaning (Sinn). As Heidegger succinctly puts it,
“that which is proper [Eigenheit] to the human being lies in this—that the
human being does not belong to itself.”14 Heidegger’s claim here should
not, however, be understood as an existential pronouncement about the
self-alienation of the human being. Rather, Heidegger discloses a more
fundamental sense of being “alien” or “other” that he traces back to the
tragic situation of Sophocles’s Antigone, where the human being is un-
derstood as deinos—the awesome, aw(e)ful being whose uncanny abilities
yield strange and terrible wonders. The human being is alien to itself as
part of its “singularly counter-turning
character” in the way that “every-
thing that is, is essentially permeated [durchwest] by its counter-essence
[Gegenwesen].”15
This sense of being strangely unsettled in the very settlements of our
dwelling, of being utterly haunted in the haunts of our habitat, extends
beyond any ontic question about domestic residence. It is, rather, an in-
terrogation of the very limits and possibilities of human existence since,
for Heidegger, our existence is marked by a profound homelessness that
is of ontological provenance. We are, he tells us, unique among beings in
that we are not at home in being: “the human being alone can be called
by the name ‘the uncanny’ [der Unheimliche], the un-homely
one.”16 But
it is precisely this sense of not-being-at-home (Un-heimlichkeit) that re-
mains concealed to modern humanity. At home in the technical world
of computation, reckoning, and calculative thinking, we become habitu-
ated to the excess of large-scale proportion (Ausmass) and “the properly
13. GA 7:196 (218).

14. “Martin Heidegger-Takehiko Kojima: Ein Briefwechsel,” in Japan und Heidegger,
edited by Hartmut Büchner (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989), 225.
15. GA 53:83, 64 (68, 52).
16. GA 53:83, 84 (69).
212 Charles Bambach
dangerous configuration of measurelessness [Masslosigkeit].”17 In so do-

ing, we “overstep the limits of the homely, precisely in the direction of
the uncanny.”18
In both his 1935 and 1942 lectures Heidegger will think such measure-
less excess in terms of Greek tragedy—especially Hölderlin’s translation
of the first choral ode of Antigone—and in Hölderlin’s translation of hy-
bris as Vermessenheit or “recklessness,” the recklessness that comes from
an excess of reckoning.19 Both Oedipus and Antigone come to function
as exemplary figures of such Vermessenheit in that they each experience
the primordial homelessness of the human being in the uncanniest (un-
heimlichste) ways. As he comes to think the measure of such measure-
lessness, Heidegger will turn to Hölderlin’s readings of Greek tragedy
since only a poetic form of thinking strikes him as fitted for the task of
thinking the measure of an essential human dwelling. And it is precisely
to this question of “fit”—what Heidegger will variously think as Fug, Ge-
füge, Fügung, Verfügung—that I want to turn.
In what ways does the human being “fit” in the world? How might
the poetic reflection on dwelling be thought in terms of this fit? And how
might we begin to ponder what is both fitting and unfitting about the hu-
man attempt to properly dwell in and against the poetic measure of being?
Tragedy raises just such questions in its reflections on justice. Yet, as we
shall see, Heidegger will reject the traditional discourse about justice as
always already caught up in the moral-juridical
metaphysics of Western
thinking. Leaping back to the pre-metaphysical
world of Anaximander
and Heraclitus, Heidegger will think time itself as dike—not “justice,” but
“fittingness” (Fug).20 He will even go so far as to write: “Being is fitting-
17. GA 53:83, 86 (70).

18. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 116,
translated as Introduction to Metaphysics by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 161.
19. In Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone he renders Ismene’s description of
Antigone as kyndyneuma with the German term “vermessen.” Friedrich Hölderlin, Grosse
Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. 5: Übersetzungen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1952), 206. In his English
translation of Hölderlin’s Sophocles (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2001), 72, David Constantine
translates this as “you reckon recklessly.”
20. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger writes “we understand fittingness first in
the sense of joint [Fuge] and structure [Gefüge]; then as arrangement [Fügung], as the direction
that the overwhelming gives to its sway; finally, as the enjoining structure [fügende Gefüge]
which compels fitting-in [Einfügung] and compliance [Sichfügen]” (123 [171]).
ness that enjoins [fügender Fug]: dike.”21 In other words, being is so essen-
tially conjoined in the fit of dike that any human initiative to transgress
its liminal horizons will be met with a countervailing limit. This is the
lesson of Antigone and Oedipus that Heidegger would draw on in his In-
troduction to Metaphysics: against the limits of the limit—made manifest
in death—no human insurgency can prevail. For what comes to limit in
Heidegger’s thinking of a nonmoral, nonjuridical dike is nothing other
than the limits of the human being against being itself. “Justice,” in this
sense, is less the standard set by any kind of human measure than it is be-
ing’s own measure against which human beings must adjust. Justice as
ad-justment to being, as fitting-into the fit of dike, points to a realm of
balance and equipoise that happens “beyond good and evil” in a way that
cannot be configured by the figurations of human will. This Presocrat-
ic dike named by Anaximander and Heraclitus names something other
than human justice; it thinks, rather, the poetic, world-forming
jointure
of discord and concord, strife and harmony that eludes human control
and comprehension. It names that which is “fitting” and measures its fit-
tingness not by any human standards, but as the revealing/concealing
play of the openness of what Heidegger calls Ereignis. This “event of ap-
propriation” thinks being’s claim (Anspruch) upon the human being as
one that happens in/through language (Sprache)—especially the poetic
language of poets such as Hölderlin and Sophocles.
Heidegger’s Poetic Measure

In attempting to think the poetic measure of dwelling as ethos, Hei-
degger takes up the question of the strangeness of the human being to it-
self, of the un-settling and awesome dimension that both befits our trag-
ic situation, even as it shows us at moments how unfit we are to accede to
the strange jointure of physis. For Hölderlin, this will take the form of a
poetic meditation on tragedy as a discourse that sets into relation what
is proper to the home as one’s own (das Eigene) and what is strange, for-
eign, and other (das Fremde). As the “native stranger,” Oedipus comes
to embody this “furious excess [Übermass]” of “ever-contending [immer
widerstreitende]” contrarieties that rend his search for a singular identity
21. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 171; Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, 123.
214 Charles Bambach
into the multiform shapes of monstrous polarities.22 As Hölderlin will

read it, tragedy comes to embrace the impossible oppositions of a world
that is enigmatic and marked by irreconcilability. Within such a world,
tragedy provokes us by laying bare the very loss of measure that charac-
terizes the recklessness of the human being who has forfeited its met-
ric for dwelling. If modern metaphysics, armed with its Cartesian metric
of control and calculation, presents a world where human beings strive
to gain mastery and hegemony over beings, then Hölderlin’s tragic po-
etry points to the foundering of such hybris as a form of Vermessenheit,
a frantic measuring that has lost its measuredness. Such poetry leads us
to confront difficult problems and decisions that emerge for those be-
ings, like ourselves, who dwell at the limits of ambiguity and uncertain-
ty, problems that have traditionally been called “ethical.” In this sense,
Hölderlin’s writings, much like Heidegger’s, literally resituate traditional
problems of ethics at the site of a strange kind of ethos—understood as
the “dwelling place,” “abode,” “site,” “sojourn,” or “stay” (Aufenthalt) of
the human being upon the earth. In “The Rhine,” Hölderlin poetizes this
finitude of the human being as a form of dwelling within
. . . the bounds
Which God at birth assigned
To him for his term and site [Aufenthalt].23
As he attempts to articulate a nonmetaphysical language of poetic

dwelling, Heidegger will take up Hölderlin’s term “Aufenthalt” and think
it in conjunction with Heraclitus’s word about ethos as “the open region
in which the human being dwells.”24 Moreover, in texts such as the “Let-
ter on Humanism” and “The Verdict of Anaximander,” both written in
1946, he will think such a possibility precisely at a moment of histori-
cal catastrophe. In the wake of Germany’s incalculable loss of both hu-
man life and native habitat, Heidegger will think ethos in terms of its
openness to a poetic form of dwelling. At the same time, he will reso-
lutely lay bare this site as one that is also open to a monstrous inhab-
iting that might devastate any hopes for abiding in the home. As part
of this selfsame effort, Heidegger will also take up a confrontation with
22. Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. 5: Übersetzungen, 198, 201.

23. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, translated by Michael Hamburger
(Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 202–3.
24. GA 9:354–57; GA 39:273–75.
the metaphysical tradition of justice by attempting to retranslate dike

not through the Latin term justitia, or the German concept of Gerechtig-
keit, but as “Fug”—that which is fitting or what be-fits our proper way
of dwelling. What Heidegger undertakes to think in these translations
is an untranslatable possibility of what cannot be named in the lexicon
of ethics and justice. In casting aside “ethics,” however, as the residue of
a metaphysical stance toward beings, Heidegger does not somehow be-
come “un-ethical.” Instead, he will resituate those concerns that are typi-
cally classified under the discipline of ethics in a much broader region
that will variously be named ethos, “originary ethics,” dike, “fittingness,”
and “jointure.” What pervades such a discourse and its possible transla-
tion is something that exceeds both the framework of humanism and the
moral reckonings of an ethical calculus of good and evil.25 In the “Let-
ter on Humanism” Heidegger embraces a Heraclitean vision of ethos as
a reciprocal belonging together of Seyn and Dasein, of being and the hu-
man being, whereby thinking abandons its erstwhile role as arbiter of
values/measures and comes to a place where “it lets beings—be.”26 Here
ethics is no longer to be thought as constituting solely that realm govern-
ing relationships among human beings or between the human being and
God. Rather, ethics is to be thought in an originary way as a modality
of being’s own way of holding (halten) us in its jointure as the order and
habit of being itself. In this ethicality of ethics marked by the ethos of
Gelassenheit, human beings will have been released from the cybernetic
metaphysics of grasping and control that holds them in its thrall. And
it is here in the realm of poetic dwelling that, I would argue, we can be-
gin to see how powerfully attuned to ethical questions Heidegger’s work
truly is.
As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “Only those who have read Heidegger blind-
ly, or not at all, could think him a stranger to ethical preoccupations.”27
Heidegger will, following Nietzsche, break with the metaphysical tradi-
tion of good and evil that lies at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradi-
25. On this problem of thinking the untranslated possibility of justice and ethics, see the
work of Dennis Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001); Lyrical and Ethical Subjects (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005);
“What We Didn’t See,” in The Pre-Socratics After Heidegger, edited by David Jacobs (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1999), 153–70.
26. GA 9:358 (272).
27. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 173.
216 Charles Bambach
tion. Thinking the ethicality of ethics will move Heidegger to deconstruct

the idea of subjectivity back to the fundamental event of being (Ereignis)
as the very dis-closure of beings that appropriates us to its singular situat-
edness. Here “ethics” will not be understood as the practice of “applying”
principles, but as that which happens in the way being manifests itself.
Within Heidegger’s thought “being displays its own ethicality,” as Fran-
çois Raffoul so poignantly expresses it.28 That means that Heidegger’s re-
flection on the ethicality of ethics moves away from any egological enclo-
sure within the subject and toward the open expanse of being as an event
of truth that both reveals this openness, even as it veils this very revelation.
On this reading, ethos as Aufenthalt, abode, sojourn, residence might ap-
pear to have the sense of a fixed dwelling “place.” Yet, from its etymologi-
cal roots in the verb halten, Aufenthalt indicates something much more
than a place; it is also to be understood as a “holding” (halten) “up” (auf),
a “holding-back” (ent-halten), or “with-holding” (vor-enthalten) that hap-
pens as the movement and temporal dynamic of being. Halten, from its
medieval High German roots in haltan, denotes hüten and bewahren (to
shelter or preserve) back to Hirt (shepherd) so that we might understand
Heidegger’s pronouncement about the human being as the “shepherd of
being” as intimately bound up in his Aufenthalt as the proper ethos of
holding and being held in the Zuspiel of being. Aufenthalt, then, might
be understood as the site where the human being is held up for a while
and in this whiling-abiding-staying
is exposed to the self-manifesting and
self-withholding of being as a temporal movement. This is why Heidegger
will focus on Hölderlin’s river hymns as having such an intimate relation
to Aufenthalt since in their very movement they “determine the dwelling
place of human beings upon the earth.”29
To think Aufenthalt in this way as poetic dwelling means to think it
as a sojourning-in-withholding;
it means a comportment (Verhalten) of
self-restraint (Sichverhalten) in which we are held up in the withhold-
ing movement of being.30 Here it is not the poet who is to be held as the
measure, but being’s way of holding us up in the withheld promise of its
coming-to-be. Be-ing
is the measure, not “a” being—not God or the gods
28. François Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010), 223.
29. GA 53:23 (20).
30. GA 77:182–83 (118–19).
or law or principle or “ethics.” In Heidegger’s words: “the relationship of

the human being to what gives a measure is a fundamental relationship
to what is.”31 To think this measure poetically is to think it as ethos—as
a way of what Heidegger calls a “cor-respondence to the being of beings”
(Entsprechung zum Sein des Seienden).32 This involves responding to a
call (Zuspruch) from being that calls us to what is properly our own (das
Eigene)—and yet, as Hölderlin and Sophocles so powerfully remind us—
what is proper to us is not our property, but something improper that
eludes us in a way that is haunting. An ethics of being—in both senses
of the genitive—would thus be an ethics not of a “substance,” but of a
calling to the task of dwelling in the openness of the event of being, an
event that appropriates us through its claim (Anspruch). This is nothing
other than “re/sponsibility”—a responding to the claim that being makes
upon us. As Raffoul puts it, “such original responsibility (response, cor-
respondence, attunement to being) represents the very essence of human
being.”33
This is why ethics as the Anspruch (claim) of being can only come
as a Zuspruch (appeal/calling) of language (Sprache) and not as a set of
rules or directives. Ethics begins where the case does not fit the rule.
It starts in uncertainty and aporia and opens us up to the incalculabil-
ity of the decision. As Derrida will claim, “a decision always takes place
beyond calculation.”34 And it is this incalculability that haunts ethics,
that marks the site of our Aufenthalt as the un-homely, the im-proper,
the strange, and the alien. At the very core of what is our own we are in-
habited by a strange otherness that turns us away from our habits and
habitudes toward the site of the inhabitual and monstrous. Such mon-
strousness haunts us in our haunts, threatening to dislodge us from our
lodgings. Yet in this haunting visitation we are paradoxically opened
to a realm of crisis and undecidability that jars us from the routinized,
31. Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe, ed. Medard

Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987), 130, translated as Zollikoner Seminars: Proto-
cols—Conversations—Letters by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2001), 100.
32. In GA 55:326, Heidegger writes: “Being is the sole measure of beings.” In Was ist das—
die Philosophie? (Pfullingen: Neske, 1956), 35, Heidegger will also claim: “the correspondence to
the being of beings does, to be sure, continually remain our abode [Aufenthalt].”
33. Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility, 248.
34. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008), 95.
218 Charles Bambach
slumberous habits of our daily existence. Jean-Luc Nancy terms such

an inhabitual ethos of dwelling “an ethics of haunting” and traces such
haunting back to its etymological roots in the whole series of expressions
clustered around the term “home.”
Now what haunts (hante) is, according to its accepted etymological origins, what
inhabits or occupies (habite) or, on a more knowing etymological reading, what
returns to the stable, to the hearth, to the home. Haunt is from the same fam-
ily as Heim. The proximity of the imperative might well be the Un-heimlichkeit
that haunts our thinking, a disturbing peculiarity that disturbs only because it is
so close, so immediate in its estrangement. But to return to the familiar abode
is still to return to the ethos. The stakes here are none other than those of an
ethics, therefore—not in the sense of a science or discipline, however, or in the
sense of a moral sense or sentiment, but in the sense, precisely, of a haunting.35
To attend to this haunting of one’s home, to follow the traces of an

absential visitation (Heimsuchung) back to an abode that is uncanny
(unheimlich), means to think at the limit of human possibility. Such an
ethos abides in the traces of “something domestic that cannot be domes-
ticated.” Nancy recognizes in this uncanniness a dimension where eth-
ics ceases to be something about rules to be applied and instead comes
to haunt us as a responsibility that exceeds the measure of the human.
Here “ethics”—understood as originary ethics that “ponders the abode
of the human being”—is not a worldview, a value judgment, a norm, or
a cultural principle, but the very ethicality of being itself.36 In this ren-
dering of a non-egological ethics, being is understood as an e-vent, an
event that is at play in being’s appropriation of us. Given that being is in-
calculable or unprethinkable (unvordenklich), a gift of the es gibt (“there
is/it gives”), we can never get back behind this event to something more
originary than the event itself. Hence, Heidegger’s problem with “eth-
ics” is that it does not remain open to the withdrawal of the event. It
does not abide in the immeasurable singularity of this withdrawal, but
strives instead to place the event “under” the rule or the category. For
35. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, 136. In French hanter (to frequent); in German one sees this
connection in the words Heim (home) and heimsuchen (to haunt, as of ghosts). Cf. Duden. Ety-
mologie (Mannheim: Duden, 1963), 257. For an excellent discussion of the sources of ethos see
Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 142–47.
36. GA 9:356 (271).
him the very desire for an ethics is marked by the technological strategy
of calculating the measure of human action in advance so as to be able to
“apply” its principles for the future.37 Such an ethics, carried out within
the calculative reckoning of das Gestell, closes off the openness of the
event by circumscribing it within the measure of human estimation. But
Heidegger’s notion of originary ethics as a mode and measure of poetic
dwelling attempts to twist free of the cybernetic conception of the ethical
by rethinking our fundamental relationship to language.
Language is what is most proper to the human being—and yet, pre-
cisely as this most proper, it is at the same time that which is strangest
and most foreign. As Heidegger writes in “The Letter on Humanism,”
“Language is the house of being.”38 Still, the human being dwells with-
in this house as if a stranger, where what is “ontically nearest is onto-
logically farthest” from it.39 Within the reigning Gestell of technologi-
cal enframing, language has been literally dis-placed
from the heart of
humanity’s dwelling place, devolving into an instrument for production,
delivery, and measurement where all oral and written discourse becomes
“information.” In viewing language as this thingly instrument, we are
turned away from the fundamental event of being that happens in and
through language. What transpires through the dominance of this cal-
culative understanding of language is a leveling and formalizing of be-
ing’s poly-tropic ways of presencing. This instrumental language literally
in-forms beings by rendering them uni-form so that there can no lon-
ger be anything singular. Everything now con-forms with a standard of
universal measurement. Yet how are we to overcome such a bleak pros-
pect? For Heidegger, there is no hope for “overcoming” the technologi-
cal epoch of das Gestell since any stratagem modeled on overcoming is
fated to fall back into the selfsame structure of cybernetical calculation
37. For an insightful critique of this technological application of ethics see the work of
William McNeill, especially The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2006) and “A Scarcely Pondered Word” in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. Miguel
de Beistegui and Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 2003), 165–92.
38. GA 9:313 (239).
39. In “The Way to Language,” Heidegger cites Novalis: “precisely what properly charac-
terizes language . . . no one knows.” Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 12) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985), 229
(hereafter “GA 12”), translated in Basic Writings (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 397. Cf.
also Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 16, translated as Being and
Time by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 12.
220 Charles Bambach
that informs it. At best, Heidegger thinks, we can only initiate a kind of
“recovery” (Verwindung) from such a calculative approach to language
that would eventuate in a “twisting free” (Herausdrehung) or “wresting
free” (Entwindung) of it.40 Yet transforming our relation to language
means that “we must first turn back to the place where we already prop-
erly abide (eigentlich aufhalten).”41 This requires “finding in the proxim-
ity of the poetic experience with the word a possibility for a thinking ex-
perience with language,” since this proximity “pervades everywhere our
sojourn [Aufenthalt] upon this earth.” Heidegger was convinced that “no
human calculation-fabrication can, from out of or through itself alone,
bring about a turn in the present state of the world.”42 Nonetheless, he
claims, poetry, in league with thinking, could help to situate us in the
proximity of such a turn by turning us to hidden possibilities that lay
concealed amidst our contemporary relation to language. As Heidegger
expresses it: “Hölderlin’s poetry is, for us, a fate. It waits for mortals to
cor-respond [ent-sprechen] to it. This correspondence leads to the path of
a turning that enters into the nearness of the gods that have fled, i.e., in
the space of their flight, a flight that spares us. Yet how shall we recognize
all of this and retain [behalten] it? In that we heed Hölderlin’s poetry.”43
Human beings can only come into this correspondence if they attend to
the words of the poet. Only then can they dwell in nearness to the gods.
“It remains necessary, therefore, to prepare the sojourn [den Aufenthalt]
in this nearness.” This can happen only if we “fatefully correspond to the
fate that is Hölderlin’s poetry.”
What Heidegger privileges in this Hölderlinian Aufenthalt upon
the earth corresponds to the ethicality of being as an attunement to the
40. Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it best: “what one recovers from [verwindet] does not
simply lie behind one as something overcome [überwindet] or surmounted [aufgehoben], but
keeps determining one henceforth.” Gesammelte Werke IV (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck,
1987),
483. For some of Heidegger’s thoughts on Verwindung and Herausdrehung, cf. Martin Heideg-
ger, Nietzsche I, ed. Ingrid Schillbach (Gesamtausgabe 6.1) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), 304;
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche II, ed. Ingrid Schillbach (Gesamtausgabe 6.2) (Frankfurt: Kloster-
mann, 1997), 330–36; Martin Heidegger, Der Spruch des Anaximander, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler
(Gesamtausgabe 78) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2010), 175–78; GA 7:77–78.
41. GA 12:179, 177.
42. Martin Heidegger and Erhart Kästner, Briefwechsel 1953–1974, ed. H. W. Petzet (Frank-
furt: Insel, 1986), 59–60.
43. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von
Herrmann (Gesamtausgabe 4) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981), 195, translated as Elu-
cidations of Hölderlin´s Poetry by Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity, 2000), 224.
openness of an event that appropriates us (Ereignis). It is this openness,

which Hölderlin terms “das Offene” (the Open), that comes to shape the
relation between what is proper to us (das Eigene) and what continues to
be strange and foreign within our propriety. In Hölderlin’s poetry this
constellation of issues comes to language in exemplary fashion in his el-
egy “Bread and Wine” where, he writes:
By day and by night we’re urged on by a sacred fire that
Impels us to set out. So come! Come behold the Open [das Offene]
Where we may seek what is ours [Eigenes], distant, remote, though it be!
One thing is sure even now: at noon or reaching towards midnight
Whether early or late, always a measure endures
Common to all, though his own to each one is also allotted
Each coming and going according to his reach.44
In this poetic rendering of the Open that finds a measure for all
things while simultaneously heeding the singular measure of what is
properly our own, Heidegger will find a nonmetaphysical hint for doing
justice to beings, of properly thinking their poetic measure. Heidegge-
rian justice means thinking the measure of beings according to the mea-
sure of being—but that, in turn, means thinking being as an event of
withdrawal that shelters and conceals its measure from the static gaze of
the present. Hence, poetic measure can never be grasped as a normative
measure or standard (Maßstab), but instead needs to be attuned to the
immeasurability of concealment (aletheia), withdrawal (Ent-zug), and
withholding (Vorenthalt) that happens each time singularly. It is in heed-
ing the draft (Zug) of this withdrawal (Ent-zug) that we are drawn into
“the nearness of the claim [Anspruch]” of being.45 To fit into the order
of this withdrawal, to let ourselves be taken up in this claim, means to
hold ourselves open to the appropriating event of being, to correspond
to its way of self-withholding—a
mode of comportment Heidegger will
term Gelassenheit, a releasement of the egological structure of the will.
To correspond to (entsprechen) the appeal (Zuspruch) of being, however,
is nothing less than a heeding of our responsibility, a heeding the call for
a responsible comportment to this event as an event of withdrawal. For
44. Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, 152–53 (translation altered).

45. Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, ed. Paola-Ludovika
Coriando (Gesamtausgabe
8) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 10–11, 19, translated as What Is Called Thinking?
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 8–9, 17.
222 Charles Bambach
Heidegger this means thinking in an originary way Hölderlin’s mourn-

ing lament for the gods who have fled. It means thinking the order of
being as one marked by a proper allotment that accords with the assign-
ment of a finite, temporal sojourn that fits with the jointure of being, a
jointure that lets itself be thought of as dike—a justice that cannot be
thought as justice, a justice in excess of the measure of human justice, a
justice that claims us in our disjointed time, waiting for us to accede to
that fit which is befitting.
Concluding Remarks
In “Poetically Dwells the Human Being,” Heidegger contends that such
measure-taking occurs most properly in poetry, a poetry that attunes it-
self to the “letting-come of what has been measured-out and ap-portioned
[Zu-Gemessenen].”46 On this reading, poetic justice would consist in em-
bracing an Anaximandrian sense of justice as the proper apportioning of
being in each and every case, an apportioning and allotment that gives
each being its due measure without surmounting its singularity or sub-
suming it in a metaphysics of the whole.
Such a poetizing of justice would be in excess of the world, would not
be enclosed within the configurations of values, worldviews, moral sys-
tems, juridical principles, customs, or habits. It would exceed such sub-
jective enclosures in the direction of language itself as the call that is not
simply “the call of conscience,” but rather the call of being, calling us
to properly attend to our ownmost possibilities of dwelling.47 This, for
Heidegger, would characterize freedom in its deepest sense: “Being-open
for a claim [Offensein für einen Anspruch],” the claim that being makes
upon us and to which we are called to respond.48 In responding to this
call, the human being comes to itself by coming into the just allotment
gifted to us as the appropriate dispensation in the event of appropriation
(Ereignis).
As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, “what is appropriate is defined by the
measure proper to each existent and to the infinite, indefinitely open,
circulating, and transforming the community (or communication, con-
46. GA 7:203 (224).

47. GA 9:342 (260).
48. Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility, 276–81; Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare, 272 (217).
tagion, contact) of all existences between them.” Such appropriateness

defines the condition of justice, which he sees as what happens to hu-
man existence in its being exposed to the event of being, being ex-posed

or expulsed from its egological enclosure toward the otherness, alterity,
multiplicity, exteriority of being. Justice here comes to mean grasping the
groundless coming out of nothing that characterizes the gift that is the
world, a world that “is without models, without principle, and without
given end, and that this is precisely what forms the justice and the mean-
ing of a world.”
Framed differently: “justice is thus the return to each existent its due
according to its unique creation, singular in its coexistence with all other
creations. The two measures are not separate: the singular property ex-
ists according to the singular trace that joins it to other properties. What
distinguishes is also that which connects ‘with’ and ‘together.’ ”49
Heidegger thinks something like this in his Heraclitus lectures where
he claims that “the fundamental meaning, i.e., the essence, of metron is
the expanse [die Weite], the open [das Offene].”50 Here poetic measure
is thought less as a normative standard than as a measure attuned to the
immeasurability of being’s withdrawal, of its play of pres-ab-sence.51 To
think this measure poetically is to gain an opening to a site for origi-
nary dwelling, an Aufenthalt or ethos that holds us open to the withhold-
ing event of being. In the draft (Zug) of this withdrawal (Entzug) stands
the figure of Oedipus who is strangely at home in his loss of measure,
marked by an excess of measure that sets him apart in an uncanny sin-
gularity. In his poem “In lovely blueness” Hölderlin expresses this Oedi-
pal mark of excess by exclaiming: “King Oedipus has an eye too many
perhaps.”52
Oedipus’s excess or hybris—from the Greek verb hybrizein used to
describe the wanton growth of plants running riot—sets him apart in
49. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Cosmos Basileus,” in his The Creation of the World or Globalization
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 110–11, 55. Compare the earlier translation
in Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000),
186–87.
50. GA 55:170.
51. P
res-ab-sence is a term coined by Thomas Sheehan to designate the fateful play between
presence and absence within the selfsame happening, cf. “Martin Heidegger,” in A Companion
to the Philosophers, ed. Robert Arrington (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 288–97.
52. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil
Press, 2004), 791.
224 Charles Bambach
multiple ways, not least of which is his bifurcated, conflicted, and am-
biguous relation to the proper.53 In the figure of Oedipal excess, the hu-
man being, as Hölderlin puts it, “incites itself to know more than it can
bear or comprehend.”54 “In the doubled-schismatic
sojourn [Aufenthalt]
of the human being,” Heidegger claims, “presumption [Vermessenheit]
comes to dominion.”55 As we inhabit the habitat allotted to us within
being, we comport ourselves in a doubled ambiguity: strangers to our-
selves, we lose the measure for a proper dwelling, forgetting being’s mea-
sure as we get lost in the quotidian measures of habit and custom. To
dwell in the uncustomary-inhabitual (ungewöhnlich) exile of Oedipus is
to come to terms with the finitude of our sojourn, its destitution and dis-
placement. Hölderlin thinks this displacement as belonging to our prop-
er sense of dwelling. Indeed, he conceives of it as bound up with negotiat-
ing the tragic tension that shapes our fate as finite creatures who, unlike
the deathless gods, must inevitably perish. The human sojourn, under-
stood as the proper form of ethos, must attend to the just limits admea-
sured by dike. To live within these limits, to abide by the abode ordained
as our proper dwelling, is to embrace a poetic ethos of limitation—of an
Aufenthalt (ethos) marked by Verhaltenheit (restraint).56 While acknowl-
edging the immeasurable distance of the gods to such a fate, Hölderlin
calls upon the poet “to present the world in an attenuated or diminished
measure [im verringerten Maßstab].”57 As the just fit to which the human
creature must adjust, poetic measure holds open the play to which we,
as players, must respond. “The question becomes whether and how we,
hearing the movements of this play, can play along” and properly join in
the playful ethos granted us in the poet’s “diminished measure.”58
53. Liddell-Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, n. d.), 1841;
Alois Vanicek, Griechisch-Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877), 91;
Christoph Horn, ed., Wörterbuch der antiken Philosophie (Munich: Beck, 2002), 201–2.
54. Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. 5: Übersetzungen, 198; Hölderlin, Hölderlin’s Sophocles, 65.
55. GA 55:326.
56. Martin Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(Gesamtausgabe 45) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992), 1–2; GA 65:12–16, 33–36, 398–408.
57. Hölderlin, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. 5: Übersetzungen, 272.
58. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, ed. Petra Jaeger (Gesamtausgabe 10) (Frank-
furt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 169, translated as Principle of Reason by Reginald Lilly
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 113.
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Contributors
Charles Bambach is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas

at Dallas, Richardson.
Rudolf Bernet is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Catholic Uni-

versity of Leuven, Belgium.
Richard Capobianco is professor of philosophy at Stonehill College,

Easton, Massachusetts.
Daniel Dahlstrom is John R. Silber Professor of Philosophy at Boston
University.
Theodore Kisiel is distinguished research professor emeritus of phi-

losophy at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb.
Rudolf A. Makkreel is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of

Philosophy at Emory University, Atlanta.
William McNeill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University,

Chicago.
Richard Polt is professor of philosophy at Xavier University,

Cincinnati.
Richard Velkley is Celia Scott Weatherhead Professor of Philosophy

at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Holger Zaborowski is professor of the history of philosophy and phil-

osophical ethics at the Catholic University of Vallendar (PTHV), Germany.
233
Index of Names
Index of Names
Index of Names
Altman, William H. F., 106n1, 226 Dürer, Albrecht, 108–9

Anaximander, viii, 7, 212–14, 222, 220n40 Durst, David C., 165n1, 226
Antigone, 29, 211–13, 228
Aquinas, Thomas, vii, 1, 33–34, 225 Ebbinghaus, Julius, 153n28
Arendt, Hannah, 139–40, 145, 225
Aristotle, vii, viii, 1, 3–4, 28, 29, 32–33, Faye, Emmanuel, 106n1, 119, 226
36n18, 39–40, 46, 49–70, 71–89, 109, 141, Frings, Manfred, 26, 27n2, 226
144, 154, 155–56, 168n15, 200–201, 225, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 94, 109n4, 231
227
Auer, Michael, 168n15, 225 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 145, 150, 220n40,
Augustine, 14, 34, 45 226, 230
Galilei, Galileo, 152
Balke, Friedrich, 168n15, 225 George, Stefan, 136n46, 198n35
Bambach, Charles, 7, 207–224 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 166
Barth, Karl, 151 Goschler, Constantin, 182n69, 226
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 116 Grimm, Jacob und Wilhelm, 28n5
Beaufret, Jean, 30, 44 Guardini, Romano, 177
Béland, Martine, 168n15, 225 Guignon, Charles, 110n5, 229
Bernet, Rudolf, 3, 49–70
Binswanger, Ludwig, 35, 45 Hamacher, Werner, 165n1, 226
Bismarck, 128 Higgins, Paul, 2
Blattner, William, 27n1, 225 Hitler, Adolf, 106, 113, 120, 123,130, 132, 134,
Blochmann, Elisabeth, 175, 228 135, 136
Blok, Vincent, 168n15, 225 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, viii, 94,
Boss, Medard, 45 99, 115–16, 122, 127n33, 133–35, 136, 137, 141,
Bousquet, Antoine, 168n15, 225 163, 180, 228
Brentano, Franz, 28 Hemming, Laurence Paul, 168n15, 171n21, 228
Bullock, Marcus Paul, 165n1, 225 Heraclitus, viii, 5, 7, 26, 29n5, 31, 39n26, 47,
48n45, 68, 117, 118,120, 137, 141, 209, 210n8,
Capobianco, Richard, 2–3, 26–48, 225 212, 213–15, 223
Cassirer, Ernst, 151n22, 177 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 181n63, 228
Celan, Paul, 168n15, 225 Hölderlin, Friedrich, vii, viii, 7, 89, 113,
Crowell, Steven, 27n1, 225 118n22, 133, 136–37, 180, 193, 198n35,
207–24, 228
Dahlstrom, Daniel O., 2, 8–25, 225 Homer, 35
Darwin, Charles, 124 Hopkins, Burt, 27n1, 228
Derrida, Jacques, 217, 226 Horn, Christoph, 224n53, 228
Descartes, René, 1, 34, 36, 116, 153 Husserl, Edmund, 3, 13, 27n1, 28–31, 34, 36,
Dreyfus, Hubert L., 27n1, 226 151, 156, 159, 225, 228
235
236 Index of Names
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 151n22 Raffoul, François, 216–17, 222n48, 229
Jaeger, Werner, 33 Richardson, William J., 26, 27n2, 227
Jaspers, Karl, 177 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 87
Jonas, Hans, 145 Rorty, Richard, 27n1, 230
Jünger, Ernst, viii, 6, 135, 147, 165–83, 186, Rosenberg, Alfred, 137
225, 226, 228–31 Rosenzweig, Franz, 151
Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 168n15, 229
Scheler, Max, 33
Kant, Immanuel, vii, 1, 4, 12n10, 14, 18, Schelling, F. W. J., viii, 127n33, 208, 230
31n11, 33n13, 90–105, 115–16, 146, 151, 162, Schmidt, Dennis J., 215n25, 230
226, 228, 229 Schmitt, Carl, 119–20, 128, 130n36, 131n36,
Kästner, Erhart, 220n42, 228 134–35, 151, 169n15, 225, 227, 229, 230, 231
Kiesel, Helmuth, 165n1, 181n63, 228 Schopenhauer, Arthur 63
Kisiel, Theodore, 184–206, 228 Schwegler, Albert, 33
Kittler, Wolf, 168n15, 173n23, 228 Schwilk, Heimo, 165, 230
Klee, Paul, 202 Scott, Charles, 218n35, 230
Klein, Jacob, 152–53, 155, 161–62, 228 Sharr, Adam, 29n6, 230
Kolbenheyer, Erwin G., 123–25, 128, 137, 228 Sheehan, Thomas, 27n1, 30n7, 34n15, 46n39,
Krüger, Gerhard, 145, 150n18, 151n19 223n51, 230
Silesius, Angelus, 39
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, vii, 1, 49, Smith, Steven B., 158n44, 230
80n16, 186 Socrates, 5, 127, 146, 150–151, 152, 157–59, 162,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 152 163, 164, 230
Löwith, Karl, 145 Sophocles, 29, 138, 211, 212n19, 213, 217,
224n54, 228
Makkreel, Rudolf A., 4, 90–105, 229 Spengler, Oswald, 166, 170, 177
Marcuse, Herbert, 145 Spinoza, Baruch de, 151–52, 230
Marx, Karl, 122, 125, 163 Stauffenberg, Claus von, 198n35
McNeill, William, 3–4, 71–89, 219n37, 229 Storck, Joachim W., 228
Meier, Heinrich, 151, 152n23, 229 Strauss, Leo, 5–6, 134n42, 143–164, 229
Morat, Daniel, 168n15, 182n69, 229
Telemachus, 35
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 215, 218, 222–23, 229 Trawny, Peter, 168n15, 169n18, 172n22,
Nerhot, Patrick, 168n15, 229 183n69, 231
Nietzsche, Friedrich, vii, 1, 6, 15n25, 39n26,
49, 82n17, 87, 101, 146, 147–53, 156, 162, Ulmer, Carl, 120n25
163, 166, 167, 168–72, 174, 175–76, 178, 180,
209n7, 215, 220n40, 225 Vanicek, Alois, 224n53, 231
Velkley, Richard L., 5–6, 143–164, 231
Odysseus, 35
Okrent, Mark, 27n1, 229 Weber, Max, 151
Whitman, Walt, 47–48
Parmenides, viii, 26, 31, 39n26, 85 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36
Platon, vii, viii, 1, 5, 15, 29n6, 34n15, 36n18, Wolff, Christian, 116
40, 73, 74–75, 76, 82, 116, 122–23, 125, 128, Wood, David W., 109n4
144n5, 145n6, 149n14, 151n20, 152, 155, 156,
161, 162n68, 166, 168–69, 171, 172, 178, 182, Zaborowski, Holger, 1–7, 106n1, 146, 165–83,
201n45, 230 231
Polt, Richard, 5, 42n32, 106–142 Zahavi, Dan, 27n1, 231
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
Index of Subjects
actualitas, 46 108–9, 111, 134, 223

aisthēsis, 67, 80, 83 essence of being (Beyng, Dasein/Sein),
anthropocentric, 88 13, 17, 18, 37, 47, 115, 117–18, 153
anthropology, 96, 144, 172–73, 176, 177 essence of ground, 13, 15, 21, 86
anthropomorphic, 176 essence of human being, 38, 125, 125,
archai, 50, 52, 81 126–27, 128, 129, 135, 138, 139, 141, 192, 193,
Aufenthalt: 217; dwelling, 7, 214; ethos, 216, 195, 210, 217
223, 224; habitat, 101–3, 130, 200, 201, 211, essentia, 46, 76
214, 224; sojourn, 210, 214, 220, 224 ethos, 7, 210, 213–218, 219n37, 223–24, 229
authenticity, 110n5, 112, 113, 229 eudaimonia, 80
Europe, 123, 146, 164, 166, 167
Being and Time, 1, 3, 9, 10, 12–18, 21, 27n1, Existence: 74, 155, 195; ecstatic, 73; human,
30–31, 37–39, 44–45, 57, 62, 71, 79, 80, 2–4, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 28, 58, 63, 72, 80, 82,
82n17, 84–86, 88, 106n1, 111–12, 113n12, 96, 124, 143, 207, 211, 218, 223; Dasein,
114, 118, 130, 140, 143n1, 196, 199n39, 8, 9, 11, 82, 124, 129, 144; political, 129,
225–29 130n36, 138, 141; temporal-mortal, 147
Being-in-the-world, 10, 11, 14–15, 21–22, existentialism, 110n5, 229
27n1, 57, 65n35, 72, 82–84, 104, 144–45,
194, 226 fate, 6, 118n22, 124, 128, 129, 140, 146, 149,
Bodenständigkeit, 129, 130, 197, 200, 201 164, 220, 224
First World War, 106n1, 146, 151, 165, 167,
Christian, 154n31, 215 171, 226
Christianity, 148, 153 finiteness, 99
contemplation (Besinnung), 77, 79n16, 81– fitting/fittingness (Fug), 7, 212, 213, 215
82, 85, 144, 160, 182 freedom: 98, 102, 103, 109n4, 122, 124, 135,
cosmopolitanism, 105 141, 162, 181, 195, 223, academic, 169;
human, 5, 33n12, 125; negative, 122, 125; of
Denken, vii, viii, 29n5, 34n15, 43n34, 98, movement, 195, 205
168n15, 106, 201n49, 202nn51–52, 221n45, fremd/das Fremde, 209, 214
229
dike, 7, 212–13, 215, 222, 224 Geist, 115, 166
dunamis, 3, 49–70, 80 Gelassenheit, 7, 113, 168n15, 198, 215, 221,
226, 229
eidenai, 80 Gestell, 89, 185, 203, 217
eidos, 40, 43, 46, 54, 73–77, 81–82, 108 God, 7, 32, 98, 115, 136, 148, 152, 197, 214, 215,
Empfindsamkeit, 166 216
energeia, 46, 50–55, 58, 59–60, 62, 64, 65, 66
Enlightenment, 122, 141, 151 history: 1, 41, 123, 127, 133, 134, 139, 141n52,
essence (Wesen), 19, 36, 40 , 74, 76, 93, 107, 146, 149, 152, 157, 163–64, 166, 174183n69,
237
238 Index of Subjects
history (cont.) noein, 81
187, 205, 228, 229; of being, 2, 16, 17, 39, nous, 81, 83
114, 170, 172, 174, 179, 201; of (Western)
metaphysics, 4, 19, 25, 171, 174, 175, 178, object (Gegenstand), 6, 13–15, 85, 91–100,
182, 191, 193; of ontology, 71n1, 72, 73n2, 101–4, 119, 126, 133, 138, 144, 153, 156, 182,
79, 229; of philosophy, 3 180n59, 188–90, 201, 206
humanism: 215, letter on, 31, 39n26, 44, 210, objectivity, 99, 189, 191, 201
214, 215, 219 Offenbarkeit, 26, 70n45
Offene, das, 209, 221–23
Idealism, 18, 90, 94, 95, 104–5; German ontological difference, 2, 8–9, 11, 12–13,
Idealism, 4, 90, 94; Hegelian, 122; 15–25, 62, 89
refutation of Idealism, 95–96 ontology, viii, 2, 9, 12, 17n31, 20, 51n1, 75, 79,
individualism, 140, 167, 169 84, 86, 105, 128, 150, 210, 229; Greek, 4,
intuition, 91, 92, 98–100, 195 71–79; fundamental, 9, 13n15, 18, 22, 49,
Islamic, 152 57, 226 229
ousia, 18, 40, 46, 50, 74–76, 200
Jewish: Enlightenment, 151; philosophy,
152, 153n29, 154n31, 155n35, 156n38, 230; phenomenology, 2, 6, 12, 14, 22, 27–28, 38,
thought, 231 49, 73, 84–88, 110n5, 112, 151, 159, 165, 172,
Jews, 117, 130, 131nn36–37, 139 206n67, 225, 227–229
justice (Gerechtigkeit), 7, 64, 101, 125, 132n38, phronesis, 4, 64, 72–73, 79–83, 87, 144
144, 159, 207–8, 212–13, 215, 221–23 phusis, 18, 19, 47, 49, 51, 54, 57, 69, 74, 76, 82
playing field (Zeit-Raum-Spiel), 195, 205
kairos, 81 poièsis, 51n1, 55–56, 65n35, 80, 81, 87, 181,
Kehre, 4, 37, 38, 89n35, 90, 98, 226 185n4
praxis, 4, 72, 79n16, 80–81, 139, 181, 200
language, 70n46, 132, 140n50 227 production, 50–51, 71, 74–77, 82, 126, 139, 156,
liberalism, 119, 122, 124, 125, 134, 141, 151, 166, 173, 190, 198, 205, 219
157 projection, 10, 14–15, 20, 31, 88, 126
Lichtung, 3, 41, 44–46, 210 psychology, 28, 95, 110n5, 229
purposiveness, 102, 104n39, 105
machination (Machenschaft), 113, 136, 191,
193 rationalism, 111, 125, 135, 141, 147, 148n13, 149,
meaning (Bedeutung), 52, 56, 58, 68, 76, 79, 151–52, 154n30, 156n39, 157n42, 160nn55–
91, 93, 96, 97, 111–13, 122, 125, 129, 135, 138, 58, 161, 163n68, 230
139, 147, 149, 151, 154, 157, 159–60, 167, 171, rectorate, 1, 5, 6, 16, 107–8, 114–16, 132n38,
175–76, 192 147–48, 169, 171, 174, 227
mindfulness (Besinnung), viii, 7, 27n1,
113n15, 174, 179n55, 182, 189n13, 196 science, 1, 9, 71, 77, 82, 95, 105, 123, 125, 143,
morphe, 40, 46, 54, 61, 73, 108, 204, 146–49, 151, 159, 162, 172–74, 180n59, 189,
mystery (Geheimnis), 21, 87, 88n31, 133, 136, 206, 218, 227
199, 209 Seinsvergessenheit, 27
self-grounding, 134
National Socialism, 1, 107–8, 122, 126, 164, sensitivity, 60, 166
171, 174–75 shepherd, 38, 45, 216
nearness (Nähe) , 47, 187–88, 193, 194, 209, sophia, 81
220–21 spirit, 98, 115–16, 122, 125, 146, 147, 149, 150,
Nicomachean Ethics, 49, 64, 79, 81, 144 152, 166, 176
nihilism, 6, 148, 154–55, 168n15, 175, 182–83, state, 127–37, 139–40, 146, 151, 157, 169, 191,
22 205, 208, 220, 227, 230
Index of Subjects 239
Stiftung, 88 Wesen, viii, 33n12, 51n3, 53n8, 27n32, 172,
struggle (Kampf ), 5, 94, 111–12, 113, 115, 117– 178n28, 179nn54–55, 185, 202n45, 209,
127, 135n43, 137, 141, 186, 229 210, 227
subjectivism, 175, 181, 182 will, 110, 113, 121, 122, 124, 126, 131, 132, 135,
subjectivity, 15, 21, 27n1, 31, 36, 146, 176, 182, 139, 140, 152, 170, 213
209, 216, 231 will to power, 5–6, 49, 82n17, 101, 113, 148,
subject-object, 122, 189, 192 171, 174–78, 180
summum bonum, 105 willfulness, 113, 139
symbol, 109, 207 world, 11–12, 14–15, 21, 28, 36n19, 53, 56–57,
65, 67, 72–73, 76, 78–79, 83–89, 90, 91,
taoism, 202 100, 101, 104, 110, 112n8, 115–16, 121, 124,
technē, 3–4, 69, 71–89, 194, 202 126, 131n37, 133, 135, 138, 141, 144, 147–51,
technicity, 6, 71, 73, 87, 88, 184–85, 190–91, 155,–56, 163, 165n1, 167, 177, 180n59, 184,
194, 197 186, 189
technology, 6, 82n17, 87, 88, 89, 172–79, worldview, 21, 218, 222
184–85, 194, 205 world war: 186; Second, 113, 181; First, 107n1,
temporality, 4, 11, 12–13, 72–73, 81–82, 87, 91, 146, 151, 165, 167, 171, 226
95–967, 122, 141, 147, 209
territory, 101–3, 129, 130, 131 Zeug, 23, 66, 75
theōrein, 77, 81 Zionism, 131, 151
truth, 5,72, 107, 116–17, 120, 127, 201n45
Volk, 111, 116, 117, 121, 123n31, 124, 125, 126,

128, 131n36, 132, 137, 140, 169, 228
S
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Heidegger’s Question of Being

Studies in Philosophy and the

General Editor: John C. McCarthy

Edited by Holger Zaborowski

The Catholic University of America Press

Libr a ry of Congr ess ­­Cata logi ng-i n-Pu blication Data

Holger Zaborowski, Introduction 1

The following list of abbreviations refers to volumes in the complete works

GA 4 Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (ed. von Herrmann)

GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important twentieth-century

of contemporary Heidegger research. This volume shows how the differ-

what he considers the “core matter” of Heidegger’s way of thinking. This

Time. McNeill situates Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the context of

Richard Polt focuses on Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s and on

According to Heidegger, the difference between being and beings is the

The Ontological Difference

In the second section of Being and Time Heidegger endeavors to

proposes to understand being in terms of temporality (Temporalität) and,

grounding deserve mention. He repeats his insistence, already flagged in

the unity of the horizons of Dasein’s underlying timeliness. Nonetheless,

From the Ontological Difference to

30. GA 65:423–27, 466.

tion of the history of metaphysics.”39 What he means by this grounding

difference becomes a genuine barrier (eigentlicher Schranke) that gets in

43. GA 65:250; GA 69:22.

neither being’s transcendence of beings or the transcendence that marks

Da-sein beings (Seiendes)

Da-sein at work implement (Zeug)

Yet the equilateral triangulation illustrated in figure 1-1

From the mid-1930s,

being as conceived throughout the history of metaphysics, with its sup-

Aletheia is . . . the fundamental feature of Being itself.

Truth abides in everything that abides.

Sache selbst) of Heidegger’s thought—which, remarkably enough, is at

tion that whereas Husserl was primarily influenced by the Brentano of

us in their eventfulness. The key point is that in his reflections here, we

Being Is Truth in the First Place

“meaning” of Being that Heidegger sought after, even if originally this

the ‘Da,’ it is a matter of becoming claimed by Being.”8 Also at Le Thor,

it in the lecture course “Introduction to Philosophy” from the 1928/29

As noted earlier, on this point, Heidegger drew his inspiration from

being may be said to be “manifestative” (manifestativum) or “shown” (os-

The Priority and Primacy of Being

observation that Heidegger made much later in his thinking, in 1965.

Thus, to pick up the thread of the narrative that I am unfolding, Hei-

Additionally, in the same seminar he clarifies that manifestation and

a strict ­­transcendental-phenomenological manner to say that Being “is”

Heidegger’s original and sustaining concern was with Being as man-

(Sein selbst)—that is, the fundamental, unifying, and originary meaning

31. Ibid., chaps. 2, 5, and 6.

A careful consideration of “Time and Being” reveals, therefore, that

His reflection here is a superb example of a retractatio of the Augus-

37. GA 9:332 (253).

What is more, as late as 1973, in a seminar in Zähringen, he stated

Several decades later, this “strange” matter for thinking continues to

keeps us unsure and unknowing—and humbly reserved in our telling to

In focusing on Heidegger’s interpretation of the Aristotelian dunamis,

Translated from the French by Basil Vassilicos.

the fortunes of a specifically human drive, which is to say one exposed

The Structure of Movement and the

1. Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der

4. GA 62:352 (159): “movement of factic life.”

Libr a ry of Congr ess Cata logi ng-i n-Pu blication Data

GA 31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie

a strict transcendental-phenomenological manner to say that Being “is”

An inauthentic self-understanding, emergent from the everyday horizon

5 S Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading of Kant