Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, Robin Small Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy

Michael Ehrmantraut

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

vi vii 1

Chapter 1: Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy’

29

Chapter 2: Heidegger’s Students

41

Chapter 3: Student Dasein

87

Chapter 4: Philosophic Pedagogy and Historical Community

114

Epilogue

148

Notes Index

155 195

Acknowledgements

In reflecting upon what education means for Heidegger, I have often been led to think of my own teachers and of how they approach the task of an ‘introduction to philosophy’. While I am grateful to many friends for the benefits of their conversation, insight and advice, I wish to express my special thanks to the teachers who made this study possible: Professors Eric Petrie, Susan Shell, M. Richard Zinman and Richard Velkley. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Department of Political Science at Boston College.

Abbreviations

References to both the original German text and to the English translation are given when quotation follows the English translation in whole or in part. Otherwise, translations from the German text are my own.

Works of Martin Heidegger BP BQ BT CP EdP EM FCM G9 G13 G16 G26 G27 G28

Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. A. Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Basic Questions of Philosophy. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. P. Emad and K. Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Europa und die deutsche Philosophie (1936 lecture), in Europa und die Philosophie. Ed. H. Gander. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1993. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Fifth edition. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 9: Wegmarken. Ed. F. W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. Ed. H. Heidegger. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. Ed. H. Heidegger. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 26: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik (SS 1928). Ed. K. Held. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie (WS 1928/29). Eds. O. Saame and I. Saame-Speidel. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 28. Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart (SS 1929). Ed. C. Strube. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997.

viii

G29/30

G32 G34 G38 G39 G45

G53 G54 G65 Hw KPM MFL Ni Nii PIK PS SG SU SZ VA

Abbreviations Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 29/30. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt— Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit (WS 1929/30). Ed. F. W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 32: Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (WS 1930/31). Ed. I. Goerland. Frankfurt: Klostermann 1980. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 34: Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (WS 1931/32). Ed. H. Moerchen. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 38: Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit (SS 1934). Ed. G. Suebold. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 38: Hölderlins Hymnen: ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’ (WS 1934/35). Ed. S. Ziegler. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 45: Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’ (WS 1937/38). Ed. F. W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 53: Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Der Ister’ (SS 1942). Ed. C. Ochwadt, 1982. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 54: Parmenides. Ed. M. S. Rings. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie. Ed. F. W. von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989. Holzwege. Sixth edition. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Fourth Edition. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Trans. M. Heim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Nietzsche, Vol. 1. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Nietzsche, Vol. 2. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Emad and K. Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. P. Emad and K. Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Der Satz vom Grund. Stuttgart: Neske, 1957. Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität. Das Rektorat 1933/34. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Sein und Zeit. Sixteenth edition. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986. Vorträge und Aussätze. Seventh edition. Stuttgart: Neske, 1994.

Introduction

Near the conclusion of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger quotes a series of passages from Count Yorck’s correspondence with Wilhelm Dilthey in order to exhibit how the insights and tendency of Yorck’s thought anticipate in important respects the thinking of Being and Time. In particular, according to Heidegger, Yorck not only approaches one of the central discoveries presented in Being and Time – that of the ‘historicality of Dasein’ – but moreover, he ‘did not hesitate to draw the final conclusion from this insight’. Heidegger then presents a selection of remarks from Yorck’s letters in which this ‘final conclusion’ is expressed. The common theme of these remarks concerns the manner in which philosophy, as a way of ‘living’ is itself inherently historical. Among the comments upon the meaning of philosophy which are quoted by Heidegger, the following statement stands out: That science can become practical is indeed now the authentic justification of all science. But the mathematical praxis is not the only one. The practical aim of our standpoint is one that is pedagogical in the widest and deepest sense of the word. It is the soul of all true philosophy and the truth of Plato and Aristotle. (SZ 402; BT 402; emphasis added) Through citation, Heidegger adopts Yorck’s statement as his own and thereby points out an important characteristic of ‘the practical aim’ of his own philosophical ‘standpoint’. The following study is an exploration of the thesis that philosophy, for Heidegger, is inherently ‘pedagogical in the widest and deepest sense of the word’. The main elements of this theme can be outlined in a provisional way through reference to how, according to Being and Time, philosophy can be understood as a mode of ‘praxis’ and, in addition, through consideration of how the practice of philosophy may itself require a kind of ‘pedagogy’.

The Practice of Philosophy In Being and Time, philosophy is understood with regard to its fundamental theme as the inquiry into Being. Undertaking this inquiry presupposes that

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before any thematic questioning, Being is somehow already accessible to and understood by the being that can question. It also assumes from the outset that this accessibility, which is called the understanding-of-Being (Seinsverständnis), essentially determines the human being such that it is thereby designated as ‘Dasein’. That Dasein understands Being entails that it moves within a disclosure of both its own Being and the Being of beings which it is not. The former relation which Dasein has to itself as a being is an ‘understanding’ of its own Being which does not, in the first place, consist in anything like a universal conceptual apprehension, but rather lies in a concern with how it ‘is’ and ‘can be’, that is, the way in which its own existence and things ‘matter’ to it. Dasein’s self-understanding is thus always a way in which it stands out before itself (‘ex-sists’) as possibility. Because the understanding-of-Being is implicated in this ‘existentiell’ selfunderstanding (being-towards-itself as possibility), the philosophic investigation of Being in general is itself to be construed as a possibility of Dasein’s existence, i.e., as a manner in which Dasein ‘can be’. Thus along with the definition stated above, Heidegger also conceives philosophy ‘as a way of existence, and therewith as a mode of Being-in-the-world, which uncovers beings or discloses Being’ (SZ 357; BT 408). Philosophy for Heidegger can then be described as a mode of ‘praxis’ insofar as it is ‘rooted in’ Dasein’s concern with its own Being and requires that Dasein ‘seize’ this possibility of questioning Being as its own. It is surely not subsequently ‘practical’, in the sense of being an application of the results of theoretical research. All of human existence moves within a disclosure of Being, but only philosophy is explicitly directed to the questioning and interpretation of Being as such. Philosophy is thus not a free-floating, self-forgetful departure from the pre-philosophic ‘practical’ preoccupation with concrete possibilities of existence, but rather a ‘radicalization’ of pre-philosophic care and comportment. Thus Heidegger says, ‘If to interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary being to be interrogated; it is also that being which already comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself – the pre-ontological understanding of Being’ (SZ 14–15; BT 35; emphasis added). Moreover, in ‘radicalizing’ the tendency towards the disclosure of Being that essentially determines Dasein, the philosophic interpretation of Being (including the thematic interpretation of Dasein’s Being, the task of Being and Time) thereby ‘fulfils’ (vollzieht) this tendency. As Heidegger says, ‘As an investigation of Being, [phenomenological interpretation] becomes the independent and explicit fulfillment [Vollzug] of the understanding-of-Being which already belongs to Dasein and which “comes alive” in any of its dealings with beings’ (SZ 67; BT 96). In summary, according to Being and Time, philosophy is determined as: (1) an ontically rooted possibility of Being-in-the-world; (2) a radicalization of the pre-philosophic ‘essential tendency’ of Dasein’s Being and (3), the explicit

Introduction

3

fulfilment (Vollzug) of pre-philosophic existence. These three traits are visible in Heidegger’s later proposal (in the Rectoral Address) to regain ‘for our Dasein’ the Greek understanding of philosophic theory as a mode of praxis; a proposal which thereby explicitly conjoins his own conception of philosophy with the primordial sense of the Greek conception.1 ‘Theory’, on the one hand, was undertaken [geschieht] not for its own sake, but solely in the passion to remain near the beings as such and under their constraint. On the other hand, the Greeks struggled to conceive and fulfill [vollziehen] this contemplative questioning as one, indeed as the highest way of energeia, of the ‘being-at-work’, of man. Accordingly, it was not their intent to assimilate practice to theory, but to understand theory as the highest actualization of genuine praxis. (SU 11–12) As noted above, what distinguishes the possibility of philosophy from other ways of existence is the fact that it consists in the explicit questioning of Being. The possibility and necessity of this way of existence is for Heidegger a central problem. While it is assumed that Dasein has an understanding-of-Being which inheres in everything it does, says and thinks – in all relations to beings – this understanding is so self-evident as to initially obviate any perplexity and inquiry. This is one way in which the possibility of philosophy is problematic. ‘Everyone understands’, Heidegger says, ‘“the sky is blue”, “I am merry”’ (SZ 4; BT 23). The very self-evidence of this ordinary disclosedness of Being in fact covers over an underlying enigma of Being. For this reason the ordinary understanding both carries within itself and obstructs the possibility of experiencing a perplexity regarding Being, an experience out of which the questioning arises and in which it must be maintained. Thus the recognition that there exists an ‘average intelligibility’ of Being in no way rules out the need for inquiry; it rather only ‘makes manifest that in every way of comporting oneself towards beings as beings – in any Being towards beings as beings – there lies a priori an enigma. The very fact that we already live in an understanding of Being and that the meaning of Being is still veiled in darkness proves that it is necessary in principle to raise this question again’ (SZ 4; BT 23). To direct oneself according to the ‘enigma’ that is concealed in the average intelligibility is to open and sustain a tension with the tendency to ‘flee’ the questionableness of Being that characterizes pre-philosophic existence. The ‘radicalization’ and ‘fulfilment’ of the pre-philosophic tendency towards disclosure must turn against, by calling into question, the manner in which Dasein ordinarily interprets itself and Being in general. Given the necessary predominance of the pre-philosophic obfuscation of Being as pervaded ‘a priori’ by an enigma, the practice of philosophy maintains itself in what Heidegger calls a ‘modification’ or ‘transformation’ of existence as a whole, one that implies a constant opposition to the everyday, inauthentic existence. As Heidegger says, ‘that with which philosophy deals [wovon die Philosophie handelt]

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is opened up only from within and out of a transformation [Verwandlung] of human Dasein. This transformation is demanded [geforderten] of man with every philosophic step, but the common understanding opposes it as a consequence of its natural laziness [Behäbigkeit]’ (G29/30 423). From the founding experiences of being-in-the-world that reveal the questionability of Being, to the existentiell ‘seizure’ of the possibility of philosophic questioning as a way of existence, and through to the fulfilment of this possibility in an ontological interpretation and communication (a ‘work’) which aims ‘to bring Being to word’ – the practice of philosophy is characterized by its movement ‘in, out of, against, and yet for’ the everyday way in which Being and existence are interpreted.2 Here we pose as a theme Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy itself, not only as it is conceived but also the way in which it is practised. This offers a perspective on the unity of philosophy – a unity which in Being and Time is presented through the indication that existential-ontological interpretation and its possible truth are ‘rooted’ in existentiell understanding and truth. In other words, viewed comprehensively, philosophy as a way of existence encompasses: (1) the ‘fundamental experience’ (Grunderfahrung) through which Dasein is opened to the world, its own Being and Being itself in its questionableness; (2) the disclosure of the concrete historical situation of the community in which philosophizing is rooted; (3) the comportment (Haltung) in which philosophic questioning is maintained; (4) the intricate method of interpretation employed in inquiry (thematization, projection, interpretation, analytic, formal-indicative and metaphysical conceptualization and destruction) as a way of ‘gaining access’ (a Zugangsart) to the phenomena; and, lastly, (5) the modes of discourse (writing and speaking) and communication (treatise, lecture, essay) through which all the preceding moments are disclosed for other Dasein who are ‘in the world’ with philosophic Dasein. We shall call this disclosure the pedagogical aim of the practice of philosophy. In quoting Yorck’s dictum that ‘the practical aim of our standpoint is one that is pedagogical in the broadest and deepest sense,’ Heidegger reveals something important about how he understands his own activity.

The Pedagogical Character of Philosophic Practice To address the theme of philosophic pedagogy with regard to its distinctive aim, possibility, necessity, conditions and scope, is a task that thus unfolds from out of attention to the practice of philosophy itself. The more one focuses on the latter, the more pressing becomes the problem of philosophic pedagogy. Heidegger himself makes this point: ‘Indeed the more seriously we preoccupy ourselves with philosophizing, all the clearer it will be, that the philosophizing, although it happens in the essence of Dasein, indeed precisely because of this, because it happens there and only there, needs its own liberation and guidance

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[Führung], a liberation, in which the Dasein must employ violence against itself’. (G27 220; emphasis added). As the following study will show, ‘liberation’ and ‘guidance’ (or ‘leadership’) constitute the aim and character of philosophic pedagogy.3 Heidegger maintains here that the ‘need’ for guidance becomes clear through serious attention to what philosophy implies and the attendant experience of the difficulties, inherent in the very Being of Dasein (insofar as they are essential ‘tendencies’ of the pre-philosophic understanding), that hinder the possibility of philosophic questioning and make ‘necessary’ the self-inflicted violence of a modification of existence. In order to elaborate the character of this pedagogy and the way in which it belongs to the practice of philosophy, this study focuses primarily upon Heidegger’s lecture courses of the years 1927–1934. Special attention is paid to Einleitung in die Philosophie (1928), and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (1929–30).4 Each of these texts addresses the problem and exemplifies the practice of philosophic pedagogy and does so on three different levels. First, such texts have as their stated intention, for example: the ‘awakening’ of a sense of perplexity about Being (SZ 1); the ‘initiation of a living philosophizing’ (G29/30 87) and the endeavour ‘to bring philosophizing underway in our Dasein’ (G27 5). In this sense, then, these discourses, as instances of communication, intend to fulfil the task of ‘liberation’ and ‘ guidance’ – the pedagogical aim of philosophy. Second, these texts directly make the problem and task of pedagogy – an ‘introduction to philosophy’ – more or less prominent themes of discussion. Third, the main philosophic themes of all these writings concern, in one way or another, the conditions of philosophizing in the Being of Dasein. Systematic treatments of fundamental ontological matters are then revealing with regard to the possibility and necessity of Heidegger’s pedagogy.

The Problem of the Beginning For the reader of Heidegger’s works – especially Being and Time – the topic that is to be addressed under the rubric of philosophic pedagogy is first encountered in the ‘problem of the beginning’ (Problem der Anfangs) as it exists for the reader who wants to understand the work, that is, someone who wants to take part in the inquiry that the work proposes to initiate and so approach the ‘matters themselves’ with understanding.5 The presentation of Being and Time very explicitly differs from the early modern claims to posit principles as known with certainty and then proceed inductively or deductively towards an account of the whole of what can be known. In contrast, this work takes as its starting point a ‘projection’, a prior understanding of the Being of beings – including the Being of man – and then proceeds to analyse the constitution of the Being of this being from out of these guiding ontological assumptions (cf. SZ 314). The movement of the work is

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neither an ascent towards nor a descent from first principles, but rather a circular movement in which the guiding projections are gradually clarified through a disclosure of their presuppositions. ‘Philosophy will never seek to deny its ‘presuppositions’, but neither may it simply admit them. It conceives them, and it unfolds with more and more penetration both the presuppositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions’ (SZ 310; BT 358). While indeed the ‘presuppositions’ of the ontological interpretation become ‘conceived’ through the movement of the interpretation of Dasein, they do not have the character of conceptual propositions about things or ideas. Rather, the ‘presuppositions’ have the character of ways in which Dasein itself is, i.e., exists. Such modes of existing are presuppositions for and of the guiding ontological projection of the idea of Being in general and the idea of existence. The fundamental presupposition here is then conceived as the authentic, finite (temporal-historical) existence of Dasein – one could also say, a way of Being of the one who philosophizes.6 The presupposition of the inquiry, as a ‘way of existence’, thus precedes the work and, as it were, stands ‘outside’ the work in which it is conceived, unfolded and fulfilled. The conceptual interpretation which clarifies and secures the presuppositions may suffice to demonstrate that the work does not ultimately proceed from an ‘arbitrary construction’ (SZ 303). Yet the explication of the ‘presuppositions’ of ontological interpretation is itself carried out on the level of ‘formal-indicative’ existential-ontological discourse. This might at first seem to suggest that the reader could acquire a proper philosophic-ontological understanding of existence through a thoughtful reading of the work alone. But if the fundamental presupposition of ontological understanding is not a mode of conceiving finite existence as a whole, but a way of being (existing) as a whole – a way of existing ‘temporally’ and ‘historically’ such that the phenomena of ‘temporality’ and ‘historicality’ first become accessible – then it is by no means clear that the presentation of ontological interpretation can provide the conditions under which a reader could participate in the interpretation with understanding. As Heidegger says with respect to the existentialontological interpretation of conscience: ‘Just as little as existence is necessarily and directly impaired by an ontologically inadequate way of understanding the conscience, so little does an existentially appropriate interpretation guarantee that one has understood the call in an existentiell manner’ (SZ 295; BT 341). Indeed, the ‘problem of beginning’ here intensifies to the extent that it becomes clear that ‘without existentiell understanding all analysis of existence remains groundless [Bodenlos]’ (SZ 312; BT 360). Here, ‘ground’ or ‘soil’ (Boden) means the ‘phenomenal ground’; to be grounded means to have a footing in the matters themselves. The question then remains: how is it possible for a Dasein to participate in the interpretation of the constitution of the Being of Dasein ‘so that it may decide of its own accord whether, as the being which it is, it has that constitution-of-Being?’ (SZ 315; BT 362). Reflection on this difficulty opens a view for the usually overlooked ‘pedagogical’ function of ontological interpretation itself. Insofar as it is presented in

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the work (Being and Time), ontological interpretation is also an act of ‘communication’. After noting, as quoted above, that the ontological understanding does not ‘guarantee’ existentiell understanding, Heidegger adds, ‘But the more primordial existential interpretation also discloses possibilities for a more primordial existentiell understanding, as long as ontological conceptualization does not let itself get cut off from ontical experience [Erfahrung]’ (SZ 295; BT 341). Remarkably, the formal ontological interpretation is then not only rooted in a ‘fundamental experience’ of Dasein in its finitude (i.e., authentic being-historical). It not only retrospectively clarifies and secures its own ground through an ontological-conceptual interpretation of that experience. It not only thus ‘fulfils’ this primordial existentiell ‘being in truth’. It can, at the same time, indirectly lead other Dasein (e.g., the reader) into an authentic experience of finite historical existence. Heidegger identifies this practicalpedagogical aim of philosophic interpretation as one of ‘liberation’. The existential interpretation, as communicated through the work, Being and Time, ‘becomes the interpretive liberation [interpretierenden Befreiung] of Dasein for its uttermost possibility of existence’ (SZ 303; BT 350). This sketch of the ‘problem of the beginning’ may suggest how a pedagogical aim must inhere in both the method and presentation of fundamental ontology. For the latter not only works out the question of Being for itself, but strives to engender what Heidegger later calls a ‘mutual questioning’ and ‘selfquestioning’ (Mitfragen und Selbstfragen), in order that ‘the question of Being should again move our Dasein’ (EM 16; SZ Vorbemerkung). However, difficulties remain regarding the possibility, necessity, ground, character, effectiveness and limits of the pedagogical intention of fundamental ontology. These difficulties emerge on the basis of further attention to the exposition of Being and Time, and through consideration of the manner in which the problem of philosophic pedagogy is approached in later lectures. The pedagogical function of ontological interpretation lies in the disclosure of possibilities for ‘more primordial existentiell understanding’, and yet the formal-indicative method and conceptuality of fundamental ontology inherently limits (for reasons and in ways that are not transparent) the manner in which possibilities of existence can be presented. As Heidegger says, ‘The existential analysis is in principle not able to discuss that for which the Dasein in each case factically resolves itself. The present investigation excludes even the projection of the factical possibilities of existence. Nevertheless, it must be asked, from whence in general the possibilities can be drawn, on which the Dasein factically projects itself’ (SZ 383; BT 434). Although the existential analytic is in one sense the self-interpretation of Dasein in its facticity, the orientation of the investigation to the kind of ‘Being’ of the being (as opposed to the ‘ontic’ approaches of anthropology, psychology, political science etc.), proceeds from a standpoint that is removed from – but still ‘rooted in’ and ‘connected with’ – the level of concrete, factic existence. This self-imposed distance first allows the factic singularity of historical experience to be ‘conceived’.

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Heidegger here departs from the philosophic tradition which holds that the ‘individual is inexpressible’.7 That maxim is based upon the idea that particulars can be determined only through representation of the general class (the concept). Only the general class of particulars can here be expressed. Against this tradition, Heidegger introduces a new way of understanding the philosophic concept. Formal-indicative concepts ‘indicate’ (point towards) the intended subject matters – which are themselves not beings but modes of Being (intentional ‘relations’). By ‘indicating’ the phenomena, these concepts are like signs that show not only that which is to be understood, but where and how understanding is to be ‘fulfilled’ within one’s own factic existence in the world. Thus these indications point into the facticity of the one who wants to participate in the inquiry. The primordial understanding of this ‘formal indication’ is then again not guaranteed through proper existential-ontological understanding, but requires of the reader a resolve to be open to his own death, the call of conscience, tradition and historical world. The phenomena that are presented in the work ‘in general’ and formally are to be appropriated and understood ‘factically’. The ‘guidance’ given by the ontological interpretation is thus characteristically indirect. Such indirection is implied in the formal ontological interpretation in that the latter not only indicates which phenomena are essential to authentic finite existence, but the manner (the ‘how’) in which they are to be understood. The formal-indicative concept grows out of a violent modification of the everyday manner of understanding the phenomena of Dasein (in terms of things present and ready-to-hand). The existential analytic demarcates the ‘primordial’ Being of the matters at issue from the ‘ordinary’ way in which they are given and thereby shows ‘indirectly’ and ‘prohibitively’ the way to an authentic understanding of such matters as death, guilt, temporality and history. The task of ‘deformalization’, as a free action, a ‘resolve’, thus appears to be placed on the individual. Insofar as ontological interpretation does not or cannot ‘in principle’ bring this about, the pedagogy of fundamental ontology is itself not only ‘indirect’, but also ‘non-authoritative’ and ‘nonbinding’ (unverbindlicher) (SZ 312; G27 397). Nevertheless, if the aim of philosophic pedagogy practised in Being and Time is to give indirect guidance into the question of Being itself, it is not clear that the method of ‘formal indicative’ ontological interpretation can alone suffice to fulfil this intention. This method appears problematic if one considers the manner in which it limits the discussion of the possibility of philosophy itself in Being and Time. Philosophy as a possibility here has an ambiguous status. On the one hand, the possibility of philosophic questioning is understood as ‘essential’ to Dasein: it is an ‘understanding of Being’ – the essential character of man as Dasein – that has become explicitly directed towards Being as such in its questionability. Indeed, the whole ontological interpretation of the Being of Dasein is itself first introduced as the interpretation of the being which not only understands Being, but can ask the question of Being. In this respect, the whole

Introduction

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of Being and Time is the self-explication of the possibility of philosophic questioning.8 Philosophic questioning is thus here predetermined to belong essentially to ‘Dasein’ as such. However, like all ‘possibilities’ (even being-towards-death), the possibility of philosophy truly ‘exists’ as a possibility in being ‘seized’, and thus appropriated, by the particular Dasein such that it understands itself out of this possibility. Such an appropriation is itself the ontic root and founding condition of the philosophic problematic of Being. ‘The existential analytic is on its side ultimately rooted existentiell, i.e., ontically. Only if philosophic-investigative questioning is itself seized [ergriffen] in an existentiell manner as the possibility-of-Being of existing Dasein, does there stand the possibility of the disclosing of the existentiality of existence and therewith the possibility of undertaking an adequately founded ontological problematic in general’ (SZ 13; BT 34). Insofar as the very disclosure of the phenomena of existence (‘existentiality’) is contingent upon the possibility of philosophic questioning, access to the investigation itself must be contingent upon the existentiell seizure of this possibility. And yet even here the ontological interpretation as a whole in Being and Time remains within the methodological constraints of a formal ontological interpretation. The existential analytic explicates the conditions of the authentic seizure of possibilities, indicates what is involved therein and from ‘whence in general’ the possibility is drawn, but (to repeat) ‘is in principle not able to discuss that for which the Dasein in each case factically resolves itself. It excludes even the projection of the factical possibilities of existence’ (SZ 383; BT 434). Thus although the existential analytic can indicate that every factic possibility is transmitted through a particular tradition of a people and is first determined as the fateful destiny of Dasein, it can only indicate, and not determine ‘this’ possibility, ‘this’ tradition and ‘this’ people. Dasein draws its possibility from its factic tradition and thereby determines itself in relation to the history of its people in its situation and historical moment. The ‘formal indicative’ concepts can, however, only point to what is implied in resolution, but they cannot supply the necessary historical determinateness of factic resolution, and so they cannot disclose the historical situation. The indirect guidance of ontological interpretation would then seem to leave the concrete seizure of the possibility up to the resolute individual Dasein in its freedom. But this would lead one to assume that the possibility of philosophy – precisely as that possibility which for the first time opens the disclosure of the existentiality of existence and the interpretation of Being in its temporality – is not bound to a singular determinate historical situation and historical moment, but to any situation, any tradition, any historical people. The possibility of philosophy (understood as the retrieval of the question of Being) would then seem removed from the unique historical destiny to which it belongs. Moreover, this would suggest that any Dasein can radically discover its situation ‘on its own’ with only the indirect indications that the existential analytic gives as to what in general belongs to a situation.

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Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy

These and other considerations lead us to conclude that the formality and indirectness of ontological interpretation render problematic the pedagogical task of assisting others to participate in the question of Being, and thus to gain access to the phenomena. In a 1928 lecture Heidegger comments on why the current crisis of science must be seen not only as a crisis in the relation of the individual towards science, but as a crisis of science ‘in the whole of historical-social Dasein’: ‘Certainly, the factic concrete relation to a determinate science must in each instance be decided by the individual, but that decision can be fulfilled [ist vollziehbar] only in the context [Umkreis] of possibilities, which tells us how the space [Spielraum] appears, inside of which the individual can decide this or that in a genuine way’ (G27 30). It is precisely this factic ‘historical-social’ Spielraum of possibilities which formal ontological interpretation must presuppose (insofar as it is ontically rooted and founded), but which the existential-ontological interpretation cannot in principle originally disclose. Here it is also evident that the factic relations of the individual towards science (i.e., those that are methodologically excluded from existential analytic) cannot simply be decided by the individual in its freedom – they rather belong to the elusive historical Spielraum which precedes and makes possible any choice.

The New Pedagogy of the Lecture Courses After Being and Time, in lectures given in the years 1927–1935, Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy undergoes a change in character and method in accordance with his adoption of the university lecture as the primary way in which philosophic inquiry is communicated.9 The new mode of presentation redresses those aspects of Being and Time that render for others a genuine participation in the inquiry problematic, if not impossible. The new approach does not intend, however, to leave that work behind, but rather to make possible an entry into the investigation of the sense of Being, that is, a more concrete and effective introduction to the problem of Being and Time itself. Several of the main traits of the new pedagogy can be briefly sketched by drawing a contrast with the pedagogy of Being and Time. (1) In Being and Time, the very necessity of philosophic pedagogy and the way in which ontological interpretation intends to disclose possibilities for primordial existentiell understanding – and thereby ‘liberate’ others – in no way stands in the foreground of the presentation, but is visible only through concentration on the method of fundamental ontology.10 In the lecture courses, on the other hand, Heidegger deals thematically with the very problem of any ‘introduction’. Such discussions of philosophic pedagogy are clearly undertaken for the purpose of leading the auditors into philosophy. The pedagogical aim is more explicitly evident as an integral element of the practice of philosophy. Indeed, in several instances the stated intention of lecture courses as a

Introduction

11

whole – even in their ‘systematic’ contents – is to make possible a genuine introduction.11 (2) Except for a few ambiguous statements about how fundamental ontology presupposes the existentiell seizure of the possibility of philosophy, Being and Time does not – and within its methodological limits cannot – directly address the question: what is philosophy? Lacking such guidance it is not clear how this possibility could be appropriated and thus how participation can be engendered. However, in the lecture courses, Heidegger repeatedly departs from and returns to the question ‘what is philosophy?’ (sometimes in the form: ‘what is metaphysics?’ or ‘what is science?’) and considers how such an understanding is to be gained. Moreover, this problem is thematized not for its own sake, but as the cultivation of a ‘pre-understanding’ of philosophy that will first allow ‘philosophizing to be awakened and seized within us’ (G27 5). (3) Whereas the existential analytic formally describes the fundamental attunement and comportment (angst and anticipatory resoluteness) as the ways of Being in which Dasein can exist in the primordial existentiell truth of existence (thus grounding the philosophic ontological truth), the lecture courses (especially Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics) bring into the foreground the manner in which the ‘awakening’ of the possibility of philosophy, the posing of philosophic questions, the attainment of conceptual understanding and the communication of philosophic (and poetic) discourse all ‘happen’ out of an ‘attunement’ (Stimmung), one through which the whole of beings becomes manifest. Accordingly, the philosophic lecture assumes the pedagogical task of ‘awakening’ attunements. As Heidegger remarks in the context of an elaboration upon the questions ‘what is world?’ and ‘what is finitude?’: ‘We will first authentically execute these questions, if we first awaken a fundamental attunement of our philosophizing. That is the first and proper fundamental task of our lecture and the initiation of a living philosophizing’ (G29/30 87; FCM 57). (4) In contrast with the formal neutrality of philosophic discourse in Being and Time, Heidegger now intends the ‘we’, ‘here’ and ‘now’, in an immediate and concrete sense, one that defines the starting point for the development of the philosophic problematic. ‘Philosophizing ought to be brought into an occurrence [Geschehen] in our Dasein, not taken generally, but rather in our Dasein now and here, in this moment [Augenblick] and in the perspectives which this moment offers’ (G27 6). The attempt to awaken philosophizing ‘in our Dasein here and now’ leads directly into a questioning – which at once coincides with or prepares a determination – of ‘who we are’, that is, a concrete existentiell self-questioning and self-determination of Dasein in its finitude. Being and Time fulfils such a determination only on the level of neutral ontological interpretation. By proceeding out of the immediate relation of speaker and listener in the lecture hall, Heidegger is able to disclose what could only be indirectly indicated as a presupposition in Being and Time: the social-historical ‘situation’ in which philosophy becomes possible and necessary ‘for us’ is itself the situation of the question of Being.

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Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy

The situation is here not closed or confined to the lecture hall, but is rather expansive and ultimately comprehensive: the philosophy lecture is situated in the university as the central institution in the existence of the German people; as the university is essentially determined by the possibility of philosophy (science) it bears the destiny of Europe and the West within itself. It may seem that, in Being and Time, the ontological interpretation places itself as it were ‘outside’ the factic ‘happening’ (Geschehen) of history (Geschichte) in order to describe this movement in formal and general terms.12 By way of contrast, the immediacy of discourse in the lecture courses permits Heidegger to speak directly ‘in’ and ‘out of’ the historical community in which he and his listeners stand. The questions concerning the Being of Dasein and its relation to beings as such as a whole (its relation to Being) thus gain a new point of departure and can be concretely formulated in such characteristic ways as: ‘who are we?’; ‘who is this Volk which we ourselves are’; ‘What happens with us in the grounds of our Dasein once science has become our passion?’: and ‘who are we ourselves, this corporation of teachers and students of the highest school of the German Volk?’ (G38 63, 69; G9 103; SU 9). At the same time, the question of the meaning of Being – to which the question of Dasein’s finite Being remains, as it is in Being and Time, subordinate – itself proceeds from a new point of departure. Heidegger can move, for instance, from the puzzle as to the fact that in ‘this’ classroom we find all kinds of beings that manifestly ‘are’, but cannot determine just where and how the ‘Being’ of these things ‘is’. So Heidegger can lead one into the question of Being by unfolding the following perplexity: these things ‘are’ but their ‘Being’ (Being itself) remains for us an empty word. To ask ‘how it stands with Being’ is then to enter into a consideration of why ‘Being’ remains ‘for us’ a vacuous word and why this determination (elucidated through reference to Nietzsche’s teaching that ‘Being’ is in fact a mere vapour and illusion) comes to sight precisely at this historical moment and why it persists (EM 30).

Fundamental Ontology and Metaphysics We do not intend to suggest that the mode of philosophic pedagogy adopted in the lecture courses of 1928 involves in any way a repudiation of Being and Time. However, the new pedagogy does indeed belong to a new direction within and towards the question of Being that Heidegger embarks upon at this time. In August 1928, at the time when Einleitung in die Philosophie (1928/29) was being prepared, Heidegger wrote to Elizabeth Blochmann: ‘The last Marburg lecture this summer struck a new way, or rather a stepping upon the path, which I have yet for a long time only been able to surmise.’ In that course (Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Logik) Heidegger outlines the problems and respective steps of investigation involved in the question of Being, thus integrating fundamental ontology within a more comprehensive scheme that includes a prospectus on a complementary theme and corresponding approach that is at this time

Introduction

13

yet to be undertaken. Insofar as the pedagogical approach adopted in and after the lectures of 1928 is adapted to this transformation of the philosophic problematic, it is necessary to consider Heidegger’s survey of what the question of Being involves in its entirety, first fundamental ontology, followed by the new thematic. The question of Being is first presented as the retrieval of a traditional problematic which is taken up through fundamental ontology. The latter at once ‘radicalizes’ and ‘universalizes’ the traditional approach to the problem. Since the pre-Socratic thinkers (especially Parmenides), the Being of beings has been thought to have a special relation to the being that apprehends, understands, conceives or questions beings. Accordingly, Being has always been conceived in relation to thinking, logos, the soul or subject. Fundamental ontology proposes to radicalize this traditional problem through an interpretation of that being, ‘Dasein’, in order to explicate how an ‘understanding-of-Being’ belongs essentially to this being (i.e., belongs to its own ‘constitution-of-Being’). Further, Heidegger calls attention to the manner in which the determination and ordering of beings has traditionally been carried out in relation to time, for example, in the traditional distinction between the eternal and temporal realms of beings. Time, moreover, since Aristotle, has been held to have a special relation to the soul or subject (with Kant). The retrieval and radicalization of the traditional problem of Being thus becomes the investigation of Being and time. The analytical interpretation of Dasein explicates the ‘temporality’ of Dasein’s Being – thus also the temporality of the understanding-of-Being – in order then to thematize the temporality of Being itself, that is, to conceive Being as time (G26 188–89). The question of Being is not only to be radicalized, but also, still within the framework of fundamental ontology as the analytic of Dasein’s existence, the traditional problem is to be ‘universalized’. Heidegger clarifies what this means in an outline of four subordinate themes, central in the philosophic tradition, that are to be taken up: (1) an investigation of how the meaning of ‘Being’ varies in accord with the different kinds of beings, while retaining its unity; (2) an inquiry into the grounds of the traditional ‘articulation’ of Being into essence (what-being, character, form) and existentia (that-being, content); (3) a treatment of the difference between ‘Being’ and ‘beings’ (as implied in any consideration of the ‘Being of beings’) with a view to how this differentiation belongs to any understanding-of-Being and (4) the relation between truth and Being – the determination of the essence of truth from out of the investigation of Being (which has special focus on logos as the traditional locus of truth) (G26 189–94). Heidegger concludes this general exposition of fundamental ontology with a more concise definition. Fundamental ontology is the grounding of ontology in general through (1) the interpretation of Dasein as temporality (a task that describes the whole of Being and Time), and (2) the explication of the fundamental problems contained in the question of Being (what Heidegger calls the

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‘temporal exposition of the problem of Being’, a theme which is partially presented in the 1927 lecture course Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie). At this point, however, just as fundamental ontology appears to evince a coherent order of ‘problems’ with a settled procedure and mode of presentation, and just as the completion of the project appears imminent, in a most startling passage Heidegger expresses the necessity for an ‘overturning’ of ontology. The task of philosophy is not completed with fundamental ontology, rather the latter constitutes an indispensable first stage which must be complemented by a different set of questions and a new approach. The larger whole, to which fundamental ontology now belongs as an initial approach, is designated ‘metaphysics’. The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes up against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in this: that in the simplicity of its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a new awakening [ein neues Wachwerden fordert]. With what concerns fundamental ontology, what is to be considered above all else is that precisely the radicalism and universality of this central problematic, and it alone, leads one to see that these problems are indeed central; but for that reason they are in their essentiality never the sole problems. In other words, fundamental ontology does not exhaust the concept of metaphysics. (G26 198–99; MFL 156 emphasis added) Heidegger proceeds to briefly lay out the subject matter of the new problematic and how it emerges through the transformation of ontology. Especially perplexing here is that the new problematic is presented as being both, on the one hand, a development of fundamental ontology, one that could not arise prior to it, and on the other hand, a radical transformation that lies in a return to the ‘origin’ of fundamental ontology in ‘factic existence’, and so appears to consist in reflection upon and enactment of the possibility of fundamental ontology itself. Heidegger explains: Since Being is there only insofar as beings are already in the there [im Da], there lies latent in fundamental ontology the tendency towards a primordial metaphysical transformation which first becomes a possibility when Being is understood in its whole problematic. The inner necessity, that ontology turn back to its point of origin can be clarified by reference to the primal phenomenon of human existence: that the being ‘man’ understands Being; that in the understanding-of-Being there lies at the same time the fulfillment of the differentiation of Being and beings; that there is Being only if Dasein understands Being. In other words, the possibility that there is Being in the understanding has as its presupposition the factic existence of Dasein, and this again presupposes the factic presence [Vorhandensein] of nature. Precisely in the horizon of the radically posed Being-problem it becomes apparent that

Introduction

15

all of this becomes visible and can be understood as Being, only if a possible totality of beings is already there. From here there is given the necessity of a peculiar problematic which now has the being in/as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen]13 as its theme. This new position of questioning [Fragestellung] lies in the essence of ontology itself and arises from out of its overturning [Umschlag], metabole. This problematic I designate as metontology. And here in the region of metontological-existentiell questioning is also the region of the metaphysics of existence. (G26 199; MFL 156) That ‘Being is in the understanding of Being’, and that this understanding (as well as the development of the problem of Being) presupposes the factic existence of Dasein, were the guiding theses of fundamental ontology in Being and Time. What is new, surprising and perplexing, is the assertion that this factic existence ‘presupposes’, as something ‘already there’ the whole of beings, here (to all appearances) identified with the ‘presence of nature’. What this ‘presupposition’ entails, and thus what is at stake in the ‘overturning’ of fundamental ontology remain obscure until Heidegger elaborates on how the new problematic should not be construed. He warns against an understanding of the new problematic as something like a new discipline within a philosophic system. This misunderstanding is fostered by the ‘systematic’ procedure of fundamental ontology, i.e., the ‘existential analytic’. In order to dispel this assumption, Heidegger calls attention to the fact that all analysis is undertaken within and out of an experience of the whole of what is to be takenapart – in other words, he points to what in Being and Time was conceived as the ‘ontic-existentiell rootedness’ of existential-ontological (analytical) understanding. Heidegger says, ‘One may not throw together the pedantry of a schema with the rigor of questioning and one must be clear that in the analytic we grasp only that which already lies at the ground in every analytical approach as primordial unity and wholeness, as a synthesis, which we have not explicitly executed beforehand, but rather one which is, as it were, always already fulfilled by us and with us, insofar as we exist’ (G26 202; MFL 157–58). In Being and Time, the existential analytic takes its departure from the guiding ‘idea’ of a whole (the ‘idea of Existenz’). The ‘idea’ – and the findings of its analytic – are subsequently justified through an interpretation of the possible ‘fundamental experience’ of existence as a whole, i.e., the possibility of Dasein’s capacity-for-being-a-whole. The description of the possibility of authentic historical existence (and all that belongs to it: being-towards-death, being-guilty, authentic being-temporal in the moment of vision and authentic being-historical) serves the methodological need to demonstrate that the ontological project of the idea of existence (and thereby fundamental ontology) is no arbitrary, ‘free-floating’, ‘fantastic’ idea, but rather arises from the ground of experience.14 In fundamental ontology, it should be emphasized, the ‘synthesis’ that makes the analytic possible expressly concerns Dasein’s ‘capacity-for-being-whole’, a capacity that is fulfilled

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when Dasein exists authentically.15 Heidegger argues that this wholeness is neither derivative nor constructed but ‘primordial’. In light of the problem of wholeness in Being and Time, the development and ‘overturning’ of fundamental ontology in the new problematic of das Seiende im Ganzen manifests itself as a ‘turning back’ (zurückkehren) to explicate a yet more primordial and comprehensive wholeness (‘synthesis’): the position of factic (historical) existing Dasein in the midst of the whole of beings. This position in the whole is at once ‘prior to’ and more comprehensive than the project of authentic existence. The existential-ontological determination of what constitutes authentic existence is then preserved in the new problematic. But now authenticity is no longer treated primarily as a mode of self-relation (Dasein’s authentic projection of possibilities), but rather as a distinctive way in which Dasein is ‘heldout-into’ (Hingehaltenheit) or ‘exposed’ (ausgesetzt) in the whole of beings. Heidegger gives one final characterization of the new problematic in relation to fundamental ontology. ‘Fundamental ontology is this whole of founding and developing ontology; the former is (1) the analysis of Dasein, and (2) the analysis of the temporality of Being. But the temporal analysis is at the same time the turning [Kehre] in which ontology itself explicitly runs back into the metaphysical ontic [metaphysische Ontik] in which it implicitly always remains’ (G26 201; MFL 158). The new problematic thus develops from out of fundamental ontology (existential analytic) by returning to its as yet unexplicated ‘origin’. This development is undertaken in the lectures that follow Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. In the execution of this problematic, however, Heidegger neither runs through the whole founding and development of fundamental ontology that has been laid out above, nor does he assume that his auditors have done so. Rather, with each new lecture course, Heidegger initiates a new beginning by leading students directly from their factic situation ‘back into’ their position in the midst of das Seiende im Ganzen. The philosophic problems concerning this whole then arise from out of this experience of the factic situation. Consider, for example, What is Metaphysics?, the most familiar of the lectures in which what we call ‘the new pedagogy’ is carried out. Heidegger proceeds in the following way: first, he places the factic situation of the teachers and students at the university in question (asking ‘What happens with us when science has become our passion?’); second, he shows how the fundamental attunement of angst implicitly underlies and attunes their activity by situating them in the midst of the whole of beings – thus placing them before the nothing; and, third, he unfolds the manner in which this experience of the nothing is essential to the scientific investigation of beings.

Philosophic Pedagogy and Spiritual Leadership The problem of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy, as it has been presented thus far, concerns the task of making participation in philosophic questioning

Introduction

17

possible for others. Heidegger’s approach to this task emerges most clearly when the problem is construed in terms of the immediate relation between the philosopher and his students, auditors or readers. At the same time, however, attention to this issue shows that the scope of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy is by no means limited to the immediate relation between teacher and student, but rather encompasses the relation of philosophy to the people to which it belongs, and perhaps even a more comprehensive Dasein, the West as a whole. In Being and Time, man, as Dasein, is essentially determined in terms of its ‘preoccupation with Being’. As Dasein is never simply a subsistent individual being but rather is always in some way ‘with’ others, a ‘community’ of Dasein is defined in terms of a shared understanding of Being and this means, at the same time, a shared inheritance of possibilities (ways in which it can-be), and a shared being among beings as such as a whole. Because Dasein’s Being is constituted by historicality, the community is itself essentially historical. According to Introduction to Metaphysics, this implies that the fundamental position (Grundstellung) that defines a people has its ‘inception’ in a moment of unsettling exposure in the ‘realm of the powers of Being’ in which a people is fundamentally threatened and called in question. Such an experience elicits a response on the part of a people’s poets, thinkers and statesmen. A people’s position in the whole of beings is thereby founded (stiften), opened, conceived, established and preserved through their work. However, the order of the world that is thus opened through confrontation with the overwhelming powers of Being inevitably becomes accepted as the whole truth of ‘what is’. In this way, what was questionable, obscure, incipient and open-ended at the inception is silently forgotten. This movement appears to be one of decline. Thus Heidegger asks, ‘How, if such a thing is possible, that man, that peoples, in their greatest acts and powers, have a relation to beings and yet have long since fallen out of Being without knowing that this is the innermost and most powerful ground of their decline?’ (EM 28). By posing the question of Being in the form of the question, ‘how does it stand with Being for us’, Heidegger opens a metaphysical perspective on ‘our’ historical situation. This situation is thus understood out of the historical ‘happening’ (Geschehnis) of inception and decline with respect to Being. At the same time, this very questioning, as an action that itself belongs to this historical happening, can initiate anew the relation to Being which founds a people. ‘Questioning: how does it stand with Being? – that means nothing less than the retrieval [wieder-holen] of the inception of our historical-spiritual Dasein, in order to transform it into the other inception. This is possible. It is even the authoritative [massgebende] form of history, because it begins in the fundamental happening [Grundgeschehnis]’ (EM 29). Although, in this discourse on history, Heidegger does indeed indicate that ‘man’ and ‘peoples’ in general are constituted in their relation to Being, it is clear from the exposition that such general assertions are rooted in a factic

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mode of being-with-one-another that is centred in the immediate situation of speaker and listeners in the lecture hall, a situation which itself implies a belonging to a more comprehensive community – the German Volk – which itself exists as the ‘centre’ in the community of Western peoples. When Heidegger thus calls attention to ‘our historical-spiritual Dasein’ and the possibility of retrieving its inception through ‘our’ questioning, he makes no general theoretical assertion about a state of affairs. This is rather a way in which ‘our’ being-with-oneanother expresses itself and becomes ‘who’ it essentially is. In other words, the discourse of the lecture is a mode of ‘communication’ which opens the factichistorical ‘there’ (Da) of the auditors. As it is defined in Being and Time, such a ‘communication’ is to be construed not as the conveyance of opinions, but rather as the explication of being-with-one-another in the world, a being-with that is always already there, but which here becomes ‘explicitly shared’ in and through communication (SZ 162). Heidegger’s lectures thereby exemplify concretely a mode of communication (formally described in Being and Time) through which the ‘power’ of a people’s destiny (Geschick) is liberated, that is, freed from ‘long-standing error and neglect’ (SZ 384; EM 28). The preceding remarks on the relation between philosophizing and history are drawn primarily from Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, a 1935 lecture course which exhibits the form that Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy takes after Being and Time. The first introductory chapter of this lecture shows how the apparently narrow pedagogical task of ‘introducing’ a philosophic question to others in fact implies a comprehensive task of philosophic ‘leadership’ in human affairs. The discussion here departs from the formulation of what Heidegger calls the ‘fundamental question’ of metaphysics: ‘why are there beings rather than nothing’ (EM 1). The elaboration of this question leads into a treatment of philosophic questioning in general which includes an exposition of the explicitly pedagogical problem of making possible a ‘mutual questioning’ among listeners. Because fundamental questions are not simply given with their utterance, but ‘are’ what they are only in being-asked by Dasein, the introduction of philosophic questioning must cultivate what Heidegger calls the proper disposition of questioning (Fragehaltung) in those who are to truly question. However, in order to awaken such a Fragehaltung as the existentiell presupposition of the questioning, it must itself be ‘clarified’ and ‘secured’. The remainder of the introductory chapter is devoted to this aim and includes both Heidegger’s best known disclosure of the historical situation of philosophic questioning and indeed the clearest statement on how philosophizing, the Fragehaltung, is to be conceived as essentially ‘historical’. Our questioning of the fundamental question is historical [geschichtlich] because it opens the happening [Geschehen] of human Dasein in its essential relations, that is, to beings as such as a whole, and therewith binds it back to the inception that has been. In this questioning our Dasein is called to its

Introduction

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history in the full sense of the word and called to decision in it, and that not subsequently. Rather, the fundamental disposition [Grundhaltung] of the questioning is in itself historical and holds itself in the happening, questioning out of this and for this. (EM 34) The clarification of the Fragehaltung, as a preparation for leading others into a living questioning, is an exhibition of how the question of Being has an ‘inner belonging’ to a world-history that is in its present situation defined by the occurrence of ‘world darkening’ (Weltdüsterung). We will here forego remarks upon Heidegger’s exposition of this event and merely note that this oft-cited characterization of the crisis of the German Volk and Europe before the metaphysical and spiritual threat of America and Russia intends to fulfil the essential ‘pedagogical’ task of clarifying the proper disposition of philosophic questioning.16 At the same time, this statement on what it means to understand the questioning-disposition as ‘historical’ brings out the inner unity of the pedagogical aim and the questioning itself: the questioning not only arises ‘out of’ and maintains itself ‘in’ the happening of Dasein, but is at once ‘for’ this happening – insofar as it ‘opens’ the historical relation of Dasein to the whole. This ‘opening’ is nothing like the cultivation of theoretical perspective on worldhistory, but rather a disclosure of future possibilities of existence in the whole through which the Dasein of the Volk can retrieve its inception. The inner unity of questioning and the pedagogical aim – being ‘for’ the future of a people – suggests that the still obscure necessity through which philosophic questioning is experienced, is at once a necessity of ‘being-for-others’ on a fundamental level – a necessity that Heidegger sometimes presents in the traditional language of ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’ and ‘service’ (Dienst). For example, the Rectoral Address opens with the assertion that spiritual leadership of the university is an ‘obligation’ (Verpflichtung) that the philosopher assumes. One can find many such indications throughout Heidegger’s work that the philosophic Fragehaltung implies a kind of care for (Fürsorge) other Dasein, the Volk, Europe and the West. Further, this solicitude can here be seen to derive from the fact that the questioner and the questioning ‘belong’ to these spheres of being-with in their past and future. Nevertheless, the source, ground and character of this necessity remain vague and undefined. As this solicitude evidently moves Heidegger’s pedagogy through every step, its clarification, to the extent possible, is an especially important task of the following study. In the quotation from Yorck (in Being and Time), the practical aim of philosophy is said to be ‘pedagogical, in the broadest and deepest sense of the word’. No doubt, if the pedagogical intention lies in the task of leading others into the questioning of Being, the term ‘pedagogical’ is here used with a depth far greater than is meant in our common understanding. Likewise, when Heidegger unfolds the implications of the question of Being and thus exhibits the ways in which questioning occurs both ‘out of’ and ‘for’ world-history, philosophic

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pedagogy is shown to have the ‘broadest’ possible compass. Heidegger acknowledges that the exposition of the connection between the questioning of Being and the spiritual fate of the West will seem to be an incredible exaggeration for some listeners. Nevertheless, he insists that this questioning is one in which the fate of ‘our historical Dasein’, Europe and the earth itself is put for a decision. The broad compass of philosophic pedagogy comes to sight in Heidegger’s concluding statement on the significance of the question of Being. Questioning after the beings as such in the whole, the questioning of the question-of-Being, is one of the essential fundamental conditions for an awakening of spirit, and therewith for a primordial world of historical Dasein and therewith for forestalling [Bändigung] the danger of world-darkening and therewith for a taking-over of the historical mission of our people of the Western center. Only in these great traits can we here make clear, that and to what extent the questioning of the question-of-Being is in itself, through and through, historical, and that accordingly, the question as to whether for us Being is to remain a mere vapor or become the fate of the West is anything but an exaggeration and a mere manner of speaking. (EM 38) With this clarification of what it means for philosophy to understand itself ‘historically’, it becomes evident how far removed Heidegger’s orientation is from the conventional historicist view that philosophizing is a derivative expression of a culture. For Heidegger, the historicality of questioning is manifest in its being a condition for an incipient ‘awakening’ and ‘opening’ of Dasein’s position in the whole. This understanding of philosophy thus seems to represent a position antithetical to ordinary historicism insofar as it implies an assertion of the possibility of a kind of founding and philosophic rule within the order of human things. Such a claim is not unprecedented in the philosophic tradition. One can find similar pronouncements in the self-interpretation of philosophers like Descartes, Bacon, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Nietzsche.17 For Heidegger, the questioning of Being is ‘in the service of’ a comprehensive task that might be described as political, in some sense. This task is designated most simply as the ‘salvation of the West’.18 The relation between spiritual leadership and traditional notions of philosophic rule still needs to be clarified. What seems to distinguish Heidegger’s conception of spiritual leadership is that it does not essentially consist in anything like legislation, command or the propagation of a doctrine. Rather, as the remarks from Introduction to Metaphysics indicate, this leadership centres on ‘questioning’ and preparing others to enter this question. In the preceding discussion we have sketched out: (1) how philosophy is essentially a form of practice; (2) how the practice of philosophy is essentially pedagogical insofar as it involves the introduction of the question of Being in the existence of others and (3) how this pedagogical intention is the root of the possibility of the comprehensive, philosophic, spiritual-historical leadership in human affairs.

Introduction

21

Education and Politics This study is not a thematic exposition of the political dimension of Heidegger’s thought. Yet, it may be worth noting that pedagogy has been adopted as the guiding theme of investigation in part because it offers the way into an understanding of the ‘political’ character of Heidegger’s thought – i.e., because it, among all other possible approaches, seems to permit access both to Heidegger’s own conception of the problems that pertain to politics and to the fundamental intentions in his political practice and reflection. A statement from Leo Strauss may help to elucidate my contention that concentration on the pedagogical problem of Heidegger’s work opens the perspective in which Heidegger’s understanding of how the relation between philosophy and the political sphere should be approached. Strauss addresses the questions of why, and how, political things were first taken seriously by philosophers. Prior to Socrates, philosophy initially concerned itself ‘only negatively, only accidentally’ with political things. With Socrates, philosophy began to reflect upon its own possibility. This self-reflection brought to light a hitherto unrecognized way in which the philosophic quest is necessarily related to political life. But philosophy, being an attempt to rise from opinion to science, is necessarily related to the sphere of opinion as its essential starting point, and hence to the political sphere. Therefore the political sphere is bound to advance into the focus of philosophic interest as soon as philosophy starts to reflect on its own doings. To understand fully its own purpose and nature, philosophy has to understand its essential starting point, and hence the nature of political things.19 Strauss’ comment about classical political philosophy inadvertently reveals something of importance about Heidegger’s thought: moral and political themes always arise in the context of Heidegger’s own reflection upon the possibility of philosophy and the attendant clarification of philosophy’s ‘essential starting point’. Moreover, in Heidegger, this clarification of the beginning is undertaken with a view to what we have called the ‘pedagogical’ task of bringing about a ‘living philosophizing’ in other human beings. That task requires that the ‘essential starting point’ be actualized in historical existence. Attention to the problem of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy can thus open access to Heidegger’s own understanding of the essential relation between philosophic questioning and the political sphere. This relation, restated in Heidegger’s own terms, concerns the essential ‘rootedness’ of philosophic questioning in the spiritual-political Dasein of a particular people. As we have argued above, and will emphasize throughout this study, selfreflection on the meaning and possibility of philosophic questioning belongs intrinsically to the essential task of philosophy. Heidegger’s reflection on philosophy’s ‘own doings’ and the clarification of the ‘essential starting point’ do not, to be sure, lead into an attempt to understand the ‘nature of political things’ in the classical sense. It does however intend to disclose, on different

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levels, the essential conditions of philosophizing insofar as they pertain to the Being of the questioner. The reflection on the essential starting point of philosophy, in Heidegger, becomes an explication of the most basic conditions of philosophizing. Such conditions include: the temporality of existence, Dasein’s being-in-the-world, the understanding-of-Being; the possibility of authenticity; the spiritual-historical situation; the fundamental attunements (Grundstimmungen) and experiences (Grunderfahrungen) in which the whole manifests itself; the tradition which hands down the possibilities of questioning and the destiny of the community in which philosophizing is situated. Because these conditions lie in Dasein – a Dasein which is essentially historical – the reflection on philosophy’s own doings leads of necessity to a reflection upon the historical origin of philosophizing with the Greeks (SZ 20–21). Heidegger characterizes this origin in the Rectoral Address. He poses the question of the condition under which ‘science’ – which is here identified with ‘philosophy’ – can ‘truly exist’ both ‘for us’ and ‘through us’ and answers: ‘Only if we place ourselves again under the power of the inception [Anfang] of our spiritual-historical Dasein. This inception is the break-out [Aufbruch] of Greek philosophy. There Western man stands up out of a nationality [Volkstum] and, by virtue of his language, confronts the being as a whole and interrogates and comprehends it as the being which it is’ (SU 11). Here one sees how the reflection on the conditions of philosophy opens up the necessary relatedness of philosophy and Volkstum. Heidegger is primarily concerned here not with the Greeks themselves, but with the significance that the Greek inception has ‘for us’. The Greek beginning is understood as the inception of our Dasein. Heidegger’s injunction that ‘we’ place ‘ourselves’ under the ‘power’ of the inception – that is, actualize the condition of a truly existent philosophizing – requires that teachers and students of the German university understand their own doings in relation to this inception. But crucially, the inception is not to be understood as something that has already happened, as something left behind, or even as something ‘past’ that has important consequences for the present. The power of the inception is, rather, ‘futural’. As Heidegger says, The inception still is. It does not lie behind us as something that was long ago [das längst Gewesene], rather it stands ahead of us. . . . The inception has invaded our future, it stands there, over us as the distant decree, to catch up with its greatness. (SU 13) If the inception is the occurrence through which man stands up ‘out of’ a nationality to experience and question the whole of beings, and if the inception awaits Dasein as a task of its future, then Heidegger’s Rectoral Address intends to prepare teachers and students for this inception. Heidegger thus appeals to a fundamental experience of the whole of beings which emerges out of the students’ own Volkstum. Philosophy then comes to sight as something necessarily and essentially bound to nationality in its origin.

Introduction

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Heidegger nevertheless does not contend that peoples, by themselves, apart from their thinkers and poets, are capable of an openness to the whole in its hiddenness, uncertainty and questionability. The questioning confrontation with the whole originates in an Aufbruch – a ‘break-out’ or ‘eruption’ – from a people’s prevailing relation to beings, a relation defined by a closedness to what philosophers experience as questionable. Disclosure of the whole of beings must take place at once ‘in, out of, and against’ the interpretation of the world in which one has grown (SZ 169). Historical peoples harbour the possibility of a fundamental experience of the whole. Such experiences become awake in poets and thinkers. Their activities respond to and set forth the manifestness (‘truth’) of the whole. Insofar as this manifestness happens through the medium of a people, a Volk, Heidegger designates it as the ‘truth of a Volk’. In his lectures on Hölderlin (1934), Heidegger elaborates upon the way in which the possibilities of philosophizing arise from ‘out of’ a historical people. Philosophy opens, founds and conceives the world of a people. Philosophy can thereby clarify the historical destiny of a people so that it can become what it already and essentially is. Heidegger’s point of departure for this elaboration is an explanation of how the world is ‘opened’ through an experience designated as a ‘fundamental attunement’. In the attunement [Stimmung], there happens the opening exposedness [Ausgesetzheit] to the beings. This also implies that the Dasein of man is in itself already displaced [versetzt] into the Dasein of the other, i.e., [Dasein] only is, how it is, in being-with the others. Dasein is essentially being with, for and against one another. Dasein finds its ground [Boden] and the realm of its decisions and comportments [Haltungen] in accordance with the world that is opened in the ruling fundamental attunement – that is, in the manifestness of that wherein the Dasein is grounded. This being-with-one-another of the Dasein is, according the fundamental character of Dasein, in itself historical and therewith bound to the powers of history and structured [gefügt] through it. The prevailing fundamental attunement and the opening of the whole of beings that happens within it is the origin of that determination which we call the truth of a Volk. The truth of the Volk is the particular manifestness of Being as a whole, according to which the supporting and joining and leading powers receive their rank and are brought into accord. The truth of a Volk is that manifestness of Being out of which the Volk knows what it historically wills, in that it wills itself, it wills to be itself. The fundamental attunement, and that means the truth of the Dasein of a Volk, becomes primordially founded through the poet. The Being of beings that is thus revealed becomes conceived and structured and therewith first opened through the thinker. Being, so conceived, is thus situated within the most extreme and primary seriousness of the beings [ersten Ernst des Seienden], i.e., it is placed in the determinate [be-stimmte] historical truth in which the Volk is brought to itself as a Volk. (G39 143–44)

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In the Rectoral Address, Heidegger intends not only to instruct men of science about the rootedness of their own activity in their own nationality, but also to initiate the questioning of science (philosophy) anew in conjunction with an renewal of the German people. The possibility of philosophizing and the spiritual destiny of a people are intertwined and reciprocally condition one another in the future inception. Thus, Heidegger maintains, ‘Science and the German fate must come to power at once in our will to the essential’ (SU 10). What one could call the central ‘political’ problem in Heidegger has two aspects that cannot be separated: first, the question of how the essential possibilities of philosophizing belong to – are ‘rooted in’ – the historical Dasein of a historical people; second, the question of how the possible greatness of the German people (and, through it, the community of Western peoples) is determined by philosophy as the questioning of Being. Heidegger’s concern with this political problem precedes his involvement in the National Socialist movement, governs his decisions throughout the period of his rectorate and remains vital throughout the subsequent course of his works. The perplexities this problem involves, the scope and diversity of ways in which Heidegger responds to the problem throughout a large number of texts – make it impossible to give here a comprehensive exposition of Heidegger’s treatment of the political problem. Nevertheless, by taking Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy as a theme of investigation, one can disclose the primary considerations that guided Heidegger in his approach to the political problem. In other words, the ‘political’ aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy are essentially ‘pedagogical’. A statement on philosophy’s capacity for ‘leadership’ in human affairs like the following is best approached from out of an understanding of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. What philosophy can be and must be is this: a thinking that opens the paths and perspectives of the knowledge that sets the standards and hierarchies in which and out of which a people conceives its Dasein in the historicalspiritual world and enacts that knowledge which kindles and necessitates every questioning and thereby threatens all values [Schätzen]. (EM 8) This conception of philosophy should be construed as ‘pedagogical’, not only because philosophy indirectly serves historical Dasein, but also because in doing so it is ‘preparatory’, an ‘opening of perspectives of knowing’, a ‘knowing’ that understands itself as a ‘questioning’. My employment of the term ‘pedagogical’ to describe this aspect of Heidegger’s conception of philosophy is, admittedly, not fully satisfactory. The term is employed in order to respond to real difficulties in understanding Heidegger’s position towards matters that we ordinarily understand as ‘political’. One must take into account the degree to which Heidegger departs from common ways of speaking about ‘political things’. Indeed the very word ‘political’ is used very rarely by Heidegger, and then in a derogatory manner, in the

Introduction

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course of interpreting the words of other authors, or in a qualified manner (with constructions like ‘spiritual-political’). Only once, to my knowledge, does Heidegger refer to his own essential activity as ‘political’ and this passage points to the difficulty. Heidegger here speaks of the need to allow Hölderlin’s poetry to become a ‘power in the history of our Volk’. The ‘elucidation’ of Hölderlin’s poetry, that is, the lecture course in which this task is carried out, evidently serves that need. Heidegger then comments on this task: ‘To take part in this is “politics” in the highest and authentic sense, so much so, that whoever accomplishes anything here has no need to talk about the “political”’ (G39 214). On the one hand, then, Heidegger describes his own (pedagogical) activity as ‘politics’ in the highest sense. On the other hand, he suggests that it is misleading to understand the essential in terms of familiar conception of the political.20 This passage highlights an important difference between Heidegger’s thinking and classical political philosophy. For the latter, prephilosophic life is essentially ‘political life’. Moral-political concerns and the language of moral-political distinctions constitute man’s primary relation to the world. Classical political philosophy seems to assume that the political articulation of world has a permanent, ‘natural’ status. Because access to ‘what’ the beings are is given through moral-political concern and discourse, the philosophic pursuit of the truth proceeds through a critical examination of authoritative moral-political opinion. However much philosophic truth breaks from common moral-political opinion by subjecting it to rigorous and radical examination, the pursuit of truth here presupposes a kind of respect for the political understanding of the world. For Heidegger, on the other hand, philosophy does not rely on the ‘self-interpretation’ of prephilosophic existence.21 He thus denies the ‘natural’ status of the political sphere. For political philosophy, it seems, the main question then concerns Heidegger’s ‘essential starting point’. If access to the questionability of Being is not gained through dialectical examination of moral-political opinion, then how? The question about Heidegger’s pedagogy allows one to develop this problem. For Heidegger clarifies the starting point precisely in the attempt to enact a philosophic ‘beginning’ in the existence of others. Two additional considerations highlight the difficulty implied in describing Heidegger’s thought as ‘political’ in any familiar sense. In the first place, Heidegger’s attention is focused primarily on the ‘Volk’, and thus not upon political things as they have been understood in the tradition – for example the political community, regime or state. The essence of a historical Volk, for Heidegger, is something prior to its political organization through the state.22 This approach seems to diminish the importance of the traditional political institutions like the state, the constitution, the regime and laws. In the second place, Heidegger speaks about matters that are usually associated with ‘politics’ from an apparently non-political perspective. For example, Heidegger approaches the ‘Volk’ as the medium through which the ‘manifestness of Being as a whole’ emerges. Accordingly, the philosopher and poet are accorded a

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more important role than the state-founder in determining the ‘destiny’ of the Volk (G39 144). The suggestion that an examination of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy may prepare us for an understanding of his ‘politics’ (in the ‘authentic sense’) finds additional support in the fact that almost all of Heidegger’s so-called political activities and statements during his involvement with the National Socialist movement explicitly concerned questions of education. As ‘spiritual leader’ of Freiburg, Heidegger delivered numerous speeches about the essence of the university, the demands placed upon the genuine student, and the role that ‘labour-service’ should play in proper education of students. After stepping down as rector, Heidegger delivered an important address on the history of the German university. In later years, Heidegger consistently explained that his involvement was primarily determined from out of his preoccupation with the fate of the university and the problem of education generally. Critics have suggested that Heidegger’s explanation was an intentionally misleading attempt to conceal the depth of his commitment behind the guise of ordinary academic preoccupations. However that may be, a reading of the documents from the period in question suggests that Heidegger’s whole concern – reflective and practical – with the political is subordinate to a concern with ‘education’, albeit an education understood, once again, in the ‘widest and deepest sense’ (as Heidegger quotes Yorck on the pedagogical standpoint of philosophy). This point is confirmed in a 1934 address where Heidegger describes what he then saw as the essential (potential) possibilities of the National Socialist movement. The fundamental character of the new spiritual-political movement, which goes through the Volk is that of an education [Erziehung] and reeducation [Umerziehung] of the Volk to the Volk through the state. Should not the task for the highest school arise immediately from here, where it concerns the deepest and broadest education? (G16 304) Given this connection between the ‘spiritual-political’ and the broadest ‘education’, a study of Heidegger’s pedagogy may help clarify the grounds of Heidegger’s ‘politics’. Moreover, if Heidegger’s intentions in assuming the rectorate of Freiburg were inseparable from the pedagogical intentions that determine Being and Time and subsequent lecture courses, then the catastrophic failure of his rectorate raises important questions about the assumptions underlying the earlier pedagogy. We will return to this issue in the epilogue to this study.

Why Study Heidegger? Even if a thematic exposition of Heidegger’s pedagogy may contribute to an understanding of what is necessary in order to gain entry to the question of

Introduction

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Being, the need to attend to the question of Being and Heidegger’s thought in general is not thereby demonstrated, but rather remains something presupposed. Such a need can become compelling as one first becomes familiar with Heidegger’s insight into the forces that form the historical world in which we reside. The initial exposure to Heidegger’s writings awakens the sense that his reflection upon the age clarifies the truth of the situation in which we find ourselves today. Heidegger and Nietzsche (in confrontation with whom this reflection is carried out) describe this situation in various terms: the death of God, the darkening of the world (Weltdüsterung) and the onset of planetary nihilism. Their descriptions may awaken a sense of recognition, yet one which implies nothing in the way of a resolution of the difficulties inherent in their interpretation of nihilism, difficulties that must be faced if any genuine assessment of their thought is to be undertaken. To the contrary, the understanding of their teaching is inherently perplexing. The need to confront such difficulties arises out of the experience of recognition itself. With Heidegger, as with Nietzsche before him, nihilism is not itself a philosophical teaching, nor is it something brought about through philosophic critique of the tradition. It rather names the ‘fundamental movement of the history of the West’, ruling two millennia and determining the contemporary epoch (Hw 214). Nietzsche and Heidegger experience, name and interpret this movement at the moment in which it appears. In this historical period, nihilism manifests itself as a process in which the standards, aims, grounds and gods lose their evidence and binding power. Both particular crises (in the foundations of philosophy, science, morality, politics, religion, education) and the world catastrophes of the past century are experienced as consequences of this formerly unrecognized movement of the history of the West. Thus nihilism itself does not affect particular regions of human concern, nor even just what is human. The crisis is ‘total’, comprehensive in scope; for nihilism determines the whole of what is. This can be gleaned from Heidegger’s description of what world-darkening as an event entails: the destruction of the earth, the massification of man and the flight of the gods (in other words: the natural, the human and the divine as a whole) (EM 34). Nihilism affects any criteria that determine what is important or unimportant, necessary or dispensable. Every decision about what is worth knowing is situated within the horizon of possibilities opened up by this event. If we recognize our situation in Heidegger’s description, then some matters of interest close themselves off. As an all-encompassing event, the awareness of nihilism exposes the problematic nature of any preoccupation, in any field of activity, that has not realized the possibility of its own groundlessness. For all measures (the given goals, standards, laws, teachings, gods and authorities) in relation to which the worth of any activity is justified, may be without grounding in reality. Simply in directing our attention to this predicament, Nietzsche and Heidegger impart the necessity of confronting the problematic on the comprehensive and fundamental plane of their own thinking.23 Nietzsche calls the effect that his

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thought works in arousing awareness of this state of affairs the ‘seduction of truth’. Through this, all given foundations and aims are inexorably drawn into question. The relatively small concerns of ordinary politics ineluctably give way to ‘great politics’ (Ni 629). With the recognition of the possibility of nihilism, particular concerns and problematics that reside in the space of aims which, as Heidegger here says, ‘one lets stand as valid’, lose their importance. At the same time, comprehensive questions become inescapable. Nietzsche and Heidegger not only first awaken the necessity of this reflection on the problem of nihilism. Through their writings, they hold open the possibilities for self-reflection even when the ‘world catastrophes’ that attend the initial unfolding of nihilism recede from attention, when the crisis of the West is no longer self-evident, when technological functioning attains a level of perfection, when a general belief in historical progress is reinstated (if not as a philosophic teaching), and, finally, when nihilism thus becomes the ‘normal condition’ of humanity (G9 392). Through experience of nihilism, then, all philosophic positions which do not respond to the fundamental and comprehensive questions that nihilism force upon us lose their significance. At the same time however, possibilities for reflection other than Heidegger’s have emerged and demand consideration on the grounds of their own depth and comprehensiveness. For us, these alternatives have been opened on the basis of the initial awareness of nihilism which has been conveyed through Heidegger’s work. The very presence of such alternatives then fosters the necessity of gaining clarity about Heidegger’s own problematic, the questioning of Being, and thus of understanding how one secures entry to this questioning. Among any alternative approaches, however, Heidegger’s inquiry retains a priority for us in that it opens the space and determines the situation in which the other interpretations appear as compelling alternatives. For Heidegger an understanding of this situation is an essential component of the inquiry into Being. An attempt to decide between Heidegger’s position and the different alternatives that it has influenced would therefore require an engagement in Heidegger’s inquiry, an engagement which goes beyond our initial exposure to and familiarity with his writings. The following examination of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy intends to serve the aim of clarifying Heidegger’s own understanding of what this inquiry demands from the student.

Chapter 1

Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy’

In addition to the major treatises like Being and Time and shorter essays, Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe contains transcripts of lecture courses originally delivered to university undergraduates. Many of these lectures exhibit the titles, form and content of general introductions to philosophy and philosophic problems; e.g., Einleitung in die Philosophie, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Einführung in die Metaphysik and Grundfragen der Philosophie. These lecture courses do not simply deliver an ‘introduction’, but also devote considerable attention to laying out what the task of an ‘introduction to philosophy’ itself involves in the way of aims, obstacles and procedures. Thereby, the task of ‘introduction’ is approached as a problem in its own right. The ‘introductory’ discussions of such lectures do not necessarily represent a preliminary, easily comprehensible stage which is soon thereafter surpassed as more important matters are taken up. Rather, Heidegger takes advantage of the constraints imposed by his academic position as a teacher – e.g., the official duty to deliver lectures and to ‘introduce’ beginning students to academic subjects through such lectures – in order to execute his deepest philosophic intentions. One lecture course in particular, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1928), stands out for the way in which it at once proposes to carry out an ‘introduction to philosophy’ and, at the same time, takes up the question as to the possibility, necessity and procedure of this task. A brief consideration of the introductory chapter of this text may help to bring into focus the basic traits of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. Thereby it will enable us pose the questions about this guiding theme that will then be developed and explored in subsequent chapters.

The Task of Introduction: Einleitung in die Philosophie This lecture course opens with a critique of the conventional approach to an academic ‘introduction to philosophy’. A conventional introduction, according to Heidegger, gives a general representation of the nature of philosophy as a field of knowledge. It presents an overview of the history of philosophy and, since philosophy is never simply a historical discipline, a study of the problems

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and the corresponding disciplines devoted to them (logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc.). The basic assumption as to what an adequate introduction requires is here not peculiar to philosophy, but is the same for all sciences or fields of study. The need for beginners to be ‘led in’ to philosophy here assumes that they initially stand ‘outside’ of this ‘field’. It is commonly expected that, by means of such an introduction, the student will acquire a basic understanding of this important field of science and culture. It is presumed that the student will thereby have been introduced to philosophy and have fulfilled a requirement of his general education. Yet, Heidegger maintains, this ordinary approach fails in the decisive respect even, or especially, if it does give students the opinion that by this course they have been introduced to philosophy. The failure arises, first, on the basis of the opinion that philosophy is an enclosed field of specific subjects of knowledge and, second, from the attendant assumption that the starting point for an introduction lies ‘outside’ philosophy so conceived. Heidegger rejects these underlying assumptions and counters with an assertion regarding the nature of ‘philosophy’. In an intentionally paradoxical manner, this assertion expresses a fundamental presupposition, not only of the task of a proper academic introduction, but of Heidegger’s thought generally. But we are indeed not ‘outside’ of philosophy, although not because we already have some knowledge [Kenntnisse] about philosophy. Even if we expressly know nothing of philosophy, we are already in philosophy, because philosophy is in us and belongs to us, indeed in the sense that we are always already philosophizing. We philosophize even when we know nothing about it, even if we do not busy ourselves with philosophy. We philosophize not now and then, but rather constantly and necessarily, insofar as we exist as human beings. To be as man, means philosophizing. The animal cannot philosophize and need not philosophize. A god, who philosophized, would be no god, because the essence of philosophy is to be a finite possibility of a finite being. (G27 3) This hyperbolic broadening of ‘philosophy’ from the conventional idea of it as a special field of knowledge to a virtual identification of ‘philosophizing’ with human existence as such is not intended to eliminate the necessity of ‘introduction’ itself but to revise our understanding of the character of what introduction and education should be.1 For the identification of philosophizing and existence does not imply a cancellation of the movement that inheres in the notion of Ein-leitung. While ‘to be human means already to philosophize’, indeed such that philosophizing is somehow latent or implied in all ways of human existence,2 it does not follow that philosophizing is explicitly enacted in human existence. Man as such already stands ‘in’ philosophy. However, in an important qualification of this thesis, man does so in different degrees of ‘wakefulness’. In this way, the task of introduction is formulated anew as one of

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‘awakening’, letting-happen (Geschehenlassen), liberation and ‘bringing underway’ (ins Gang bringen), of a possibility that lies dormant ‘in’ Dasein. Hence the assertion that man philosophizes ‘insofar as he exists’ does not preclude that philosophy is at once a distinctive possibility which, as it were, becomes what it truly is, ‘the innermost necessity of our ownmost essence’ and ‘what gives this essence its ownmost dignity’ (Würde) in being ‘seized’ (ergreifen). Such a seizure and enactment of the possibility of philosophy in determinate, historically existing Dasein – i.e., the ‘we here and now’ of Heidegger’s discourse – requires however a ‘pre-understanding’ of what philosophy is; for this, the preceding assertions regarding the relation between the essence of philosophy and the essence of man do not suffice. As Heidegger says: Philosophizing ought to be brought underway in the Dasein. But human Dasein indeed never exists in general [im allgemeinen] but rather every Dasein exists, if it exists, as itself. Philosophizing should be brought to a happening [Geschehen] in our Dasein. In our Dasein – but also not in general, but rather in our Dasein now and here, in this moment [Augenblick] and in the perspectives which this moment has, in which we prepare ourselves to act from out of philosophy. Philosophy ought to become free in us and within this situation [Lage]. But in which situation? – In that, which primarily and essentially determines the existence of our Dasein, i.e., our choosing, willing, doing and letting. (G27 5–6) By this point, the primary way in which Heidegger’s ‘introduction’ distinguishes itself from the conventional academic task of assisting others to become familiar with a distinct subject matter has become clear: the task is that of enacting philosophizing as a possibility, a way of existence, a historical occurrence (Geschehen) ‘in our Dasein now and here’. The substitution of ‘philosophizing’ for ‘philosophy’ as the goal of the task of introduction further highlights not only the manner in which it is essentially a kind of action, but moreover, the fact that it truly is what it is only in being seized and brought underway by ‘us’ in the particular historical situation. Historicism and conventional opinion assume that philosophy is a given, established element of culture, tradition, education or the institution of science. Heidegger counters this assumption insofar as he presents philosophy as something radically and totally rooted in the free ‘choosing, willing, doing and letting’ of the historical moment.3 This appeal to philosophy as a historical happening (Geschehen) here anticipates the focus of the Rectoral Address on the question ‘if science should exist, and should exist for us, and through us, then under what conditions can science truly exist’ (SU 10). The goal of a conventional introduction – to arrive at a general understanding of philosophy itself – is still preserved in Heidegger’s introduction, yet it is radicalized. For the arrival at a ‘pre-understanding’ is not itself the ultimate aim, but rather a subordinate yet decisive moment in making philosophizing possible; it is thus a kind of preparation for self-determination. Hence the

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‘essence’ of philosophy is to be determined in direct relation to the historically situated and particular ‘us’ of the lecture hall. The determination of ‘what’ philosophy is becomes conjoined with the task of understanding ‘who we are’, i.e., it involves a self-reflection which is at the same time an act of self-determination. Up to this point, the task of an ‘introduction’ to philosophy consists in: (1) a critique of conventional assumptions about what philosophy is and what ‘introduction’ to it (i.e., education) requires; (2) a provisional, yet ungrounded statement regarding the essence of philosophy as something that inheres in the essence of man; (3) the awakening and seizure of philosophy as a possibility of ‘our’ historical existence; (4) the acquisition of a concrete ‘pre-understanding’ of philosophy in relation to the historical situation that is requisite for the enactment of this possibility; (5) reflection aimed at determining the ‘situation’ of awakening and seizure and (6) the awakening and seizure itself. Taken together, these interrelated steps involved in bringing philosophizing underway do not simply represent a distinct, definite stage of philosophizing which is to be succeeded by steps that follow the introduction. Rather, the circle of problems implied in the task of introduction lead into, open up upon, and ultimately encompass the whole, not only the whole of philosophy but Dasein’s position within the whole of beings (das Seiende im Ganzen). Thus, those texts of Heidegger’s which present themselves as an ‘introduction to . . . ’ never advance beyond the steps provisionally laid out as integral moments of introduction. The introduction to philosophy has a comprehensive scope because, while philosophizing is to be seized as a particular possibility of historically situated Dasein, it is yet a ‘fundamental’ or grounding possibility (Grundmöglichkeit) – it is a determinate possibility of being which is explicitly oriented towards the whole of beings as such; it relates to the whole as such explicitly insofar as it exists in a questioning of what beings as such are. Initiating the movement of introduction, Heidegger first here determines the historical situation in which ‘we’ stand, the situation out of which the concrete pre-understanding of the essence of philosophy is to be developed and thus the situation in which that possibility can be enacted. The ‘situation’ of which, out of which and in which the lecturer speaks is addressed in the nearest, most immediate sense: it is the site of the lecture itself, the common existence of teachers and students at the German university. Developing an understanding of the situation in terms of the powers that now determine our whole existence – powers in relation to which philosophy is to be provisionally articulated – Heidegger briefly explicates what is implied in the very presence of students within the university. This is interpreted, notably, according to its moral and political meaning. From the outset their attendance at the university is understood to arise from the obligation (Bindung) implied in the claim to the academic civil right (akademische Bürgerrecht) through which students attend the university.4 The claim to this right is a decision (Entscheidung) concerning one’s vocation (Beruf), here defined not in terms of an external position in life, but rather ‘the inner task, which itself gives Dasein its existence in and as a whole

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and in everything essential’ (G27 6). It is not denied that the historical actuality of a vocation requires an external public position and must be in some way embodied in institutions, but this is held to be of subordinate significance. Although the vocation decided upon with entry into the university is such an ‘inner task’, it is not simply a matter of individual choice. Insofar as it involves the claim (Anspruch) to a civil right to education, it implies a duty to the historical community. Here Heidegger presents a decisive statement on what he will call in the Rectoral Address philosophy’s duty to ‘spiritual leadership’ in the historical community. It should be kept in mind that this statement occurs in context of an introduction to philosophy and thus of the task of acquiring a pre-understanding of philosophy from out of the powers which determine Dasein ‘now and here’. This important statement will be quoted at length because succeeding chapters of our study consist in an exploration of and elaboration upon themes touched upon here. To what extent have we given our Dasein a particular vocation with the claim to the academic civil right? With this claim – insofar as we understand it in general – we have planted in our Dasein the duty [Verpflichtung] to take over something like leadership [Führerschaft] in the current whole of historical being-with-one-another. Under this, we do not understand the external assumption of a so-called leading post in the area of public life, not that we perhaps here and there play the role of administrator or director, but rather leadership is the duty to an existence which in certain ways understands the possibilities of human Dasein more primordially and in this understanding ought be a model or example [Vorbild]. In order to be an example, however, it is in no way required that someone belong among the prominent. Even less does this leadership already without further ado include a moral superiority to others – to the contrary, the responsibility, which precisely such uncontrollable and absolutely non-public [unöffentliche] leadership carries, is a constant and sharpened opportunity for the moral failure of the individual. Why does there now lie precisely in the actual belonging to the university a peculiar claim to such leadership? It results from the fact that the university, through the care for scientific research and in the communication of a scientific education [Bildung], prepares the possibility for a new position in the whole of the world [Stellung im Ganzen der Welt], in which all relations of Dasein to beings experience a transformation [Wandlung] and Dasein can become related [verwandter] in new ways to all things – although they need not do so – because a proper transparency and enlightenment comes into Dasein. That we know more, and perhaps better, about some things than others do, that we acquire qualifications and examination certificates, is completely irrelevant. But that the whole of Dasein become ruled by an inner merit [Vorzug], which in itself is something none of us has earned, that thus in its primordial grounds science develops in us the possibility of an inconspicuous and therefore all the more effective leadership in the whole of

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Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy human community [im Ganzen der menschlichen Gemeinschaft] determines the moment [Augenblick] of our contemporary Dasein. Science and leadership, both in this unity, are accordingly the powers under which our Dasein – if it has in general some clarity – is now placed, not in the sense of a transitory episode, but rather as a unique stage, which essentially determines the singularity of our Dasein. If we want to let philosophy become free in our Dasein here and now, and if it is the task of introduction to bring philosophizing underway then we will also acquire a certain understanding as to what philosophy means from out of this situation. This pre-understanding, which we proximally need, must be procured out of an illumination of the essence of philosophy in its relation to science and leadership. Leadership determines the vocation of your Dasein, simply because you already exist at the university. But leadership here means: having disposal over higher and richer possibilities of human existence, which are not imposed on the others, but indeed become exemplified [vor-gelebt] unobtrusively, and so with singular effectiveness. This concealed exemplification of genuine leadership [Vorbildlichkeit echter Führerschaft] requires its own clarity and security, i.e., Dasein needs to renew constantly a reflection on its fundamental position [Grundstellung] towards the whole of beings [zum Ganzen des Seienden], yet a reflection which is determined immediately out of the current historical situation of Dasein and so is effective within it. What thus lies in leadership – and indeed not only in it – we call world-view [Welt-anschauung]. So the task of acquiring a pre-understanding of philosophy from out of the current determining powers of our Dasein means nothing else than to pose the question: how does philosophy comport itself to leadership, Weltanschauung and science? (G27 7–8)

In summary, the participation of the students in academic study carries with it a certain communal obligation to exercise an inconspicuous leadership through example; a leadership grounded in the fact that philosophy involves a privileged understanding of the whole of human possibilities and, correspondingly, exemplifies and reflects upon the fundamental position of Dasein in the whole of the world. Thereby the need to determine the situation of ‘our Dasein’ at the university is fulfilled through consideration of these determining powers: leadership and science. As a pre-condition for the enactment of the possibility of philosophy, introduction requires the acquisition of a concrete pre-understanding of what philosophy itself is. This pre-understanding will be gained through the thematic discussion of, first, the relation between philosophy and science, and of, second, the relation between philosophy and Weltanschauung. This order of topics then determines the structure of the lecture course itself. Having thus given an overview of this presentation of the task of an introduction to philosophy, it is now possible to return and consider in more depth points made within this discussion which will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. Such an elaboration

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is a necessary and fruitful undertaking because it is characteristic of Heidegger’s introductory presentations to make simple statements on matters of fundamental importance without extensive elucidation in the introductions themselves. These preliminary assertions are often developed by Heidegger more directly in chapters that follow the introductions or indeed, in other writings. Accordingly, three such points made in the first chapter of Einleitung and mentioned above require further clarification. First, the thesis that the possibility of philosophy essentially belongs to Dasein; second, that this possibility is something that must be ‘liberated’, brought underway and awakened; and third, that such an awakening of fundamental possibilities involves the assumption of a kind of leadership in a historical community. In what follows, we seek clarification of these traits of philosophic pedagogy by turning to both those texts where they are thematically discussed and to those texts in which such traits are indirectly exhibited in practice, i.e., in the course of Heidegger’s teaching.

Philosophy and the Essence of Man Over and against the conventional view, for which philosophy is a specialized field of study from which the student is initially removed and into which entry must be gained, Heidegger asserts that in fact ‘we are already in philosophy, because philosophy is in us and belongs to us and indeed in the sense that we are always already philosophizing. . . . To be as man means philosophizing’ (G27 3). Whereas philosophy is commonly understood to be one academic discipline among others, Heidegger, in contrast, presents philosophy as something in which Dasein is always engaged whether this is acknowledged or not. Philosophizing is thus depicted in terms that are so comprehensive as to be almost wholly indeterminate. Indeed, Heidegger says that philosophy inheres in those ways of existence that are usually distinguished from philosophy: myth, religion, poetry and science. Yet still, philosophy is not here left wholly indeterminate and universal, for Heidegger emphasizes that it is peculiar to human existence. Philosophy, as a ‘finite possibility of a finite being’, is limited to and even somehow defines the essence of man. These statements are merely provisional (later to be qualified in Einleitung5) and must be viewed in their context as the prelude to an extensive attempt to define what philosophy is (which is itself a preparation for the enactment of philosophy). Nevertheless, it is possible to clarify the apparent obscurity of this identity of ‘philosophizing’ and ‘human existence as such’ in formal terms by way of reference to the basic theses of Being and Time. In the latter, ‘Dasein’ is distinctive among all other beings in that it is preoccupied with (geht um) Being and possesses an understanding-of-Being (SZ 12). This understanding makes possible every manner in which one can comport oneself towards beings – towards worldly and natural things, other Dasein, and oneself. To ‘exist’, according to Heidegger, means to have this distinctive relation to Being. Everything

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Dasein is and does moves within this ultimate condition of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is thus here essentially defined in terms of this distinctive way of relating to Being. On the other hand, in places where Heidegger gives a more formal definition of philosophy, the latter is understood as a comportment toward Being. For instance, in a 1927 lecture Heidegger says, ‘It is in ontology, i.e., philosophy, that Being becomes explicitly and specifically a thematic object. Accordingly, philosophy becomes the freely undertaken task of elucidating and unfolding the understanding-of-Being which belongs to the essence of human existence’ (PIK 26). And so both the essence of Dasein and philosophy are presented as ways in which Dasein stands in a distinctive relation to Being. The identity of the ‘essence of Dasein’ and ‘philosophy’ – implied in the statement (in Einleitung) that Dasein philosophizes ‘insofar as it exists’ (i.e., insofar as it understands Being) – does not foreclose the possibility of defining philosophy in a stricter sense: as an explicit (ausdrücklich) comportment to Being ‘as such’. If philosophy is understood as a thematic, directed, conceptual investigation into the phenomenon of Being, it can be distinguished from the implicit, a priori relation to Being that constitutes pre-philosophic existence. But what is the intent behind the strong and (in light of later qualifications) exaggerated identification of philosophy and man’s essential Being? By locating philosophy in what is most distinctive, highest and necessary in Dasein – i.e., the understanding-of-Being – philosophy itself is presented in its rank, dignity, necessity and fundamental importance. Thereby, the distinction between the true ‘introduction to philosophy’ and an ordinary introduction to a science is justified. However, the attribution of philosophy to the essence of man is not, as it may first appear, the establishment of something uncertain upon an ‘essence’ taken as a secure foundation; it is not the presentation of something less well known in terms of what is known better. For, in conjoining the essence of man and philosophy, Heidegger calls attention to the reciprocal character of this relation. On the one hand, philosophy is in a way subordinated to the essence of Dasein, it is said to essentially belong to the latter and be grounded therein. But, on the other hand, philosophizing is for Heidegger an exemplary possibility, a possibility in which the essence of man most fully shows itself. Hence the traits of the Being of Dasein which are highlighted in Heidegger’s thought – finitude, temporality, historicality, being-in truth and untruth – come to sight most clearly within, and are explicated in terms of, the fundamental experiences (Grunderfahrungen) of philosophizing. Indeed, philosophic existence is the guiding clue for the interpretation of Dasein in general. In Being and Time, the questioning of Being begins with the analytic of the being ‘Dasein’ not only because Dasein essentially possesses the understanding of Being, but at the same time because ‘to work out the question of Being, we must make a being – the questioner – transparent in his own Being’ (SZ 7; BT 27). If the philosophic interpretation of Dasein is in fact the self-interpretation of Dasein as questioner, the grounding of philosophizing itself in the existence of

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Dasein is in no way an effort to establish this problematic activity on a firm, self-evident ground. Perhaps such a grounding could be viewed in that way if the reference to the essence of man were an appeal to the traditional ideas of man; yet such ideas are subject to critique at the outset of the analytic of Dasein. The attribution of philosophizing to the essence of man thus does not serve to anchor an otherwise dubious venture, but rather to accentuate the precariousness, obscurity and problematic nature of philosophizing itself. As Heidegger says in a 1929 lecture: We are uncertain about philosophizing. Could not philosophy have its intrinsic and ultimate certainty precisely in this? No, for the fact that we are uncertain about philosophizing is not some accidental property of philosophy in relation to us, but belongs to philosophy itself, if indeed it is a human activity. Its truth is essentially that of human Dasein. The truth of philosophizing is co-rooted in the fate of Dasein. But this Dasein happens [geschieht] in freedom. Its possibility, change, and situation are dark. It stands before possibilities which it does not foresee. It is subjected to a change which it does not know. It moves constantly in a situation which it does not have power over. All that, which belongs to the existence of Dasein, belongs just as essentially to the truth of philosophy. (G29/30 28; FCM 19; emphasis added) Heidegger in a way inverts the Cartesian teaching about the relation between the ‘certainty’ of thinking (science) and the certainty of human existence. For Descartes the foundational self-certainty of man as subject is established through the certainty of the ‘I think’. This then provides a secure basis for science. For Heidegger, the questionability and uncertainty of Dasein’s Being is evinced in the uncertainty of philosophizing. But what are the implications of this insistence on the ‘uncertainty’ of both philosophizing and existence? In the first place, Heidegger conceives both the possibility of philosophizing and the ‘essence’ of Dasein to be phenomena that do not exist unconditionally. The true Being of these phenomena lies in their being possessed by Dasein. Possession requires an act of ‘seizure’ (ergreifen), an ‘appropriation’, which enables these phenomena to become what they ‘are’. Both an ‘essence’ and the possibility of philosophizing are said to belong to Dasein. But the manner of ‘belonging’ is here is open to modification. Heidegger articulates this in terms of contrasts between what is explicit (ausdrücklich) and implicit (unausdrücklich), awake and asleep, gained (gewinnen) and lost (verlieren), unconcealed and concealed, authentic (or ‘owned’) and inauthentic (or expropriated). Accordingly, the ‘essential’ is conceived as both conditional and susceptible to modification. This understanding of the term departs markedly from its meaning in Husserl’s phenomenology, where ‘essence’ connotes the invariant meaning that becomes accessible to theoretical intuition. For Heidegger, the ‘essence’ designates the ‘sense of Being’ – the way or ‘how’ in which something ‘is’. Here ‘Being’ exhibits its own kind of movement. Rather than being invariant, like a

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class-character, essence ‘happens’ (geschieht). The ‘essence’ of human Dasein itself possesses certain distinctive kinds of motility which are variously described as existence (taken primordially as ‘standing out’ beyond itself in the world and among beings which it is not, and in having or existing as a past and future), transcendence (Übersteigen) (a movement of stepping-over beyond beings in preoccupation with their presence and understanding what and how they are), temporalizing (Zeitigung) and, more frequently, Geschehen, translated variously as ‘historizing’, happening or occurrence. For example, Heidegger says in the lecture, What is Metaphysics?: ‘The human Dasein can only comport itself to beings, if it holds itself into the Nothing. The going-out over the being happens [geschieht] in the essence of the Dasein’ (G9 121; emphasis added). This emphasis upon the movement within the ‘essence’ helps us to further understand the paradoxical identification of philosophizing – which presents itself as a human activity – with the ‘essence’ of man, as well as the thesis that this Wesen can be historical (geschichtlich).6 Such movement, designated as happening or ‘historizing’ (geschehen), while it does indeed imply an openness to determination, never suggests a possibility of an ontic alteration in human nature (such as might be entertained by Fichte or Marx as the consequence of overcoming nature through the exercise of reason in morality, science and labour). Modification of essence is rather here understood as a movement of unconcealing and concealing of the being at issue. Hence, while philosophizing occurs ‘in the essence of Dasein’, this essence undergoes modifications which correspond to the ways in which beings as a whole are manifest or unconcealed. For example, Heidegger places special emphasis on a modification ‘in’ the essence of man that comes to pass in the historical inception of philosophizing itself. At this inception, man for the first time truly ‘exists’ – i.e., understands Being – explicitly insofar as he comports himself to beings ‘as such’ through the act of questioning what they are. Thus the ‘the Ek-sistenz of historical man’, according to Heidegger, ‘begins [anfängt] in that moment, when the first thinker in a questioning manner confronts the unconcealment of the being with the question as to what the being is’ (G9 189). Hence the existence (the distinctive mode of Being) of man, can undergo a ‘beginning’. It can undergo a fundamental modification (an ‘awakening’ as Heidegger elsewhere calls it) which in no way corresponds to anything like a prehistorical, ontic genesis of ‘man’ from out of pre-human life. Rather, this ‘awakening’ as an event, takes place in the original historical inception of the possibility of philosophizing and involves an initial exposure to the whole of beings as such in its manifestness and hiddenness (i.e., as questionable). There is then a fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, an ontological ‘awakening’ in which the understanding-of-Being is affected and, on the other hand, an ‘ontic’ genesis in which beings themselves change. The pre-Platonic philosophers, for Heidegger, did not experience or grasp this distinction (see G27 385–86). Falling prey to a natural tendency of the understanding, they sought, through the question about ‘Being’, an explanation for the ontic origins

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or causes of the world. Pre-Platonic philosophers told a ‘story’ about how all things came to be from out of primal beings.7 Neither the original unconcealing of existence, nor the occurrence of the unconcealing of other beings – an event Heidegger calls ‘world-entry’ – in any way alters the ontic properties of things.8 Rather, beings, both Dasein and non-Dasein, are unveiled as they ‘always already’ were. As Heidegger says in a 1931 lecture: This understanding of Being which expresses itself in philosophy cannot be invented or contrived by philosophy. Rather, philosophizing – as the original action of man [Urhandlung des Menschen] – awakens into the understandingof-Being itself [in diesem selbst erwacht]. Out of this man arises as what he already was before all explicit philosophy. And because an understanding-of-Being must already lie in this prephilosophic existence of man – otherwise he could not comport himself to beings at all – the understanding-of-Being which expresses itself in philosophy is that which man as such already brings along out of his prephilosophic existence. The awakening of the understanding-of-being, its discovery, is the birth of philosophy out of the Dasein in man . . . the birth of philosophy as the awakening of the understanding-of-Being in Western history. . . . Awakening of the understanding-of-Being means: experiencing the being as a being, i.e., understanding it with a view to [hinsichtlich] its Being. . . . Where there is philosophizing the understanding-of-Being comes to word and Being comes to be understood and somehow grasped and conceived. (G34 44–45; emphasis added) This statement reinforces the enigmatic assertion in Einleitung in die Philosophie that ‘to be as man means philosophizing’ insofar as it clearly identifies philosophizing with the awakening of the understanding-of-Being (through the question about the Being of the whole of beings) that constitutes the essence of Dasein, i.e., existence. Such an awakening is the decisive event in the original Greek inception of philosophy. In Einleitung, the awakening of philosophizing is presented as an urgent necessity of the contemporary historical moment. The lecture presents itself as a preparation for that task. Given the epochal significance attributed to the ‘birth of philosophy as the awakening of the understanding-of-Being in Western history’, the introduction to philosophy which Heidegger prepares – the ‘other beginning’ as it is later called – must have a similar importance.9 Although philosophizing is an essential possibility of Dasein, it is a possibility that can remain latent and unfulfilled. The necessity of awakening derives from the manner in which the essential possibility lies dormant within historical Dasein. At the outset of Einleitung, Heidegger disputes the basic presupposition of the conventional introduction to philosophy; he calls into question the assumption that philosophy lies ‘outside’ of human Dasein. Heidegger maintains that ‘philosophy is, as it were, asleep in us’, it is ‘fettered’. The understanding of why the possibility of philosophy is not available thus determines the

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manner in which an introduction to philosophy should be carried out. ‘Philosophy does not occur in us in the way that it ultimately can and should occur. For that reason, the introduction is needed. But introduction no longer means: leading into the field of philosophy from a standpoint outside it; rather introduction now means: bringing philosophy underway, allowing philosophy to become an occurrence [Geschehen] in us’ (G27 4). Heidegger does not in this place elaborate further upon why philosophy does not occur as it ‘can and out to be [sollten]’. That philosophy not only ‘can’ but ‘ought’ to be an occurrence ‘in us’ entails that insofar as this possibility has not yet become an occurrence, the students themselves are not who they ‘ought’ to be. In the following chapter, we will examine the implications of this state of affairs for Heidegger’s manner of teaching.

Chapter 2

Heidegger’s Students

In order to comprehend the grounding presuppositions of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy, it is indeed necessary to attempt, as we have done in the preceding chapter, to clarify the sense in which philosophy essentially belongs to Dasein: the essence of Dasein is characterized as the possession of an understanding-of-Being and philosophy is an understanding that relates to Being in the most proper manner. Heidegger’s pedagogical introduction then has the character of awakening latent possibilities within the student, not of conveying new information about beings. At the same time, however, the consideration of Heidegger’s pedagogy here should not lose sight of the context in which these provisional and introductory statements about philosophizing and the ‘essence’ of Dasein are made. As is clearly evident from the introduction in Einleitung, the aim, content, structure and procedure of the lecture are determined not only by the subject matter itself, but also by the existence of those who attend the lectures. Or, more precisely, in Heidegger’s lectures on philosophy, which are consistently distinguished from academic lectures in the specialized sciences, it could be said that the subject matter of the philosophic lecture is the existence of the auditors themselves and that this bears upon both the point of departure and the direction of the lecture itself. In order to understand the rhetorical context of Heidegger’s discourse it is helpful to consider those for whom the lecture is intended. Einleitung in die Philosophie and other lectures given after the publication of Being and Time (e.g., Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik and Logik: die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache) are directed towards undergraduate university students who are not necessarily philosophy majors. Accordingly, it is evident that the teacher does not presuppose that the students possess a given knowledge of the history of philosophy or other specialized knowledge, let alone familiarity with the concepts, problems and methods of fundamental ontology. The discourse of Heidegger’s introduction thus cannot be communicated with the intent to recall a presumably given stock of knowledge. Hence one should be on guard against the tendency to interpret the meaning of the broad, sweeping assertions made at the outset of Einleitung as simply superficial expressions of theses that are established in other works like Being and Time, on the assumption that Heidegger intended that the students themselves would understand

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them in this way. This by no means suggests that Heidegger’s introductory discourse cannot or should not be examined and clarified through recourse to other texts. For the fact that this discourse has a pedagogical meaning that depends in some way on the prior understanding of the auditors does not entail that any part of the lecture is intended for a merely rhetorical effect, i.e., as if it did not involve a serious concern with the truth of what is spoken about. Although Heidegger’s introductions do not necessarily presuppose any special familiarity with philosophy, they do indeed begin and unfold on the basis of the assumption that the students are moved by a more or less serious and explicitly understood commitment to ‘science’ (taken very generally), not necessarily for its own sake, but as a manifestation of the student’s serious concern for his own Being and as preparation for the fulfilment of a vocation. Such an undefined commitment is implicit, Heidegger maintains, in the fact of the student’s attendance at the university (G26 9; G27 7). However provisional the introductory presentation of such matters as the idea of philosophy, the essence of Dasein, and human freedom may be, it serves to clarify possibilities so that they may be ‘seized’ by the auditor. The ‘introduction to philosophy’ as a whole thus makes an appeal to concerns which already belong to the students as human Dasein. An exposition of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy must then address the question as to ‘who’, from Heidegger’s standpoint, the auditor of the lecture in fact ‘is’. Heidegger says that philosophy ‘ought’ to become a ‘necessity’ of one’s ownmost essence (G27 4). The intention here is not simply to convey an idea of what philosophy is, but to arouse in listeners a sense for the seriousness and rank of this possibility in their own existence. The tone of Heidegger’s appeal to an essential necessity can be described as ‘imperative’, not in the sense that the speaker issues a command, but rather that he calls attention to and explicates a necessity that already binds each Dasein as such.1 Such an exhortation seems to presuppose, on the part of both listener and speaker, a disposition that is potentially open to appeals as to how one ought to exist. Viewed from the perspective of the tradition, it could be said that Heidegger’s pedagogical discourse appears to have the character of a moral exhortation, one that appeals to a disposition that is inherently concerned with something like a moral obligation.2 Yet such a description, based as it is on our initial impressions and on a traditional or common sense point of view, can only serve to help pose the problem of clarifying what Heidegger calls the ‘fundamental comportment’ (Grund-haltung) of philosophic questioning itself, the comportment that the pedagogical appeal intends to arouse in the students. Attention to the character of Heidegger’s appeal, and the kind of disposition the address at once presupposes and aims to awaken (erwachen), may thus help to clarify the manner in which Heidegger understands the ‘motivation’ for philosophizing itself. As a point of departure, one can ask what is implied in the statement that philosophy ‘ought’ (sollten) to become a necessity of existence. When

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philosophizing is presented as a high, ranking possibility – as ‘essential’ to, but at once removed from who one is – a difference between the way in which one ‘is’ and the way in which one ‘ought to be’ is surely implied.3 Moreover the kind of appeal that Heidegger makes in introducing philosophy assumes not only this difference between being and ought-to-be, but it also presupposes that the listener (the student), can be receptive to this appeal and can understand himself to exist as fallen from or removed in some way from his ‘essence’. The existential analytic of Being and Time – the interpretation of the phenomenon of conscience in particular – provides confirmation that the listener, the recipient of Heidegger’s pedagogy is, as human Dasein, constituted in just this way.4 In Being and Time, Heidegger seeks, through the analysis of the phenomenon of conscience, a confirmation of the possibility that Dasein can truly exist as it essentially ‘is’ over and against the manner in which it usually exists (up to this point in Being and Time this has been an unclarified presupposition). The analysis of conscience thus exhibits what it can mean to say that Dasein ‘is not’ what it ‘can and ought to be’; it does so through an explication of how this difference can be genuinely experienced and understood by Dasein. Conscience is a call (Ruf) which summons Dasein from out of its nearest everyday way of existence and self-understanding under the domination of the ‘tasks, rules, and standards’ of public life. Properly understood, conscience belongs to Dasein’s Being (as Care). The ‘voice’ (Stimme) of conscience originates neither in a being other than Dasein, nor in another Dasein, but rather issues from out of Dasein’s own self in its ‘ownmost’ capability for being what it is. Yet because Dasein generally understands itself in terms of the familiar matters of concern within the world, the call is always experienced by Dasein as something unfamiliar, indefinite, empty and strange. Moreover, the ‘caller’ is not only at a remove (in die Ferne), but, in accordance with this, neither originates in nor is subject to any conscious act of will on Dasein’s part. As Heidegger says, ‘Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned, nor prepared for, nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. “It” calls, against our expectations and even against our will’ (SZ 275; BT 320). In being thus removed from what Dasein may have free disposal over in volition and concern, the call can thus have the character of a ‘demand’ (Forderung), ‘summons’ and ‘claim’ for Dasein, even though it gives no determinate directives or commands. Conscience in a way constrains Dasein to listen, but it is not necessarily or absolutely binding; it presupposes, as it at the same time can ‘arouse’, a free willingness to listen: ‘In the tendency to disclosure which belongs to the call, lies the momentum of a push – of an abrupt and shaking arousal. The call is from afar unto afar. It affects [getroffen] one who is willing to be brought back’ (SZ 271; emphasis added).5 This reference to Being and Time’s analysis of Dasein’s potential receptiveness to the call of conscience helps to explain the disposition of the students to

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whom Heidegger’s appeal is directed. At the same time, it sheds light upon the exhortatory character of Heidegger’s introductory discourse. Like the call of conscience, Heidegger exhorts students to ‘be’ who they ought to be, i.e., who they already and essentially ‘are’. In Being and Time it is maintained that the existential-ontological interpretation of conscience can indirectly disclose possibilities for primordial existentiell self-understanding and so help make possible for others a proper hearing for the call of conscience in their own existence. The medium of the philosophic lecture, in contrast to the treatise, offers the opportunity for a more immediate intervention in the existence of others – an act of authentic solicitude through which a Dasein can act ‘as the conscience of others’ (SZ 298). This is clearly not a form of imposition on others. For, on the one hand, the speaker is not to be construed as the cause or author of the demand, and, on the other hand, that which the student is, as it were, summoned to, is itself not something foreign to his own existence. The appeal made in the lecture rather ‘helps the other to become transparent to himself in his care and to become free for it’ (SZ 122; BT 159).6 Thus the lecturer, as such a guide, is not a cause of the authenticity of his addressees but is in a way a servant of the authentic Being of the other Dasein. He addresses others on behalf their own possible authentic Being. This solicitude is not, however, an act of self-denying devotion to the good of others. In Being and Time, authentic resoluteness towards one’s own Being (i.e., authentic understanding of the call of conscience) on the part of an individual Dasein, is said to ‘drive’ (stossen) Dasein into care for others. What conscience makes known is Dasein’s finitude, and this implies that its own Being – its possibilities – belong not to itself as a self-subsistent ground, but to the community and its historical tradition. To act ‘for’ others is then a way in which Dasein is ‘for the sake of itself’ (umwillen seiner selbst) (SZ 327) – where the ‘self’ does not mean an individual subject, but the ‘self’ that can determine itself in being-with-others, a ‘we ourselves’.7 Hence the liberation of others for their own ‘care’ acts for possibilities of Being that are shared – a common resoluteness towards the possibilities of a people, or, put simply, a common destiny (Geschick) (SZ 384). As was suggested above in the consideration of Einleitung in die Philosophie, the qualification for leadership is grounded in the ‘disposal over higher and richer possibilities of human existence, which are indeed not forced upon the others, but rather inconspicuously and in this way effectively exemplified’ (G27 8). If we were here to return to Being and Time and ask what makes possible this ‘disposal’ over higher possibilities – among which philosophy is surely intended – one is brought back to the treatment of resoluteness (i.e., the authentic understanding of the call of conscience) which is ‘precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible’, and further, to the elaboration of resoluteness as the determination of possibilities which are ‘led in advance’ by the communal destiny ‘out of which’ possibilities are drawn. In this way, one can begin to see how leadership is, for Heidegger, at once always a ‘following’.8

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The Crisis of Academic Studies In Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heidegger undertakes an extensive thematic reflection on philosophy that serves the pedagogical intention of making ‘philosophizing’ possible for students ‘here and now’. This reflection thus takes its departure from the immediate situation of students at the university as a place where the existence of the students is determined by the power of science. Thus the development of a ‘pre-understanding’ of philosophy enters into a consideration of what science is and of how it is essentially rooted in philosophy. The preparatory treatment of the nature of science, however, leads directly into a comprehensive articulation of the contemporary ‘crisis’ of science viewed in a threefold respect: (1) as a crisis in the relation of the individual to science; (2) as a crisis in the social-historical position of science and (3) at the root of both of these, as a crisis concerning the essential meaning of science (perplexities that ultimately concern the concept of truth and understanding of Being that science presupposes). In Being and Time, Heidegger had treated the crisis of science as a re-emergence of perplexities which concern the character and accessibility of the basic objects of science, objects designated by ‘fundamental concepts’ like ‘nature’ and ‘life’ (SZ 9–10). Heidegger moves beyond this narrower determination of the crisis as a perplexity about conceptual foundations when he now treats the crisis of science as one that concerns the ‘position [of science] in the whole of historical actuality’ (G27 40) and presents this comprehensive crisis as determinative of the historical situation of the question of Being. Here one can say that the treatment in Einleitung stands within a movement of thinking from Being and Time to the works of the late 1930s (the Nietzsche lectures in particular) in which the implications of the thesis (of Being and Time) that the questioning of Being is essentially historical are gradually and ever more comprehensively unfolded.9 According to this thesis, the very possibility, necessity, and direction of philosophic questioning (i.e., its passage through fundamental ontology) essentially belongs to a distinctive moment in the ‘History of Being’. In the course of this unfolding, the contemporary crisis of science appears as merely one aspect of a deeper and more pervasive ‘crisis’, an event variously described in more comprehensive terms: the ‘death of God’ or the ‘darkening of the world’.10 The implications of the thesis that the question of Being belongs to a distinctive historical situation, can be seen in Heidegger’s execution of an ‘introduction to philosophy’. It was indicated above that Heidegger’s pedagogy in the lecture courses involves an exhortatory appeal to the students, one that intends to ‘awaken’ and direct the disposition and comportments which make a ‘living philosophizing’ possible. Such an appeal – and thus Heidegger’s pedagogy – presupposes that such a capacity already lies within the students, in the mode, as it were, of being latent or ‘asleep’. The introduction to philosophy takes as its point of departure science (as the determining power of the student’s existence

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at the university) in its contemporary state of crisis because the potential receptiveness of the students to such an introduction is related to this predicament of science. Accordingly, in Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heidegger argues that the ‘crisis of science’ emerges ‘in the whole of historical-social Dasein’ with the dissolution of the ideal of education, Bildung, which had prevailed until recently.11 As Heidegger explains, For some time now it has become more evident that the connection between science and an effective ideal of Bildung has been severed. It is no longer clear in what ways not only the results of science, but Bildung in science itself should be directed into the undisturbed growth of a genuine Bildung of human communities. The state of helplessness [Ratlosigkeit] with respect to science and its function in the whole of ‘culture’ is all the more pervasive, as the powers of Dasein and Bildung, which determined existence far into the 19th century even if merely as good conventions, that is, the classical ideal of Bildung, which is associated with the names of Goethe and Schiller, on the one hand, and Christian religiosity on the other, that both of these historical forces have completely exhausted [weitgehend eingebüsst] their effective possibility. If now science itself in its own significance has become questionable and an original establishing of purposes no longer exists, they fall, as it were, into a void. (G27 31) In order to understand how the failure of classical Bildung has bearing upon Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy, it may be helpful to consider what Bildung meant in its origin, in the thought of German Idealism. Generally speaking, ‘Bildung’ designated at once an ideal of human perfection – of the fulfilment of man’s natural and spiritual capacities – and the progressive development (‘formation’) through which the ideal was to be concretely (historically) actualized in the individual, the nation and humanity as a whole. The ideal of Bildung is one of a human wholeness that reconciles the tensions that become manifest in the modern world between such elements as the following: the objects of human desire and human capacities to satisfy desire; morality (or piety) and the happiness of the individual; the satisfaction of the individual and the good of the community as a whole. The foundation of Bildung is a view of reason as ‘dialectical striving’: an (infinite) power which extends human desires for ideal, imaginary objects beyond the finite capacity to satisfy such desires. Undisciplined, reason is the source of the internal tensions, conflict and alienation through which human wholeness is lost. The Kantian insight into the autonomous capacity of reason to project ideal ends of human striving opens the possibility that through the ‘critical’ insight into its own responsibility for the diremptions of modern culture, reason itself can create, through the free legislation of goals of totality, a higher form of wholeness and self-unity. The theoretical perplexities and practical conflicts that permeate all spheres of individual

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and communal life are thus viewed as imposed by reason as necessary stages of development in the life of the individual and the history of communities. The ideal of Bildung is that of a higher ‘second nature’ grounded on the free and absolute power of reason. This involves the comprehensive satisfaction of man’s needs as a natural and rational being for individual happiness, religion, community and theoretical knowledge of the whole. Grounded in knowledge of the absolute, philosophy (as absolute science which realizes the unity of theoretical and practical reason) is at once the legislator of rational culture realized through Bildung and the highest goal of Bildung. The particular sciences also maintain a central position here insofar as they participate in the manifestation of the absolute and promote the universal ends of human Bildung. The different sciences receive their justification from philosophic legislation of the ideal telos of history. Directed to a common goal, the sciences are unified with one another. Each particular science contributes to a systematic knowledge of the whole. Each branch of study is understood to be animated by the higher end of comprehending the whole of being. Each science thus helps to actualize man’s central place within the whole and contributes to the realization of the universal human good. Through participation in the work of a particular science the individual finds higher purpose and justification in a pursuit which is at once an end in itself and a means to the spiritual progress of humanity.12 The ideal of Bildung lost its effective authority in academic studies (in the nineteenth century) with the general philosophic and scientific rejection of German Idealism, the consequent separation of philosophy and the particular sciences, the rise of positivism, and the further specialization of the sciences. Heidegger recounts from his own experience that students before the war were ‘convinced of the positive inner possibilities of the sciences and their central function in Dasein’. Yet precisely such serious students became aware that with this tendency toward specialization in the drive of academic studies came something else, which we only vaguely suspected and were not able to articulate clearly: it could no longer remain concealed that with all the progress of the individual sciences the connection between, on the one hand, the sciences and their content, and, on the other hand, the sciences and a living, effective ideal of Bildung was severed and that this cleft was only artificially covered over. (G27 28) In the meantime, from the pre-war years to the present (1928), Heidegger says that although the crisis has been widely publicized and has occasioned calls for reform, the ‘crisis has not become sharper and taken more seriously, but only louder. What we earlier lacked, the possibility of an understanding of science as such in the whole of its essence, this lack shows itself in broad consequences, without having been recognized in its grounds up to the present’ (G27 29). The problem that contemporaries have neither perceived nor addressed is precisely that which constitutes the theme of this lecture course and Heidegger’s

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pedagogy generally: ‘how something like science stands essentially in human Dasein as such. It is the problem of the existential essence of science’ (G27 29). Thus Heidegger’s pedagogy belongs to a critical situation that manifests itself with the loss of an ideal of Bildung. Heidegger never proposes to revive the tradition of Bildung. Yet this period of his work (1927–1932) exhibits his most intensive engagement with Kant and German Idealism. Here Heidegger rethinks and calls into question the most fundamental presuppositions of Bildung, such as: the Idealist understanding of reason (man as a rational being) as the ‘infinite’ and purposive power to project and actualize ideals of totality; the relation between the ideal and the real; and the meaning and possibility of absolute knowledge (philosophy as the absolute science). Heidegger does not elaborate upon the implications of the critique of the foundations of Idealism for the project of Bildung itself. However, through fundamental ontological inquiry, Heidegger reopens the problems to which Bildung constituted a response: the question of the possible ‘wholeness’ of Dasein, the position of man in the whole of being, and, again, the question of how philosophy and science belong to the essence of man. Although no longer regarded by Heidegger as a viable possibility, Bildung has prepared the level on which the crisis of the science and the task of philosophic pedagogy are to be conceived. Heidegger thus argues that the crisis of science be viewed not only insofar as the individual is affected, but on the plane of ‘social-historical Dasein’.13 The ideal of Bildung has fostered in students a serious concern with the high place of science in historical Dasein. This is perhaps the most important respect in which Bildung – despite having lost its ‘effective possibility’ as a ‘historical force’ – can be said to prepare Heidegger’s own philosophic pedagogy. On the basis of this influence, the dissolution of Bildung drives students into a state of ‘helplessness [Ratlosigkeit] towards science and its function in the whole of “culture”’ (G27 31). For this experience prepares what is most needful: not a precipitous attempt to overcome the crisis taken as a calamity, but the preparation for a genuine ‘entry into the crisis’ from out of which may arise a fundamental ‘transformation in the position of existence towards science’ (G27 39). It is precisely the experience of distress – however only dimly surmised – that Heidegger’s pedagogy presupposes and evokes within the students. This is confirmed in a short, contemporaneous lecture titled, ‘Einführung in das akademische Studium’ (‘Introduction to Academic Studies’) (G28 347–61), in which Heidegger again takes up the crisis of university education and brings out the inner significance of the ‘helplessness’ in which students find themselves. Academic studies have today become questionable. At a certain point in one’s studies, not in the first semester, but more likely at the end and in retrospect, a peculiar sense of uneasiness arises. We sense that we are lacking [entbehren] something which we cannot simply grasp. We have the drive [Drang] towards a university, one that could be actual, but which is not present. Today we

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move where no one has before. An introduction to academic study has become necessary, most necessary for the academic teacher himself. It could appear as though these are only pessimistic moods [Stimmungen] and not an actual occurrence [Geschehen]. The operation and organization of the university function so faultlessly, that it appears that there is nothing questionable here. But there is a hidden occurrence [verborgenes Geschehen] at the university which makes this questionability clear. Such a hidden occurrence is the helplessness [Ratloskigkeit] of precisely the best students after their studies are completed or almost completed, the awareness that despite an advanced knowledge [Kenntnisse] of their science, they lack something essential. . . . The whole of science, genuine knowledge, does not even come into view for the students. Ever more, the university takes on the character of a warehouse in which knowledge is distributed like a present-at-hand object. It has become a vocational school. Jurisprudence and medicine especially have been pursued as if they can without detriment be separated from the university and be set up as independent vocational schools. Does the jurist at his articles generally come into the proximity of crime, punishment, sin, and guilt? Does he know in general what they are in human Dasein and what they mean? Does the medical specialist, when he stops in the clinics and registers the cases of sickness come into the proximity of sickness and death? Do crime and punishment, sickness and death in general belong to a department? In a department – separated and dealt with apart from all others? In the university today, do we not pass by everything that is essential? Have we not lost the community and commonness which we ought to have as students? Can academic studies yet be seized [ergriffen] as a whole, holding itself in the nearness to the world which it should have? The singular existence in the whole of the world, which academic study once was and should still be, ought to be awakened [erweckt] once again. This is not to be achieved through a critique of science, through programs and congresses, through university and school reform that lacks instinct. We must become ripe for an inner transformation [Verwandlung an uns]. . . . The petrified organization of the current operation cannot be overcome through a different organization, it must be shattered. We have provisionally projected academic studies as the communal drive to come into proximity to the world as a whole. It is our task to reawaken this drive [Drang wieder zu wecken] so that it can be set on its way and can actually happen. Science and philosophy ought to be the distinctive possibilities of human Dasein in order to come into proximity of the world. We must thus attempt to grasp science and philosophy in their genuine essence and at the same time hold in view the unity of science and philosophy. But are we not already in the nearness of world? Does it not belong to the essence of human Dasein, in each case to be in the nearness of the world? – Yes, we are in the nearness of world and yet at the same time absent, not knowing where. Has something been pushed in front of the world, so that it

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Heidegger’s Philosophic Pedagogy hardly still shines through [Hat sich irgendetwas vor die Welt geschoben, dass sie nur noch gerade durchscheint]? (G28 347–49; emphasis added)

The ‘hidden occurrence’ that attests to the questionability of academic studies lies in the students’ sense of dissatisfaction with their academic education, the dim awareness that they lack what is essential. According to Heidegger’s interpretation the students are seriously, if implicitly, directed towards the essential aim of academic study, to ‘come into nearness of the world as a whole’, but this drive is unconceived and unfulfilled in their own studies. The ‘hidden occurrence’ of helplessness is here articulated as something already experienced, though without clarity on the part of students. Heidegger’s pedagogy here assumes the task of exhibiting this distress as such. The ‘drive’ towards the whole is latently present in the students’ sense that something essential is lacking from their education. Hence the students’ ‘hidden’ distress is a potential openness for the ‘inner transformation’ (Verwandlung) in which this drive can be awakened.14 It is especially remarkable here that the evidence for the questionability of contemporary education, for the crisis of science and for an unfulfilled, essential aim of science, is discovered within the experience and disposition of the students. The student is not exposed to the ‘whole of science’ but only distinct specialized disciplines, each with its own independent field of objects. The manner in which the independent disciplines objectify such phenomena as crime, punishment, guilt and sickness becomes regulative for understanding the matters themselves. The fragmentation of the sciences is at once the fragmentation of reality, of ‘what is’ as a whole. This mode of representation rests upon an abstraction from the way in which phenomena are experienced as ‘meaningful’ in human Dasein. Human Dasein always already exists ‘in the whole of the world’ (as ‘being-in-the-world’). The manner in which the objects of knowledge belong together in the ‘whole of the world’ is accessible through this dimension of meaningful experience. The social organization of the university as a conglomeration of specialized disciplines of research that are concerned with independent realms of objects impedes the formation of any genuine ‘community’ within the university. What is ‘essential’ in academic study – the aim of true education – is thus ‘wholeness’: the wholeness of science; the unity of the matters of science in their belonging to wholeness of the world; the wholeness of existence within the world through which the matters are accessible in their meaningfulness; and the wholeness of the academic community of teachers and students in the pursuit of knowledge. Here one can trace the legacy of the tradition of Bildung: Heidegger says that academic study once was ‘existence in the whole of the world’, and that this ‘ought to again be awakened’. Heidegger comes as close as he ever will to the German Idealists – their conception of reason as ‘purposive striving’ (Hegel) – in designating science (or academic study) as a ‘communal drive [Drang] to comeinto-nearness of the world as a whole’. Yet here the departure from Idealist

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Bildung also becomes evident: transcendence to the ‘world as a whole’ and the other forms of ‘totality’ (‘community’) are not fulfilled through the progressive actualization of an ideal (whereby the whole is understood as a product of reason), nor in complete and absolute knowledge of the whole. Rather, the drive towards ‘nearness’ strives to capture a mode of being-in the world as a whole as something that does not need to be ‘produced’ because it is in some sense ‘already’ there: ‘But are we not already in the nearness of world? Does it not belong to the essence of human Dasein, in each case to be in the nearness of the world?’

Towards a ‘Living Philosophizing’ Part One of Einleitung attempts to work out the question of what philosophy is through a consideration of its relation to science as a power that essentially determines the existence of students at the university. The students first encounter philosophy in the German university among scientific disciplines. If, as Heidegger asserts, science ‘decisively determines our whole existence’ as teachers and students at the university, then science directly or indirectly influences what one understands as worthwhile or irrelevant. What the student hopes to gain from philosophy – and from this ‘introduction to philosophy’ in particular – is determined by the more or less explicit authority of science. Hence it is appropriate that the clarification of the meaning of philosophy proceed from the question as to whether philosophy is or is not itself a science. Einleitung in die Philosophie does not venture further into these questions about the initial expectations and disposition of the students. We will thus turn from Einleitung to the lecture course of the following year, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929/30), and focus on the following issues: what Heidegger takes to be the initial expectations of students from an introduction to philosophy; how those expectations are addressed by the lecturer in the course of his introduction and the kind of disposition that he attempts to awaken in students. In the Introduction to this lecture, the expectations that students have from philosophy are understood to be tied to conventional views of what philosophy is or should be, along with prevailing assessments of the importance of philosophy in human affairs. In this way, Heidegger leads students into an encounter with the problem of understanding what philosophy or metaphysics is. Not only are these views called into question, but the very grounds of the students’ expectations and evaluation of philosophy are thereby undermined. The ensuing experience of perplexity and distress as to the meaning of philosophy itself comes to be seen as an awakening of the proper disposition for what Heidegger calls a ‘living philosophizing’. Here Heidegger again takes as his point of departure the fact that philosophy is something encountered within the context of the modern university as the site of science. If philosophy, here identified with metaphysics, still retains its

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respected place among sciences, it does so on the basis of the assumption that it can be a genuine science, indeed the most general science. This assumption, that philosophy should aspire to the rank of a science, is immediately called into question, not simply on the grounds of any actual failure to reach that ideal, but rather because the very aim to become absolute science, the very assessment of the value of philosophy by the standard of science, may be in error (G29/30 3–4). Yet if this is the case, the public respectability of philosophy may be based on a groundless prejudice; moreover, both the meaning of philosophy and the reason why the student should take it seriously become problematic. ‘But if philosophy generally and from the ground up is not science, what should it then be, what right does it have to be in the circle of sciences at the university? Will philosophy then become merely the proclamation of a Weltanschauung? . . . Ultimately, the interpretation of philosophy as worldviewproclamation is only the same mendaciousness as the characterization of it as science’ (G29/30 3). Throughout the introduction Heidegger calls attention to a difference between the public appearance of philosophy and its inner essence. To this difference there corresponds a distinction between the expectations that a student usually brings to academic lectures and the fundamental ‘comportment’ that is demanded by genuine philosophizing. By drawing out these contrasts at length, the discussion heightens the sense of obscurity regarding the true sense of philosophy and what it demands. Heidegger maintains that an ‘ambiguity’ (Zweideutigkeit) pervades philosophy in that it presents itself as what it is not, as science, world view, or some attempt at a combination. At the same time, philosophizing – participation in the lecture on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics – demands something more of the student than does an ordinary scientific study, it requires a ‘different kind of attentiveness’ than the academic setting itself fosters insofar as this setting is externally identical to that of courses on mathematics, literature and so forth. Just what ‘comportment’ is demanded is, Heidegger admits, ‘confused’ and ‘uncertain’; yet it is to be clarified through a closer examination of the multifaceted ‘ambiguity’ that pervades philosophy, a clarification that is not intended to thematically define the comportment in question, but to ‘awaken’ it within the listeners. Heidegger says, ‘We are discussing this ambiguity of philosophy not in order to develop a psychology of philosophizing, but in order to clarify the fundamental comportment [Grundhaltung] demanded of us, so that we may let ourselves be guided [lassen führen] with more perspicacity in the coming discussion and set aside false expectations, be they too high or too low’ (G29/30 15). Through Heidegger’s discussion, the sense of ambiguity grows greater and more distressing; indeed, it becomes something that is ultimately ‘insurmountable’. Thereby, this distress, sense of ambiguity and uncertainty are seen to belong to the ‘fundamental comportment’ of philosophizing itself. From the more general ambiguity that concerns the essence of philosophy, Heidegger turns to the ambiguity that inheres ‘here and now’ in the relation of

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students and teachers. The academic setting itself influences the ‘comportment’ in which philosophy is encountered as one subject of study among others. The ambiguity of philosophy always sharpens – rather than dwindling – wherever we are explicitly concerned with it, as in our situation here and now: philosophy as a subject to be taught, an examination subject, a discipline, in which some are promoted as in other disciplines. For those who study and lecture, philosophy has the appearance [Schein] of a general subject over which lectures are held. In accordance with our attitude towards this we either attend such a lecture or pass it by. Therewith nothing else happens at all. (G29/30 17) Here it is not simply the case that the seriousness of philosophy is obscured by the conventional academic situation, but that all subjects of study, indeed all activities, present themselves in the same indifferent way. As Heidegger says, the student might profit more by spending the enrollment fees on ski poles, ‘perhaps these are far more essential than a philosophy lecture’. By virtue of his academic position, and by presenting himself as a ‘teacher’, the lecturer always carries a kind of persuasive force and a semblance of authority regardless of whether he is truly philosophizing or not, regardless of whether or not he is really understood.15 This semblance of authority persists so long as any criterion by which one can know whether the teacher speaks truly or whether one has really understood him remains absent. In Being and Time, Heidegger maintained that under the ambiguity that rules public life, ‘everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genuinely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though fundamentally it is not; or else it does not look so, and yet fundamentally it is’ (SZ 173; emphasis added).16 ‘Ambiguity’ rules as an inability to decide which is the case. Heidegger indicates that ambiguity is greater in philosophy than in the sciences. The semblance of authority that inheres in the academic setting of philosophy works to obscure this necessary uncertainty. While this authority unavoidably attends the public presence of philosophy, it is indeed a mere semblance. Thus for Heidegger, philosophic pedagogy is inherently ‘non-authoritative’ in that, strictly speaking, it does not prescribe possibilities of thought or action, nor does it involve the transfer of knowledge, but, as we saw in Einleitung, attempts to ‘awaken’ possibilities of existence in others which already belong to them in their essence.17 For on what is this authority [Autorität] grounded, with which we silently [stillschweigend] persuade? Not on our being appointed by a higher power, also not that we are wiser and smarter than others, but simply on the grounds that we are not understood. Only so long as we are not understood does this dubious authority work for us. If we are understood, then it first comes to light whether we are philosophizing or not. If we are not philosophizing, then this authority collapses of itself. But if we are philosophizing, it was

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Heidegger considers an objection to this assertion: if philosophic discourse is restricted to matters that can be proved, this ambiguity – the danger that the student may fall prey to the persuasive force of discourse he cannot understand – can be removed. Yet this objection presupposes that essential matters can indeed be proven: ‘Perhaps what can be proven is only what is essentially irrelevant, and perhaps everything which first needs to be proven carries no intrinsic weight in itself’ (G29/30 21). The ambiguity of pedagogical discourse ‘here and now’ in the lecture thus leads into the issue of the ambiguity of philosophic truth in general. The latter involves two prevalent illusions: (1) that philosophy, as something that can in some way concern everyone, is immediately accessible for sound common sense; (2) that philosophical truth must have the character of supreme certainty, as has mathematical knowledge. The assumption that either common sense or the ideal of mathematical knowledge provide an ultimate criterion of truth emerges from an inclination to escape the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in the fact that philosophizing is a human activity and the fact that the truth of philosophizing is necessarily finite because human Dasein is finite (G29/30 28). The aim of this part of Heidegger’s introduction, one should recall, is not to develop the problem of truth per se (which is specifically dealt with in many other places), but to clarify and awaken the proper comportment that philosophizing demands. While for common sense the understanding of philosophizing as something ‘ultimate and extreme’ means that it is something most certain, in fact, ‘the ultimate and most extreme is the most dangerous and most insecure’. It is dangerous because it stands in constant proximity to ‘error’ (Irrtums).18 The exposure of the illusory, ambiguous manner in which philosophy presents itself in public serves not only to disabuse the auditor of unwarranted expectations from philosophy – expectations tied to misconceptions of the meaning of philosophy – but, moreover, to bring home the manner in which the fundamental comportment is itself borne out of the experience of philosophy’s essential ambiguity. In reveling in the idea of philosophy as absolute knowledge, one tends to forget this perilous neighborhood of philosophizing. Perhaps one remembers

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it later in a hangover, though this remembrance does not become decisive for action. For this reason the proper fundamental posture [Grundhaltung] rarely awakens, a Haltung that would be equal to this innermost ambiguity of philosophical truth, this elemental readiness for the dangerousness of philosophy. Because it is unfamiliar and above all not actual, a conversation that is philosophizing is rarely or never at all attained among those who busy themselves with philosophy, yet do not philosophize. (G29/30 29) Whereas one might expect from a conventional introduction that the need for philosophy would be either taken for granted or justified in terms of some contribution to civilization, Heidegger’s introduction moves against the grain of all such expectations, all familiar ways in which the importance of philosophy might be justified. Indeed it is precisely through this insight into the ambiguity of philosophy – or, one could say, through the destruction of the aspirations of modern philosophy – that the proper comportment can arise. The proper comportment involves an experience of this situation as a source of distress. Heidegger’s pedagogy thus again has the task of evoking and intensifying a sense of ‘helplessness’ in the student. The insight into the manifold ambiguity of philosophizing effects terror [wirkt abschreckend] and in the end betrays the whole fruitlessness of such an activity. It would be a misunderstanding if we wanted in the least to weaken this sense of hopelessness, or subsequently ameliorate this by saying that in the end it is not so bad, that philosophy has accomplished many things in the history of humanity and the like. That is only chatter [Gerede] which distracts one from philosophy. Rather this terror must be preserved and withstood [erhalten und durchhalten]. Something essential in all philosophical conceiving becomes manifest in it, that the philosophical concept is an attack [Angriff] on man and even on man as a whole – hunted up out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things. The attacker however is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of comforting knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the Da-sein in man launches the attack on man. So is man in the grounds of his essence one who is attacked and seized, attacked by the ‘that he is, what he is’ and comprehended in every conceiving questioning. Yet being comprehensively included in this way is no blissful awe, but the struggle with the insurmountable ambiguity of all questioning and Being. (G29/30 31) At the same time, this exposure of the illusoriness of the grounds on which philosophy is respected as a worthwhile pursuit does not intend to suggest that philosophizing is to be assessed as something ‘despairing, dark, dispirited, pessimistic’. Insight into the ambiguity of philosophy makes known that both the aspiration to elevate philosophy to the rank of science, and the despair over its uselessness, rest upon an assessment of philosophy from the perspective of

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the ‘normal man’ (Normalmenschen) and according to the ‘leading convictions that the normal is the essential, the average, and that thereby the universally valid would be the truth’ (G29/30 32). In revealing that the available ways of taking a position towards philosophy are implicitly ‘dictated’ according to the standards of the normal man as ‘judge’ (Richter), Heidegger calls that judge into question. Thereby, Heidegger proposes to understand philosophy as something independent of extraneous standards. Philosophy is to be grasped ‘from out of itself’, as something that stands on its own (etwas Eigenständiges). One can summarize Heidegger’s main point here in the following way. Modern philosophy has achieved complete success in its effort to make philosophy respected as a legitimate enterprise through tying it to science and technology as the purveyor of human goods, world views and ‘certain’ truths. Yet it has done so at the cost of deceiving not only society (which accepts its institution within the university), but indeed also of deceiving itself. Modern philosophy conceals its own questionability and finitude by understanding itself in terms of the external, ‘public’ goals and standards before which it has tried to defend itself. It here becomes clear that an understanding of what philosophy properly can be has implicitly guided Heidegger’s disclosure of the deceptiveness and ambiguity of philosophy’s public self-presentation. Moreover, the possibility that this ambiguity is experienced as a source of distress presupposes on the part of students a serious concern with philosophy that will not rest content with the forms of semblance. At the very beginning of this introduction, Heidegger had suggested that, despite the absence of a coherent conception of philosophy, the students are imbued with a vague sense that philosophy is an ‘ultimate and extreme’ (Letzte und Äusserste) undertaking. Heidegger calls forth this sense in his listeners by asking students why they choose to attend a philosophy lecture at all. Philosophy . . . we surmise this only obscurely – is something that concerns the whole and is extreme [etwas im Ganzen und Äussersten], in which an ultimate expression and dialogue of man occurs. Why else would we have come here? Or have we only fallen in here, because others also have, or because we have a free hour between five and six, in which it makes no sense to go home? Why are we here? Do we know what we have let ourselves in for? (G29/30 6) This obscure sense of the importance of philosophy – that it is ‘ultimate and extreme’ – underlies the serious disposition that seems to be presupposed by the experience of distress before the exposure of the fruitlessness of philosophy as it is commonly understood. Heidegger has indicated that the supposition that philosophy is something ‘ultimate and extreme’ inheres even in the conventional assessment of philosophy, albeit in the semblance that philosophy is universally intelligible by common sense and something absolutely certain. Hence, even though the comportment out of which philosophizing occurs

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must then be a kind of liberation from the ‘atmosphere of the normal man’ and its standard as to what is true and essential, that disposition lies at the grounds of conventional evaluation as something distorted. This was suggested above: in philosophizing the ‘Dasein in man’ launches an attack on man as subject of everydayness. Here the comportment or disposition of philosophizing is understood as something through which man is driven rather than being a matter of choice: man as a whole is ‘driven’ out of everydayness and back into the grounds of things. Starting from the vague sense that philosophy is something ultimate and extreme, the further clarification of both ‘what we have let ourselves in for’ and the comportment that this demands of the student proceeds indirectly. A straightforward statement on these introductory issues is impossible, Heidegger says, and the reasons for this are revealed precisely through the indirect path that is taken: the meaningfulness of metaphysical concepts (including the concept of metaphysics) and metaphysical-philosophical questions depend upon an experience of the matters that such concepts and questions intend. The indirect presentation of the nature of metaphysics consists in an elucidation of an aphorism from the poet Novalis which captures both this relation to the matters which metaphysical concepts intend and the mode of experience in which this matter becomes accessible. According to Novalis: ‘Philosophy is actually homesickness: a drive [Trieb] to be at home everywhere’ (G29/30 7). Heidegger explains that ‘to be at home everywhere’ is to be ‘in the whole’ (im Ganzen), i.e., in the ‘world’. But if man is homesick, and thus ‘not’ at home, then philosophy is a way of being directed towards the whole. ‘In our homesickness we are driven to Being in the whole. Our Being is this drivenness [Unser Sein ist diese Getriebenheit]’. Such a drive towards the ‘whole’ is a mode of questioning about this existence in the whole. One asks questions about what the metaphysical concepts ‘world’ (the whole) and ‘finitude’ (implied in one’s not-being at home) themselves intend. The metaphysical questions of world (the whole), finitude and individuation, on the one hand, and the concepts of ‘world’, ‘finitude’ and ‘individuation’ thus originate within ‘our Being’. Heidegger’s further comments on the origin of metaphysical concepts reveal that a certain experience of ‘our Being’ is a necessary condition of conceptual questioning (philosophizing). The ‘first task’ of philosophizing is the accomplishment of this condition. The following passage contains one of the most important statement on the grounds and necessity of a philosophic pedagogy that one can find in Heidegger’s work. It does not suffice, that we indefinitely and unsteadily lose ourselves in such questioning. Rather this drive to be at home everywhere is in itself the seeking of the paths which open the right track for such questions. For this the hammer of conceptual comprehension [Begreifen] is needed, those concepts which can break open such a track. It is a conceptual comprehension and these are concepts of a special kind. . . . The metaphysical concepts are

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Both the concepts and the questions to which they belong are ‘anchored’ in a ‘being-gripped’, or ‘seized’ (Ergriffenheit) by something. That which the metaphysical concepts ‘conceive’ (and grow out of) is this relation between ‘the whole of beings’ and the questioner. Heidegger thus designates the metaphysical concepts grounded in Ergriffenheit as ‘In-begriffe’ – ’incepts’ or ‘inclusive concepts’. This is to be understood in two senses: first, such concepts do not conceive general properties of objects but somehow indicate ‘the whole in itself’; second, insofar as the grounds of conception lie in Dasein’s ‘beingseized’ by that which is conceived (i.e., the ‘whole’), the metaphysical concept includes the Dasein, not Dasein in general, but one that is so directed to the whole as such. Heidegger thus concludes, ‘There is no concept of the whole without the incept of philosophizing existence. Metaphysical thinking is inceptual thinking in this double sense: going to the whole and reaching through [durchgreifend] existence’ (G29/30 13). This implies that the relation to the whole of beings which grounds thinking is not simply presupposed as something given present-at-hand. As noted above, philosophizing requires an ‘awakening’ of the Ergriffenheit in which the concept of the whole can first arise. As this conceiving belongs to questioning (which is thus a ‘conceptual questioning’), the questions themselves presuppose this Ergriffenheit. The initial formulation of the conceptual questions of the lecture course – what is world? what is finitude? what is individuation? – thus remain free-floating, arbitrary and unintelligible for the auditors so long as they have not been seized by the subject matters indicated. Here it becomes evident that ‘being seized by . . .’, is at once the basis upon which one can both experience and have an interest in – i.e., be ‘driven towards’ – the whole. As Heidegger says, ‘Proximally it appears arbitrary and unintelligible why precisely these

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questions are posed. But even if we want to present these questions as metaphysical, are they not empty and general, so indeterminate, that they leave us indifferent, do not touch us fundamentally, let alone seize [ergreifen] us?’ (G29/30 87). Both the questions and the concepts of metaphysics can become meaningful only from within an Ergriffenheit which involves an experience of ‘the whole of beings’. The fact that there is a long-standing philosophic tradition in which the necessity of the fundamental questions and concepts of metaphysics has been established does not bear decisively upon how they stand ‘for us’. The ‘fundamental task of philosophizing’ lies in the ‘awakening and planting’ of an Ergriffenheit, a certain kind of experience of the whole, ‘so as to let the ancient fundamental questions spring forth anew’ (G29/30 508). This philosophic task can at once be described as pedagogical. For Heidegger juxtaposes the need for such a pre-conceptual ‘awakening’ to the ordinary assumption that the ‘fundamental concepts of metaphysics’ (the titled theme of the lecture course) can be taught, learnt and repeated. In contrast, Heidegger suggests that philosophic pedagogy must enact prior and ever more primordial conditions of conceptual understanding within the existence of students. So the pedagogical task of awakening the Ergriffenheit of conceptual questioning consists in the awakening of a fundamental attunement of ‘our philosophizing’.19 Heidegger emphatically opposes the inference that the requisite attunement can be procured subsequent to the questions. Rather: We must first of all let these questions arise out of a fundamental attunement in their necessity and possibility and seek to preserve them in their independence and non-ambiguity. Accordingly, we actually execute these questions if we set about to awaken for ourselves a fundamental attunement of our philosophizing. This is the first and authentic task of our lecture and the beginning of an actual living philosophizing. (G29/30 87) In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Heidegger prepares for this task with a provisional discussion of attunements (Stimmungen) that addresses what they are, what they disclose and how they disclose. This discussion recalls the treatment of attunements in Being and Time. From the outset Heidegger must set aside the prevailing theoretical ways in which these phenomena are initially approached, not only because such preconceptions obstruct any initial access to the essence of attunements, but because an understanding of the admittedly still obscure philosophic-pedagogical task of ‘awakening’ a fundamental attunement is likely to be misconstrued if these more or less explicit theoretical prejudices are not subjected to criticism. First, Heidegger maintains that the philosophic tradition has ‘overlooked’ the phenomenon of attunement. The disclosure that happens in attunement has been assessed according to the standard of theoretical cognition of beings in their presence-at-hand. Construed in terms of ‘feeling’, emotion or affect,

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attunement is viewed as a power of soul, or as a third class of experiences ranked beneath will and reason (G29/30 96–103; SZ 139). The traditional estimation of attunement involves a comparison between the apparent poverty of what attunement discloses and what cognition represents: on the one hand, attunement of itself makes manifest Dasein’s factic ‘Being’ – simply ‘that it is’ – along with an irremediable ignorance as to the ‘whence’ or ‘whither’; on the other hand, reason seems to reveal just such first and final causes of beings. But if Dasein’s own Being cannot be grasped according to the ontological model of what is presentat-hand – and if the sense of Being itself is not necessarily Vorhandenheit – then the cognition of what is present-at-hand and the presumed apprehension of causes cannot serve as the standard by which attunement is interpreted. For in this case, the theoretical underestimation of attunement in fact involves a concealment of the essence of Dasein and the essential questionability of Being. Heidegger counters this oversight with the thesis that ‘ontologically attunement is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure’ (SZ 136). A second assumption that Heidegger associates particularly with psychology is that attunements are merely subjective experiences (Erlebnisse). This conventional thesis is countered through reference to examples that evince the possibility of shared attunement: when someone is in good humour or overcome with grief the atmosphere of the whole situation is strangely affected. As Heidegger says, ‘Attunement is not some being that appears in the soul as an experience, but the how of being there with one another’ (G29/30 100).20 The shared character of attunement is implied in the pedagogical task of awakening a fundamental attunement of ‘our philosophizing’, one that proceeds through the interpretation of the fundamental attunement of ‘our present [historical] situation’. Insofar as the introduction to philosophy (the ‘awakening’ of attunement) proceeds through the discourse of the lecture, the question of the method of philosophic pedagogy leads to the question of the relation between discourse and attunement. According to Grundbegriffe, the philosophic concept is essentially rooted in fundamental attunement. This interpretation is a development of the teaching in Being and Time about attunement, language and communication. Discursive communication is here understood not as the transference of opinions from the interiority of one subject to another, but as the explication of possibilities of Dasein’s being-with-one-another in the world, a being-with that implies mutual attunement (Mitbefindlichkeit) and understanding. As Heidegger says, ‘Dasein is already manifest in a mutual attunement and a mutual understanding. In discourse, Being-with becomes ‘explicitly’ shared; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been taken hold of and appropriated’ (SZ 162). In light of this teaching, the philosophic discourse which calls thematic attention to its own function of ‘awakening’ a mutual attunement must be construed as an exemplary instance of such discursive communication. In Being and Time, Heidegger points to two specific kinds of discourse which have the designated task of evoking

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attunement, thus inviting comparison with his own philosophic communication through both treatise and lecture course. First, in the context of a reference to Aristotle’s Rhetoric intended to substantiate the thesis that attunements determine being-with-one-another,21 Heidegger says that, ‘It is into such an attunement and out of such an attunement that the orator speaks. He must understand the possibilities of attunements in order to awaken them and guide them correctly’ (SZ 138–39; emphasis added). Second, following up the discussion of discourse just referred to, Heidegger explains that the full disclosedness of being-in-the-world and its attunement are made known in discourse not only through the meaning of the words, but also through ‘intonation, modulation, the tempo of discourse, the “manner of speaking”’. ‘In poetical discourse’, Heidegger says, ‘the communication of the existential possibilities of one’s attunement can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence’ (SZ 162). Both the orator and the poet understand the disclosive possibilities of attunement and how these are intrinsic to effective communication and understanding. Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy, particularly as it is practised in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (consisting first in the ‘awakening’ of a fundamental attunement of philosophizing), contains within its own task the purposes that are attributed to oratory and poetry. First, like an orator, the lecturer speaks ‘out of’ an attunement in order to ‘guide’ his listeners (G29/30 270).22 Second, this guidance involves the explication of the possibilities of philosophic questioning from out of the attunement and thus, like poetry, proceeds through a fundamental ‘disclosure of Dasein’s existence’. One could say that Heidegger’s philosophic discourse seems especially to draw upon the model of oratory where, within the task of leading students into philosophizing, it adopts an exhortatory tone and announces a ‘necessity’ of questioning and knowing that – like the call of conscience – issues from Dasein’s own Being and (as we shall consider below) can be experienced through fundamental attunement. Of course, in the works here under consideration, Heidegger certainly does not directly identify philosophic and poetical language, let alone identify the tasks of philosophy and poetry. Yet it is clear that both philosophy and poetry ‘remain in a distinctive nearness of a determinate fundamental attunement’ (G29/30 270), and this common source makes the relation between the two a special problem (which enters the focus of thematic reflection in the 1930s). At the least, one can say that, in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Heidegger employs a mode of discursive communication that attempts to make manifest phenomena in a way that cannot be understood simply in terms of the traditional models of propositional assertion or (Husserlian) phenomenological description. In doing so, this conceptual discourse is imbued with possibilities of disclosure which are traditionally associated with poetry and oratory. The reason for this departure from the tradition seems to follow from an insight into how ‘discursive’ conceptual disclosure and understanding presupposes the proper disposition of the knower, such that effective communication

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must, precisely through discourse, call forth the conditions of understanding. As Heidegger says, What is far more essential than sharp-mindedness and the rigor of conceptual penetration, (which we may also need and which has a special character of its own compared with scientific thought) is the seriousness to maintain these questions on their right path, so that they serve the task given to philosophizing: not to describe the consciousness of man, but to evoke [zu beschwören] the Dasein in man. (G29/30 258) ‘Beschwören’, here distinguished from ‘description’ (beschreiben), has various connotations: to evoke, swear to, conjure up and implore. At the same time however, Heidegger qualifies this unusual statement about philosophic discourse: ‘This evocation does not happen through magic and mystical vision, but through the sobriety of a conceptual questioning.’ Thus as philosophy assumes the pedagogical task of ‘evocation’, the rigour of conceptual understanding is by no means abandoned, it rather manifests a hitherto unrecognized depth (as rooted in attunement) and moves within an expanding horizon of disclosive possibility. According to Heidegger, both philosophic discourse (conceptuality) and poetic discourse emerge out of fundamental attunement. These have a claim to leadership in human affairs by virtue of their capacity to awaken fundamental attunements. The pedagogical question about the grounds of this claim arises if one compares the teaching of Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik with the 1934–35 lectures, Hölderlins Hymnen: ‘Germanien’ und der Rhein. In the latter it is the poet who, in and through his poetry, awakens the fundamental attunement which ‘founds the metaphysical place of future historical Being’ (G39 146). Just as in Grundbegriffe (as will be considered below), the fundamental attunement makes possible an experience of the ‘need’ (Not) of the contemporary epoch. Nevertheless, this is not a matter of simply transferring the pedagogical responsibility for awakening the fundamental attunement from the philosopher to the poet. For the poet’s task of awakening the attunement requires fulfilment through the philosophic interpretation of the poetry. Moreover, though philosophy here ‘serves’ the poet (G39 151), the primary task of awakening a fundamental attunement in Grundbegriffe – that of making possible a ‘living philosophizing’ – is by no means abandoned in the concern with ‘the place of our future historical Being’. Heidegger distinguishes between the necessities of poetry and the necessities of philosophy, but at the same time maintains that these are ‘contained within each other’. Thus it is the internal necessities of thinking which draw the philosopher into the task of interpreting the poet. ‘If we exert ourselves here and now to become educated [erziehen] for the right way of listening to the saying of this poet, then that happens because of the fundamental experience of the need [Not] of modern thinking, its ungrasped angst before actual questioning after what is authentically worthy of

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question, because this need illuminates for us the need of this poet, because each need includes the other within itself’. We ‘deal with this poetry’, Heidegger says, ‘in the context of a comprehensive fundamental task of philosophy’ (G39 149). Philosophy must determine its tasks out of its ‘ownmost necessities’. If this task involves the interpretation of the poet, this is because within the historical destiny of philosophy – indeed in its ownmost origin – philosophy enters into a ‘primordial conversation with poetry and its need’ (151). At this point it may be helpful to compare the way in which the introduction to philosophy was undertaken in Einleitung in die Philosophie (above, Chapter 1) with the procedure in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik as we have considered it thus far. In the former it was argued that the necessity of an ‘introduction’ to philosophy arose from the fact that the possibility of philosophy ‘lies in our Dasein as such’, in the manner of being ‘as it were asleep in us’ (G27 4). Accordingly the necessity of introduction meant that ‘we must awaken and freely seize philosophizing in us’. Since such an action required at least a ‘provisional understanding’ of what must be seized, the introduction proceeded through a determination of what philosophy is in relation to ‘our’ existence. Philosophy was provisionally determined in relation to the prevailing ‘powers’ of existence at the university: science and world view. The whole lecture course consisted in an inquiry into these relations and thus stayed within the confines of the initial task of ‘helping to illuminate the essence of philosophy’ (G27 401). The philosophic pedagogy of Grundbegriffe has the same intention of bringing about a ‘living philosophizing’ and this continues to have the character of ‘awakening’ a possibility that already lies in the essence of Dasein. In Grundbegriffe, Heidegger again begins with the cultivation of a ‘pre-understanding’ of philosophizing. Through a less direct procedure, this is presented as a ‘comprehensive questioning’ of the whole of beings that, despite the fact that it ‘ambiguously’ appears to exist on the same plane as other occupations, is rather ‘something that stands on its own and is quite different in nature to the kinds of comportment within which we commonly move’ (G29/30 34). In Grundbegriffe the thematic discussion of what philosophy is (the pre-understanding) leads directly into the problem of enacting the originary conditions of the ‘comportment’ that a living philosophizing demands, i.e., the awakening of the ‘fundamental attunement’ of ‘our philosophizing’. In this way Heidegger attempts to initiate a movement in the Being of the students. Accordingly, Heidegger here focuses on both the fundamental ‘comportment’ that philosophic questioning requires of the one who would take part in it and the transformation of Dasein that makes this comportment possible. Although the two lecture courses under consideration here complement one another in fulfilling an introduction to philosophy, Grundbegriffe exhibits a more direct emphasis upon the problem of enacting the originary conditions, in the Dasein of the students, of a ‘living philosophizing’. The commencement of philosophizing is something that happens in ‘our existence’ and requires a clarity as to who ‘we’ are. In Einleitung this meant

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reflection on the student’s position in the university; in Grundbegriffe Heidegger explicitly broadens the perspective of self-understanding. The fundamental attunement cannot be artificially contrived but somehow already ‘attunes’ our Dasein, although it remains concealed. The question immediately arises as to which attunement we are to awaken or let become wakeful in us. An attunement that pervades us fundamentally? Who, then, are we? What do we mean here in referring to ‘us’? We, this number of individual human beings assembled here in this room? Or ‘us’ insofar as we are faced with specific task of study in the sciences here at university? Or ‘us’ insofar as we, in belonging to the university, are simultaneously involved in the process of the Bildung of spirit? And this history of spirit – is it only German or is it a Western and broader European happening? Or should we draw the circle in which we stand more broadly? We mean ‘us’, but in what situation, and how are we to demarcate and delimit this situation? The broader the perspective we have on this situation, the fainter our horizon becomes, and the more indeterminate our task. And yet – we sense that the broader the perspective we take, the more decisively it will take hold of us – of each one of us. (G29/30 104; FCM 69) The decision as to which fundamental attunement should be awakened is to proceed from a knowledge of who ‘we’ are. This means a knowledge of ‘our’ situation in a comprehensive sense. It is noteworthy here that the very concern with understanding the historical situation belongs within the context of reflection on the conditions of initiating philosophic questioning and the corresponding pedagogical task of making such questioning possible – i.e., the interpretation of the epoch is not motivated by any ulterior interest in contemporary affairs.23 For the purpose of determining the fundamental attunement of ‘our’ philosophizing, Heidegger takes up the interpretations of the historical situation carried out by Spengler, Klages and Scheler – teachings which, he argues, have the general character of a comprehensive diagnosis and prognosis of the history of Western culture. Ultimately it is not the content of their depictions or even the correctness of their analyses that is decisive here. Rather, for Heidegger, what is significant about our situation is that it is marked by the apparent need for the philosophy of culture (Kulturphilosophie) and the fact that the teachings of the latter already ‘determine our Dasein in many ways’. The philosophy of culture speaks to the present generation because through its diagnoses and prognoses of history it accords ‘us’ a special ‘role’ within it. This very need for a meaningful role in history attests to the hidden attunement of our situation. Heidegger says: The decisive question now is: What lies behind the fact that we give ourselves this role and indeed must do so? Have we become so insignificant to ourselves, that we require a role? Why do we find no meaning for ourselves any more,

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i.e., no essential possibility of Being? Is it because an indifference yawns at us out of all things, an indifference whose grounds we do not know? Yet who can speak in such a way when world trade, technology, and the economy seize hold of man and keep him in motion? . . . What is happening here? We ask anew: must we first make ourselves interesting to ourselves again? Why must we do this? Perhaps because we have become bored with ourselves? Is man himself now supposed to have become bored with himself? Why so? Do things ultimately stand in such a way with us that a profound boredom draws back and forth like a silent fog in the abysses of Dasein? (G29/30 115; FCM 77) With this question as to whether our situation is already in its grounds attuned by deep boredom, the attunement of ‘our’ philosophizing is provisionally determined. Heidegger emphasizes that this state of affairs must remain a question because an attunement is never available as something factually present-athand such that it could be objectively ascertained or denied. Moreover, as a ‘fundamental’ attunement that moves in the ‘abysses’ of Dasein, it is from the outset in no way clear what would pertain to ‘deep boredom’ such that one could recognize, affirm or deny its existence. Therefore, in order to carry through this question about a deep boredom of ‘our’ situation – in order to remain open to this attunement – it is necessary to bring the essence of boredom itself to clarity. The task of awakening a fundamental attunement for ‘our philosophizing’ thus requires a thematic interpretation of the essence of boredom. This is a phenomenological interpretation that thus serves the pedagogical task in that it intends to bring clarity concerning the attunement at issue. The interpretation must make possible a receptive openness towards what the attunement makes manifest, and thus towards the questioning that it makes possible. If the fundamental attunement ‘already’ belongs to Dasein, then to ‘awaken’ it is not to produce it, but simply to ‘let it be awake’, to not oppose it or let it fall sleep. The pedagogical task of awakening the attunement thus prescribes not only the necessity of an interpretation of the essence of boredom, but also the proper methodological approach. The way of access to the attunement – both for awakening and for thematic interpretation – is prefigured in the manner of Being of the matter itself. Thus Heidegger denies that one could gain access to an understanding of the attunement by somehow ‘transposing’ oneself into it and observing it as an object in the stream of consciousness. A primordial relationship to boredom must be cultivated, and this requires that one attend to the way in which the attunement is always already experienced prior to theorizing. As Heidegger says, ‘What is required is not the effort of working ourselves into a particular attitude, but the reverse: what is required is the releasement [Gelassenheit] of our free, everyday perspective – free from psychological and other theories of consciousness, of the stream of lived experience and the like’ (G29/30 137). Accordingly, the interpretation attempts to recover the manner in which both boredom (Langeweile) and that which bores one (das Langweilige)

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are what one always opposes. One can come to understand boredom by way of the manner in which one attempts to drive it away whenever it arises. The occurrence of this attunement includes a reaction to it. When boredom arises one attempts to drive it away. In order to elucidate the phenomenon of boredom it is thus necessary to attend to the characteristic ways in which the attunement is subdued.24 Paradoxically, the initial ‘releasement’ of the immediate everyday perspective is necessary in order to gain access to what is suppressed in everydayness. Such releasement is thus in no way a simple adoption of the everyday perspective. For everyday Dasein, the demand that one maintain a receptive openness to deep boredom – in order to prepare an ‘awakening’ of boredom – must be nonsensical. Not to let boredom fall asleep is a strange or almost insane demand. Is it not entirely opposed to what all natural and sound human comportment is concerned with every day and every hour, namely to pass the time and precisely not to let boredom arise, that is, to shake it off and make it fall asleep whenever it approaches? And we are supposed to let it be awake!’ (G29/30 119; FCM 79)

Attunement and History The primary goal in the interpretation of boredom is to awaken the fundamental attunement itself. Heidegger proposes to approach the phenomenon from the everyday perspective. Together, this intention and this approach impose restrictions on the treatment of attunements in general. These limitations account for the fact that, in Grundbegriffe, Heidegger does not elaborate upon the historical character of attunements. Insofar as he seeks the attunement of ‘our contemporary situation’, it is implied that this attunement is in some way peculiar to this historical era. Moreover, at a later point, in summarizing the conclusion drawn from the completed analysis of boredom, Heidegger confirms that attunements are historical in two ways: first, by indicating that there are other possible fundamental attunements of philosophy; second, he maintains that the historical ‘fate’ of the philosopher ultimately determines which attunement opens the possibility of a questioning relation to the whole (G29/30 269–70). This is as far as Heidegger goes in Grundbegriffe towards clarifying the historical character of boredom in particular or attunement in general. A question that naturally arises from the treatment of a phenomenon that is held to be fundamental in ‘our situation’ is not addressed: which attunements are fundamental in prior epochs? Why do fundamental attunements vary throughout different historical situations and what is the relation between them? Attention to Heidegger’s procedure in Grundbegriffe helps to illuminate why such considerations are not developed in this lecture. In executing the guiding

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pedagogical task of initiating a living philosophizing for the students from out of the immediate situation, Heidegger’s interpretation proceeds phenomenologically from what is ‘first for us’, here and now. That task is thus described as an attempt at ‘breaking open the tunnel into which we must enter in order to see what happens in our Dasein today, and in order to grasp this meaning as the fundamental meaning of our Dasein – not with the intention of an anthropology or culture-philosophy, but rather as that which breaks open the authentic questions of philosophizing’ (G29/30 236, emphasis added). Reflection here attempts to ‘break through’ the given, superficial self-understanding to the deeper ‘happening’ in our Dasein. Deep boredom is the attunement through which the ‘manifestness’ of the whole can first ‘seize’ us, so that ‘we’ could begin to question it. This attunement and this manifestness are elucidated, but within a prescribed limit: only to the extent needed in order to develop, in Part Two of the lecture, the question about this manifestness itself, i.e., the question ‘what is the world?’ Heidegger’s expressed aim is then not to present an overarching theory of the history of attunements, metaphysics or Being, but rather to attain an initial ‘entry’ to the possibility of philosophizing.25 This is accomplished by making the presuppositions of philosophic questioning a matter of the student’s own experience. In Grundbegriffe these presuppositions lie in the fundamental attunement of deep boredom, the particular ‘manifestness’ of the beings as a whole that happens in the attunement, and the way in which this manifestness of beings itself affects Dasein, what Heidegger will call a ‘need’ (Not) of beings as a whole which ‘necessitates’ the questioning that is to be awakened. These matters must first be ‘broken open’ before their history can be investigated. An interpretation of the ‘hidden history’ of the manifestness of the whole of beings – such as Heidegger undertakes in the 1930s – requires beforehand a perspective on the whole. Such a perspective can be opened only through the fundamental experience that Heidegger here seeks to make possible. In other words, the possibility, necessity and perspective of the interpretation of the ‘hidden history’ can only arise from out of the very fundamental experience that Heidegger, in Grundbegriffe, intends to lead into. Only on this condition can the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and modern technology be explicated as the history of thinkers’ responses to the questionability of the historical manifestation of the whole of beings, i.e., the history of a response to the question of Being. Thus in Grundbegriffe, the standpoint for comprehensive historical reflection on the relation between the attunement of ‘our contemporary situation’ and that, e.g., of the Greek beginning, is not yet attained and therefore the question of the historicality of the fundamental attunements remains open. Yet in the writings of the late 1930s, this standpoint is indeed reached and such questions are taken up. Heidegger here clarifies the relation between the attunement of the Greek beginning and that of the present situation. This reflection allows one to understand how deep boredom becomes the

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fundamental attunement of ‘our modern Dasein’ and thereby makes clear the need to enter the analysis of boredom in Grundbegriffe. Before taking this up, it may be helpful here to briefly consider Heidegger’s later juxtaposition of the attunements that govern the beginning and end of the history of metaphysics. In the lecture course, Die Grundfragen der Metaphysik (1936/37) Heidegger turns to the attunement that governs the first, Greek, inception of philosophy. Through the fundamental attunement of wonder (Erstaunen), the Dasein of Greeks was arrested by the unconcealedness of beings as a whole. Herein the beingness (Seiendheit) of beings as such ‘shines forth’. This attunement and manifestness affected Greek Dasein as a ‘need’ (Not) that compelled them, as their ‘assigned task’, to ‘preserve’ the beingness of beings. At the highest level, this preservation is carried out in philosophic questioning as to what and how beings as such are, but also in the techne- of art and founding a state (G45 155– 56). The initial Greek experience of Being is limited: Being shows itself as the unconcealment of the whole – the presence of beings as such – but, at the same time, the initial ‘presencing’ of this unconcealment eluded the thinking of the Greeks. Precisely through the execution of their destined task, the original wonder before the beingness of beings dissipated. Beings of course remain the subject of human dealings and philosophic investigation, but the manifestness (unconcealment) which such activities presuppose becomes obvious and forgotten. That first luminosity of wonder, which had knowledge only of the darkness, has become the transparency of all knowing and doing, accessible to everyone and satisfying everyone. Beings are – that is not worth a question, indeed it is not even worth mentioning. And to say what beings are, precisely as beings, is empty talk. For everyone knows what ‘Being’ means, especially since it is the most general and most empty determination of everything. In this wasteland of utter indifference, what in the beginning produced the highest wonder has been lost. (G45 195; BQ 168) Through modern scientific-technological representation, beings are revealed as objects of calculation and resources (Bestand) for production and consumption. This at once intensifies oblivion of Being and empties beings themselves of their meaning for Dasein. Although this condition emerges from the loss of the ‘initial wondering perseverance of the Greeks before the beings’ (SU 13), Heidegger holds that the modern domination of all beings through knowledge is in a certain sense a fulfilment of the ‘task’ assigned to the Greeks, i.e., it is unwittingly driven by the ‘need’ to reveal and preserve the unhiddenness of beings that became a compelling destiny through the Greek experience of wonder. Deep boredom is the attunement through which beings as a whole manifest themselves in their ‘irrelevance’. Boredom therefore belongs essentially to the course of history initiated in Greek wonder. In the Beiträge (of the late 1930s), Heidegger comes back to the theme of boredom. Here, the conclusions

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of the 1929 lecture are taken up within the understanding of the History of Being that has been worked out in the interim. In the context of a reflection on modern science, Heidegger writes: The hidden goal, towards which all of this and much more hastens, without having the slightest hint of it – and without being able in the slightest to have a hint – is the condition of total boredom (cf. lecture 1929/30) in the field of its best successes, which can no longer hide the character of boredom, in case a remnant of knowing power has then still remained in order at least to arouse dread [zu erschrecken] in this condition and to disclose this condition and therein the gaping abandonment of beings by Being. (G65 157) Here, both the state of boredom and what it makes manifest – the essential ‘condition’ of this phase of history – are not generally recognized but rather hidden by the general satisfaction in the efficacy of technological conquest. The awakening of the attunement is then an experience of an ‘absence’ and ‘emptiness’ pervading the whole. In this passage, boredom harbours the possibility of a more profound experience – that of dread (Erschreckens) before the abandonment of Being itself – which opens up the more primordial source of this emptiness.26 This suggests that deep boredom (and the corresponding manifestness of the whole) is not simply a consequence of the decline from the initial Greek experience of the whole; it is not a matter of moderns growing bored with what amazed Greek Dasein. Rather, boredom manifests the whole in such a way as to make possible an experience (in ‘dread’) of that event which was denied to the Greeks and the whole history of metaphysics: Being’s abandonment (Seinsverlassenheit) of beings and its ‘remaining absent’ from human thought in course of a history that moves from the pre-Socratic thinkers, through to Nietzsche and beyond.

Attunement and Philosophy In Part One of Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Heidegger undertakes an interpretation of the essence of boredom which moves through three successively more profound forms – a movement from the superficial to the profound and essential. The interpretation of each form takes as its point of departure the manner in which the respective instance of boredom is experienced through an attempt to drive it away. After the interpretation of the essence of profound boredom, Heidegger returns to the question of how a profound boredom attunes ‘us’, our ‘specific situation’. From there he exhibits how the metaphysical questions arise out of the deep boredom of our situation. We cannot here adequately discuss the elaborate and painstaking analysis of the three forms of boredom and the subsequent explication of the deep boredom of the contemporary situation. It is only possible to recall a few main points

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from the interpretation of the essence of deep boredom (the third form) and consider how this is the fundamental attunement of the historical situation – points which are important for understanding how the philosophic Ergriffenheit, questions and concepts emerge out of this fundamental attunement. Each of the three forms of boredom manifest in respectively different ways two formal structural moments: a ‘being-left-empty’ (Leergelassenheit) and ‘being-held-into or bound-to’ (Hingehaltenheit). In the two more superficial forms, the experience of boredom involves either a ‘being left empty’ by particular things in a particular situation; an ‘emptiness’ forms, wherein one, as it were, leaves oneself behind and attempts to entertain oneself with whatever transpires in a particular situation. So, e.g., the awaited train is an hour late and one feels compelled to pass the empty time with any particular diversion that presents itself on the platform, such as reading the train schedules. Profound boredom, on the other hand, is not induced by determinate things, circumstances or occasions. In profound boredom, everything – the whole situation, the specific beings that surround one and one’s own determinate self – withdraws into an overpowering indifference (Gleichgültigkeit) and become irrelevant (G29/30 207). One is here ‘left-empty’ in the whole of beings – i.e., helplessly carried beyond all specific beings and overwhelmed by their being as a whole indifferent. Any possible expectation of entertainment or satisfaction from things is ‘denied’ (Versagen). Heidegger explains: Through this boredom Dasein finds itself set in place precisely before beings as a whole, to the extent that in this boredom the beings that surround us offer us no further possibility of acting and no further possibility of our doing anything. There is a denial [Versagen] on the part of beings as a whole with respect to these possibilities. . . . Being-left-empty in this third form of boredom is Dasein’s being-delivered-over to beings’ denial [versagende] as a whole. (G29/30 210) In the more superficial forms of boredom, Dasein naturally closes itself off from what boredom makes manifest by frantic efforts to pass the time (or in one case by simply ignoring the boredom). In deep boredom, on the other hand, Dasein is so overwhelmed by the indifference that pervades everything that the possibility of finding a way of passing time does not arise; indeed, in this form of boredom there is a peculiar compulsion to attend to what happens here, a compulsion to ‘listen’ to what this boredom has to ‘say’. The telling selfrefusal (sich versagen) of beings is at once an Ansagen, an appeal, that indirectly refers to something else: the refusal of possibilities at once exposes Dasein’s possibilities in the mode of being unexploited (brachenliegenden Möglichkeiten). As ‘unexploited’ these possibilities point indirectly to Dasein’s ‘capacity-forbeing’ (Seinkönnen) itself, a pure and empty capacity for possessing possibilities. Dasein is thus here ‘held out into’, indeed ‘impelled towards’ this primordial source of possibility. Heidegger says, ‘To this being-left-behind by beings’ refusal

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of themselves as a whole there simultaneously belongs our being impelled [Hingezwungenwerden] towards the originary making-possible of Dasein as such’ (G29/30 216). In deep boredom there is an ‘oscillation’ (Schweben) between these two moments of being-left-empty and being-held-into, between the self-refusal and the announcement, between impossibility and possibility. The exhibition of the ‘temporal character’ of these two moments in their unity gives further clarification of their inner relation. Here Heidegger works out in a condensed way the manner in which the manifestness (and withdrawal) of beings is made possible through the temporalization of time, i.e., he broaches the fundamental problem of the relation of Being and time through the phenomenology of deep boredom. The first moment of being-left-empty is an experience of timelessness, an apparent cessation of the passing of time. Deep boredom (die Lange-weile) is the expansion, the ‘lengthening’ of the ‘while’ of being-there (G29/30 229). The refusal of beings ‘as a whole’ pertains not simply to a regard for what is in the temporal present, nor to a prospective or retrospective view, but in the ‘whole’ of time, the ‘originally unifying horizon of time’. In other words, the ‘while’ of Dasein’s being-there manifests itself as temporally indifferent and indeterminate (G29/30 215, 229). The withdrawal of beings ‘as a whole’ is made possible by this disclosure of the ‘horizon of the whole of time’. Dasein is spellbound (bannen) by this horizon of time (as unarticulated into past and future) in such a way that beings refuse themselves with respect to ‘what’ and ‘how’ they are and in their relevance to Dasein. Under the spell of the undifferentiated horizon of time, everything becomes indifferent. But, again, this denial of possibility is at once an appeal to possibility. Time indirectly announces itself as what primordially makes possible both the refusal of beings as a whole and any possibility of comportment with beings. That which has the power to deny is also able to confer. The self-refusal exercised by the spell-binding horizon of time simultaneously harbours a summons (Anrufen) to Dasein’s free disclosure of its possibilities, a ‘disclosure’ that would somehow reopen Dasein’s temporal ‘situation’ – its ‘there’ – as a determinate site of possibility and action. In deep boredom, Dasein oscillates between a state of being spell-bound and ‘left empty’ by time as what denies possibility and a ‘moment of vision’ (Augenblick) in which this ‘spell’ is momentarily broken. In the former state, Dasein is bound by the unarticulated unity of time and thus left empty. In the latter state, however, there arises a view for being-there (Da-sein) in the articulated unity of past, present and future. This opens the possibility that beings as a whole may become manifest for a particular Dasein and its factic possibilities (G29/30 226). Heidegger emphasizes the ‘unity’ of this phenomenon, a unity rooted in time itself. Yet in boredom there is a ‘break’ between these two moments and Dasein oscillates between them: on the one hand, in the spell-binding of the temporal horizon through which the ‘whole’ of beings becomes manifest in its indifference, the moment of vision ‘vanishes’; on the other hand, in the

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disclosure of the moment of vision the ‘spell’ is broken. If the latter moment is the possibility of authentic existence, this entails that such authenticity can only be a momentary modification, a possibility that is at the same time denied. This has profound implications for Heidegger’s understanding of philosophic questioning and conceptuality: what is opened up in the moment of vision is not ‘phenomenally’ permanent in its presence-at-hand but manifests itself relative to the momentary dis-closure. The only possible comportment towards what is not constantly available is that of ‘questioning’ (as opposed to cognition). Similarly, philosophic concepts are not representations of content but ‘formal indications’ that ‘point’ back to the preconceptual experience (the attuned ‘Ergriffenheit’) of disclosure in which their meaning can be fulfilled. The philosophic concepts thus contain a reference to a ‘transformation’ – or the demand for a transformation – of existence that ‘unlocks (Aufschliessen) beforehand the dimension of the conceivable’ (G29/30 428–29).27 In summary, the interpretation of profound boredom exhibits two themes that help to clarify why the pedagogical attempt to initiate a ‘living philosophizing’ proceeds through the awakening of this fundamental attunement. First, in this attunement there happens an original, distinctive and immediate manifestation of the ‘whole’ of beings – a whole that always already encloses man’s activities with beings, although it is for the most part hidden. This is a perplexing mode of ‘manifestness’ (Offenbarkeit) in that in deep boredom it is something with which one is precisely not ‘concerned’ with, it is ‘indifferent’ but as such no less overpowering and ‘gripping’ (ergreifen).28 The attuned experience of this manifestation of the whole is of itself not a knowledge of the whole of beings, nor does it yet even imply an explicit questioning of this whole (although, as we shall consider below, the philosophic interpretation of the attunement – as essential to the ‘awakening’ of the attunement – is intended to foster the possibility of ‘transparent receptivity’ and a ‘questioning posture’ towards what the attunement makes manifest). The manifestation of ‘the being as a whole’ comes to be conceptually designated as the ‘world’, yet the happening of the attunement and the thematic interpretation are only the point of departure for developing the ‘problem of world’; it alone does not afford an answer to the question of the character of the world.29 The sense of the ‘priority’ of fundamental attunement to conceptual questioning becomes somewhat clearer in Heidegger’s rejoinder to the prevailing way of understanding the manifestation of the world in attunement as a ‘subjective grasping’ of beings. Heidegger asks: ‘How can man even come to a subjective conception of beings, unless beings are already manifest to him beforehand? How do things stand concerning this manifestness of beings as such? If the “as a whole” indeed already belongs to this manifestness, is it not then withdrawn from the subjectivity of man, and that means here from his momentary caprice in each case?’ (G29/30 414; FCM 286). To interpret this manifestness as ‘subjective’ would be to assimilate it to a given way of conceiving the essence of the human being (e.g., as soul or consciousness). But this would overlook the way

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in which the manifestness of the ‘whole’ in attunement includes Dasein. As Heidegger says, ‘In attunement we are in such and such a way: this therefore implies that attunement precisely makes manifest beings as a whole and makes manifest ourselves as disposed in the midst of these beings’ (G29/30 410). The fundamental attunement of deep boredom thus ‘opens for us a primordial perspective’ on human Dasein itself. The pedagogical task – encompassing the awakening of this attunement, the interpretation of what this attunement makes manifest, and the initiation of a questioning that departs from such manifestness – at once radicalizes the philosophic orientation to the problem of the world (the ‘being as a whole’) and involves a ‘complete transformation of our conception of man’ (G29/30 93). The interpretation of the essence of boredom brings out a second characteristic of this attunement that is of importance for Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy: in deep boredom Dasein finds itself ‘compelled’ in certain ways. In the first place, this attunement is something which arises suddenly and ‘overpowers’ Dasein; it has the character of Übermächtigkeit and is in general ‘for the most part removed from Dasein’s freedom’ (G29/30 205, 238). Accordingly, against deep boredom there is no recourse through any mode of passing time: Dasein is abandoned to the manifest indifference of things and of its own self. In being ‘entranced’ or ‘spell-bound’ (bannt) in the withdrawal of beings from possible concern, the temporal horizon of the whole ‘binds’ Dasein to itself (an sich binden) (G29/30 221). When, in deep boredom, Dasein’s possibilities are denied (sichversagen), this denial simultaneously announces (ansagen) ‘that which makes possible’ (das Ermöglichende). The ‘announcement’ is a ‘summons’ (Anrufen) through which Dasein is ‘impelled towards’ (Hinzwingen) that which makes possible and forced into the moment of vision (G29/30 216, 223). Just as the manifestation of the ‘as a whole’ that happens in deep boredom becomes, later in this lecture course, the point of departure for developing the metaphysical question as to the character of the world, so the ‘compulsion’ experienced in deep boredom is presented as the enigmatic source of the ‘necessity’ of posing this question – indeed, the necessity of philosophic questioning simply. Thereby it is also disclosed as the source of the ‘demand’ to awaken the fundamental attunement (i.e. the demand ‘not to oppose’ deep boredom). Heidegger’s interpretation of the ‘essence’ of deep boredom is followed by a treatment of this attunement as it is specific to ‘us’ and ‘our’ historical situation. The manifestness of the whole and the experience of compulsion that belong to deep boredom are also then determined more concretely. On the basis of the preceding interpretation of deep boredom as it articulates itself into the two structural moments of being-left-empty and being-held-into, Heidegger first inquires as to whether ‘our Dasein’ is determined by a ‘specific’ ‘emptiness as a whole’. According to Heidegger’s elaboration, ‘emptiness’ here implies a ‘need’ or ‘distress’ (Not). ‘Are we affected by a need, does any such need concern us?’ (G29/30 243). The situation presents all kinds of ‘needs’

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(Nöte), crises, disruptions – social, political, cultural etc. – and there is everywhere a strident attempt to respond to such needs, efforts to ‘convert them directly into order and satisfaction’. However, precisely this preoccupation with determinate needs and the organized, programmatic responses to them not only does not address, but, moreover, must suppress the possible emergence of the fundamental Need ‘as a whole’ (Not im Ganzen) that is to be sought after.30 Any ‘Need as a whole’ that fundamentally determines our Dasein would seem to be absent. And yet, Heidegger argues, the very ‘absence’ (Ausbleiben) of a fundamental Need as a whole – in contrast to the manifold and urgent needs of the day – is a fundamental way in which we are ‘left empty’ as a whole. Not this social misery, not that political confusion, not this powerlessness of science, not that erosion of art, not this groundlessness of philosophy, not that impotence of religion – the Need [Not] in question is not the fact that this or that need distresses [bedrängt] in such or such a way. Rather what distresses us most profoundly and in a concealed manner is the very stayingaway of any essential distress [Bedrängnis] in our Dasein as a whole. (G29/30 244) In deep boredom there is an absence of an essential distress in our Dasein. Though it is suggested here that this absence itself is ‘distressing’ to Dasein, it distresses in its ‘depths’ and ‘in a concealed manner’. This implies that Dasein does not necessarily and manifestly experience the absence as distressing. This hiddenness – this apparent inability to experience the absence of distress as truly distressing – belongs to the way in which Dasein is here attuned, i.e., belongs to, the situation of being under the Need (Not) of the absence of distress. One is, as it were, ‘spell-bound’ (bannt) by this Need. Heidegger further shows how the absence, i.e., the denial (Versagen) of essential distress, is at the same time an indirect ‘announcement’ (Ansagen) such that the condition of being-spell-bound and the hiddenness of absence can be ‘broken’. This possibility is ‘announced’ in the form of an ‘extreme demand’ upon Dasein’s existence, i.e., as a necessity (Not-wendigkeit). In heeding this demand, Dasein can ‘break’ the spell cast by the absence of an essential distress, open up (entschliessen) the concealed absence and ‘truly experience’ this state of affairs as ‘distressing’. What is therewith announced in this absence of distress, in this self-refusal of the beings as a whole? Which determinate being-held-out-into [Hingehaltenheit] can belong to this determinate being-left-empty? We have learned to recognize the specific being-held-out-into of deep boredom as being-compelled to the extremity of what makes Dasein as such possible in the moment of vision. Therewith we ask: Which moment can and must be co-announced as the authentically enabling [Ermöglichende] in that self-refusal of distress? To what must the Dasein resolutely open itself in order to break the spell of that Need [Not] – the Need of the absence of distress as a whole, i.e., in order for the

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first time to become equal to that profound Need and to be open for it, in order to truly experience it as distressing? Corresponding to that emptiness as a whole, the most extreme demand must be announced to man; not an arbitrary demand, not this or that, but rather the demand to man simply. What is that? It is that Dasein as such is demanded of man, that it is given to him – to be there. (G29/30 246) In this interpretation of the specific deep boredom of the modern situation – particularly in this articulation of the ‘demand’ that speaks in the telling refusal of an essential distress – Heidegger is attempting merely to ‘help bring to word [zum Wort verhelfen] that which Dasein wants to express [aussprechen] in this fundamental attunement’ (G29/30 249).31 As it is presented, the demand is selfreflexive, it has itself as its own ‘content’. Formality and emptiness of content are, however, in keeping with the fact that it is a ‘demand’ that is here spoken of: a demand does not uncover an actual, present-at-hand state of affairs that can be ascertained; rather, a demand only ‘is’ in the indication of something that is at once possible and necessary. It announces a necessity under which Dasein always already exists, but which is proximally obscured. One should recall here that the whole thematic interpretation of boredom is undertaken in order to awaken the fundamental attunement of philosophizing, the attunement out of which Dasein can be ‘gripped’ (ergreifen) by the whole of beings so as to ground a conceptual questioning of the whole itself. At stake in Heidegger’s articulation of the ‘Need’ (Not) and ‘demand’ that speaks in deep boredom is precisely that which makes possible this affective experience of the whole of beings. The ‘Need’ happens in Dasein and is addressed to Dasein; but it is neither subjective nor something that issues from human reason alone.32 Rather the Need is the manner in which the manifestness of beings as a whole – in distinction from particular beings of concern in the effort to satisfy human needs – can of itself ‘affect’ Dasein and even exercise a kind of compulsory power in Dasein’s conduct.33 The demand announced in deep boredom breaks the spell of the ‘Need of the absence of distress as a whole’ so as to make it possible for Dasein to ‘truly experience’ this absence. In other words, the demand that Dasein ‘take-over’ being-there makes manifest how Dasein is proximally not ‘there’, not essential, or not itself. The demand thus attests to the possibility of a ‘liberation of the Dasein in man’. In light of this possibility, the contemporary situation can be experienced as a possible suppression of deep boredom. Heidegger says, We can only question whether this deep boredom thoroughly attunes our Dasein, i.e., we can question whether our modern everyday human traits, our being human, is not such that in everything – in all its doing and acting and being blinded by this – it acts counter to the possibility of that deep boredom arising. We can only ask whether contemporary man narrows down that expanse of his concealed and most profound Need [Not] to those needs [Nöte] for

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Heidegger thus suggests that modern politics and technology (‘all the organizing and program-building and experimentation’) originate in a reaction to a distress (of absence) – a ‘being-left-empty’ – which not only is not known, but which is evaded and obscured precisely through a technological knowing that can acknowledge only ‘needs’ susceptible to calculation and attempts to ‘put an end to them, to convert them directly into order and satisfaction’ (G29/30 243). This necessity of ‘resolutely opening to’ the Need of the absence of distress, is a demand that Dasein authentically ‘be there’ and ‘conceive’ of itself ‘as Dasein’. Heidegger asks: ‘To what does Dasein have to resolutely open itself? To first procuring for itself a genuine knowing concerning that wherein whatever properly makes Dasein itself possible consists’ (G29/30 247). Genuine knowing of ‘that which makes possible’ (das Ermöglichende) is, in this lecture course, fulfilled through philosophic questioning. The three guiding questions of the lecture course – what is world? what is individuation? what is finitude? – were posed with apparent arbitrariness at the outset of the lecture, but are now shown to have their origin in Dasein as it can be experienced in deep boredom.34 It is a matter of simply inquiring about and ‘bringing to word’ what ‘distresses us’ as it becomes manifest in the fundamental attunement. ‘Thus we must actually question, what [this fundamental attunement] gives for our questioning, inquiring after what distresses [bedrängt] us in this fundamental attunement and perhaps at the same time vanishes as decisive possibility’ (G29/30 249). The fundamental attunement is, in the first place, the medium through which the subject matter presents itself as something worthy of inquiry. But also, by virtue of the fundamental attunement, Dasein can be gripped by the ‘necessity’ (Not-wendigkeit) of questioning. Through the interpretation of deep boredom, the metaphysical questions ‘now betray their possibility, i.e., their necessity in the Need [Not] of our Dasein’. The painstaking interpretive analysis of the fundamental attunement in its successively deeper forms was characterized as subordinate to the pedagogical task of awakening. From the outset it has been clear that the task of the lecture does not consist simply in a theoretical description of the fundamental attunement of our Dasein. Rather, the whole lecture itself was expressly intended to somehow ‘awaken’ the fundamental attunement and thereby actively enable the philosophic Ergriffenheit – out of which conceptual questioning becomes possible and necessary – in the existence of students. From the standpoint of the provisional conclusion of Part One of Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik it is now possible to consider more thematically just what the pedagogical task of awakening intended to accomplish and how this was fulfilled. In other words, we can now consider more directly the character of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy as the awakening of a fundamental attunement.

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The essential interpretation of profound boredom brought out the manner in which this attunement and what becomes manifest therein ‘overpowers’ Dasein and is removed from its freedom. It thus clarifies and confirms the initial assertions about attunements in general on the point that they cannot be summoned at will or objectified in the stream of consciousness. Therefore the task of ‘awakening’ cannot involve a demand to ‘transpose’ oneself into or otherwise produce the attunement. Moreover, the interpretation of the deep boredom of ‘our’ specific modern situation showed that such a transposition is unnecessary: contemporary Dasein may ‘already’ be so attuned, although this attunement is proximally hidden and cannot be established as a fact. Accordingly, the interpretation of the fundamental attunement – as subservient to the task of awakening the attunement – cannot intend to instigate the attunement, but has the more limited aim of preparing students for a fundamental experience of what transpires in their own Dasein by fostering both ‘transparency’ as to the nature of attunement and an openness for the possibility of beingattuned. Phenomenological interpretation of the essence of the attunement intends to ‘create the full transparency for our being attuned, so that when we are attuned in this way, such transparency will radiate out of the unity of the attunement in its structure while remaining within it’ (G29/30 231, see also 222). The interpretation of deep boredom prepares a receptivity for the attunement insofar as it at once arises from, fulfils and conveys to the students of the lecture course the ‘demand’ (Forderung) (belonging to the attunement itself) that one ‘not oppose’ the attunement and what it makes manifest, even though the suppression of deep boredom is the prevailing tendency of both the common understanding and human beings within the contemporary situation. That the interpretation can only foster such a ‘transparent receptivity’ for the attunement and what becomes manifest within it reveals an important limitation upon philosophic pedagogy in general. The attempt to actualize the fundamental conditions of philosophic questioning – the attainment of the ‘Ergriffenheit’, the possibility of ‘being-seized’ by that which philosophy inquires into – does not have full disposal over such conditions, i.e., over everything that pertains to the possibility of actually being-attuned by the fundamental attunement of metaphysics.35 The very determination of deep boredom as the fundamental attunement of ‘our’ philosophizing – among other possible attunements – is not a matter of the philosopher’s discretion but fundamentally a matter of historical ‘fate’ – i.e., a decision that adopts as its own a ‘compulsory’ dispensation of history. Heidegger explains: Which fundamental attunement we choose in order to develop and pursue these questions is not simply an arbitrary decision on our part. It is true that in a certain sense we do choose, and do so freely, and yet in the deepest sense we are bound and compelled as well. . . . The choice involves binding ourselves to the intrinsic character of metaphysics itself which compels the engagement of a particular finite Dasein, that is, compels us to take over

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Here it is evident that the limitations implied in philosophic questioning and the pedagogical task of leading others into such questioning are rooted in the finitude of Dasein and, in turn reveal that finitude.36 The limitations inherent in Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy are most clearly expressed in the characterization of its procedure as ‘preparatory’ (G29/30 87). It was shown that the sense of the ‘demand’ that is announced in deep boredom is oriented to a transformation in which the essential Being of Dasein is restored (G29/30 257). Philosophic pedagogy and questioning however cannot effect this transformation, but only make one attentive to the demand that is announced in the fundamental attunement and thereby ‘clarify’ – through the discursive medium of the interpretative lecture – the meaning of what ‘compels’ us as ‘a necessity, namely of not acting counter to what is essential in Dasein’ (G29/30 257). Rather than effect any transformation, philosophy can only ‘bring us to the brink of possibility, the possibility of restoring to Dasein its actuality, that is, its existence’ (G29/30 257). The passage over the ‘thin line’ from possibility to actuality is a ‘leap’ accomplished in the moment of vision through ‘individual action’. What philosophy itself accomplishes is therefore ‘penultimate’: ‘to lead [führen] to the brink of possibility’, and ‘before that to prepare the possibility and the particular path of such leadership [Führung]’ (G29/30 257). This emphatic statement of the ‘merely’ preparatory character of philosophic leadership (pedagogy) is commensurate with, on the one hand, the obscurity of the demand for the ‘liberation of the Dasein in man’ and, on the other hand, the possibility that modern man is in all his activities unknowingly suppressing what is essential to his Being. In our introductory chapter, it was argued, through a discussion of Introduction to Metaphysics, that the apparently narrow pedagogical task of leading students into philosophic questioning in fact contains a more comprehensive orientation towards a kind of leadership in the historical existence of a people, a leadership that aims at something on the order of the ‘salvation of the West’. It was suggested above that a consideration of both Heidegger’s statements on the method of an introduction to philosophy and the manner in which this task is carried out in practice (i.e., without constantly recalling attention to the pedagogical aim of the lectures), will shed light on the possibility and character of the more comprehensive form of leadership that is explicitly affirmed in texts like Introduction to Metaphysics. That suggestion can now be confirmed through this reading of Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik.

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The task of introducing philosophy in ‘our’ Dasein requires reflection on who ‘we’ are. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, as noted above, Heidegger explicitly broadens the perspective of this reflection to encompass not only ‘we’ teachers and students at the university, but the more comprehensive horizon of modern Western Dasein. The determination of ‘our modern situation’ was thus fulfilled through the interpretation of the fundamental attunement, deep boredom, in which the essential traits of this situation become manifest. The task of initiating a living philosophizing in ‘our Dasein’ is carried out primarily for ‘these’ students in ‘this’ lecture hall. Yet without diverting the primary focus of attention from these students, modern humanity itself becomes the indirect recipient of this education. In the broadening of perspective upon who ‘we’ are, however, the aim of this preparation becomes ‘more indeterminate’ (G29/30 104). This task is articulated through a yet more comprehensive explication of the demand that is experience in deep boredom. That ‘demand’ that Dasein be ‘taken over’ is now one imposed on ‘modern man’ – not simply the ‘we’ who are factically present in the lecture hall. The comprehensive pedagogical task involves ‘preparing’ modern man to be receptive to the ‘demand’ and to be open to the ‘distress’ that remains hidden behind – but at once indirectly attested through – the urgent preoccupation with the satisfaction of human needs, the technological and political ‘organization, program-building, and experimentation’, and the universal ‘contentment in not being-endangered’ that underlies these (G29/30 245). In accordance with the characterization of this pedagogy as something merely ‘preparatory’, Heidegger underscores the unavoidable difficulty of this task. At the same time, it becomes apparent that philosophic leadership, however comprehensive, does not imply any expectation for a common understanding of – let alone ‘some general collective enthusiasm’ for – the task at issue. This recalls the insistence in Einleitung in die Philosophy upon the non-public character of philosophic leadership. And if, despite the proliferation of needs, the distress of our Dasein stays away, and if the mystery is still lacking, then we must first of all concern ourselves with preparing the very basis and dimension upon which and within which something like a mystery of his Dasein can be encountered. That with this demand and the effort to approach it, the ordinary modern man [heutigen Normalmenschen und Biedermann] becomes disturbed and sometimes perhaps dazed, so that he clings all the more stubbornly to his idols, is perfectly in order. It would be a misunderstanding if we were to wish that it were otherwise. We must first appeal to that which is capable of instilling dread [Schreckens] in our Dasein once again. Because how do things stand with our Dasein when an event like the World War can in the essential pass us by without a trace? Is that not perhaps a sign that no event, would it be one so great, is able to take over this task, if man has not beforehand prepared himself for an awakening in the first place? The fundamental attunement of a profound boredom, once

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The broader aim that is here intimated, that of allowing man to encounter ‘something like a mystery of his Dasein’, is of course only vaguely defined and hardly intelligible on its own. But it is so precisely because clarity here presupposes the right preparation. Indeed, it seems that Heidegger points to this aim only in order to make plain the need for such preparation. The awakening of the fundamental attunement of ‘our philosophizing’ (what Heidegger had earlier asserted to be the ‘first and proper fundamental task of this lecture course’) if it ‘can manifest to us the absence of distress’ (i.e., make manifest ‘our situation’) appears here to be an initial step in the more comprehensive ‘preparation’ of modern man. Although we have distinguished between the narrower and broader aims of Heidegger’s pedagogy, it seems to follow from the preceding considerations that the preparation of ‘modern man’ proceeds in and through the preparation of the students of the lecture. This recalls the discussion from the introduction of Einleitung in die Philosophie: the students of the university are themselves imbued with the obligation to ‘leadership’ in the whole of historical being-with-one another, a ‘non-public’ leadership that consists in the ‘disposal over higher and richer possibilities of human existence which are inconspicuously and thus with singular effectiveness lived in advance or exemplified [vor-gelebt]’ (G27 8). The students – their situation, fate and Being – must be understood as exemplary within the comprehensive situation of modern man. The fate of the students is the correlate of the philosopher’s ‘remarkable fate, to be the occasion for the awakening of philosophizing in others’ (G27 18).

The Need of Needlessness Heidegger’s later understanding of the essence of nihilism is prefigured in this interpretation of the present age as determined by a fundamental Need (Not) of the absence (or ‘staying-away’, Ausbleiben) of ‘distress’ (Bedrängnis). The later interpretation goes beyond the treatment in Grundbegriffe in that it explicates the source of Need in ‘Being’ itself and elucidates how the Need of the present era unfolds within the History of Being. In writings of the 1930s and 1940s, the word ‘Not’ refers to Being itself in its relation to man,37 the way in which Being ‘needs’ and employs man for its own manifestation.38 The ‘essence of man’ here lies in being the ‘abode’ of Being, the vehicle and place of its self-manifestation. Being manifests itself in the beings as a whole (as the ‘beingness’ of beings) in such a way as to enjoin questions as to ‘what the being as such is’, a questioning that opens and grounds the corresponding determinate positions within the whole which man occupies in the different phases of history. It is primarily through the evocation of this questioning, then, that Being itself can

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be said to be a ‘Need’ that ‘compels’ (be-nötigend) from man a response which establishes its own unconcealment in beings (Nii 390). Accordingly, the Need of Being is the source of the forms of necessity inherent in the questioning of thinkers from the pre-Socratics through to Heidegger’s own thinking (G45 195–6).39 Heidegger’s reflection on the Need of Being focuses upon the paradox that, from the beginning of its History, Being, precisely in ‘releasing’ the whole of beings into unconcealment, ‘withdraws’ from both this whole and from the thought (questioning) of the great thinkers. So the Need of Being pertains not only to a mode of manifestness, but also to the manner in which Being ‘stays away’ (das Ausbleiben). Each ‘epoch’40 is determined by the particular manner in which Being ‘abandons’ and stays-away from the whole of beings and man: ‘Beings are but yet they remain abandoned by Being, so as to be mere objects of our contrivance [Machenschaft]’ (G45 185). That beings are, and are essentially as objects of Machenschaft (resources in the total mobilization of technology) is determined from out of the self-withdrawal of Being. The staying-away – and thus the ‘Need’ – of Being necessarily eludes thinking from the beginning of the History of Being. The course of this History consists in the increasing oblivion of the abandonment of Being. In the history of metaphysics, ‘Being’ – the Beingness of beings – is of necessity not thought from out of itself, but rather through the determination of what beings themselves ‘are’ (‘substance’, ‘subject’, ‘will to power’), thus closing off access to Being itself as what stays-away (conceals itself) and as what is other than beings themselves. Through this omission, Being itself becomes increasingly irrelevant, unquestionable, a mere word, a vaporous ‘nothing’ posited by the will to power. Thus arises the condition of ‘Needlessness’: ‘Within the unconcealment of the being as such, which the history of metaphysics determines as the fundamental occurrence, the Need of Being [die Not des Seins] does not make an appearance. The being is and awakens the appearance that Being would be without Need’ (Nii 391). Again, however, human beings are not responsible for this omission, it is necessitated in the Need of Being itself as what withdraws itself (cf. Hw 336). Herein lies the greatest paradox: precisely in Needing and ‘using’ man as vehicle of its own manifestation through the history of metaphysics, Being compels man into a condition of Needlessness (Notlosigkeit) where his own essence – to be the abode of the truth of Being – is threatened with annihilation. Thereby, and more perplexing still, Being endangers itself. Heidegger explains: The Needlessness [Notlosigkeit] that establishes itself as the dominion of metaphysics brings Being itself to the utmost extremity of its Need. This Need remains not only that which compels [das Nötigende] in the sense of the unrelenting claim [Anspruchs] that claims for itself the abode [i.e., the essence of man] in that it uses it for the unhiddenness of its arrival, i.e., in order to let the truth of Being essentially unfold. The unrelenting character of its usage extends so far in the staying-away [Ausbleiben] of its own unconcealment, that

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Just as with the ‘Need of the absence of distress [Bedrängnis]’ in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysics, the ‘Need of Needlessness’, according to these later writings, determines the present epoch but is not experienced ‘as such’; it remains ‘unfamiliar’ (unvertraut). In the epoch of Needlessness, when the whole of beings is abandoned by Being, beings reveal themselves only as ‘what is objectified in limitless objectification’ and thus ‘destitute’, lacking in that which enables man to ‘dwell’ in their midst. Hence the ‘Need of Needlessness’ is experienced indirectly in terms of the derivative consequences of the staying-away of Being; such consequences comprehend at once Nietzsche’s interpretation of nihilism (as the decline of the highest values hitherto) and the upheavals of the age: ‘Limitless suffering and immeasurable sorrow openly and tacitly proclaim the condition of the world to be a needful one. All the same, in the grounds of its history it is Needless’ (Nii 392). Through the ‘Need of Needlessness’ man thus becomes ‘homeless’ (heimatlos) in the whole of beings and in his own essence. The partly conceded, partly denied homelessness of man with regard to his essence is replaced by the organized conquest of the earth as a planet and the thrust into cosmic space. Homeless man – through the success of his management and ordering of ever greater numbers of his kind – lets himself be driven into flight before his own essence, only to represent this flight to himself as a homecoming to the true humanity of homo humanus, and to make humanity a part of his own enterprise. The pressure of the actual and effectual increases. Needlessness in relation to Being is entrenched in and through the increased demand for beings. (Nii 395) The difficulty here lies in understanding how man, who does not know himself to be beset by a ‘Need of Needlessness’, can yet be ‘driven [treiben] into flight’ by a distress that is unknown. How can something unrecognized determine the whole of human conduct – i.e., the total ‘enterprise’ (Betrieb) of ‘humanity’? This seems particularly worth clarifying insofar as Heidegger designates it as the impetus to ‘global conquest’, the phenomenon that one now knows as ‘globalization’. The clue, in this passage, is that man’s homelessness with regard to his ‘essence’ – and thus Needlessness with respect to Being – is ‘partly conceded’ by the public. This implies that although Needlessness is not recognized ‘as such’ (i.e., as emerging from out of the History of Being’s self-withdrawal), it is nevertheless somehow a matter of experience. On the grounds of the

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abandonment of Being, however, all ‘experience’ (and understanding and knowing) occurs and is interpreted a priori from within the horizon of the prevailing fundamental metaphysical position – the pre-understanding of beings as such – that governs the epoch. The fundamental absence, emptiness, nullity and needlessness that is occasioned through the ‘staying away of Being’ from man’s essence, is in fact ‘experienced’ by modern man, but through this experience the absence is transformed into a ‘lack’ within beings and within man as a being. Within this epoch therefore, every ‘lack’ (i.e., need and nullity) is experienced in advance as objectifiable and calculable – i.e., as something that must be ‘fulfilled’ through human doing.41 The emptiness of Being (initiated in Being’s original self-withdrawal) becomes unwittingly replaced by – and therefore ‘experienced’ as – an emptiness in man’s relation to beings. Man’s essential ‘homelessness’ with respect to Being is then ‘conceded’ only as a human destitution with respect to the whole and precisely this drives him to undertake the technological conquest and mastery of the whole of beings Heidegger explains: The consumption of all materials, including the raw material ‘man’, for the technical production of the unconditioned possibility of a producing of everything, becomes in a concealed way determined through the complete emptiness in which the beings, the material of what is real, are suspended. This emptiness must be filled up [ausgefüllt]. But since the emptiness of Being can never be filled up through the fullness of beings, especially when this emptiness can never be experienced as such, the only way of escape is incessantly to arrange beings in the constant possibility of being ordered as the form of securing aimless activity. Viewed in this way, technology is the organization of the lack [Mangel], because it is related to the emptiness of Being contrary to its knowledge. (VA 91; emphasis added) It is evident that this later reflection on the ‘Need of Needlessness’ deepens the insights of Grundbegriffe as regards an essential, but unrecognized, Need of historical Dasein that is ‘narrowed down to those needs for which he immediately finds some self-defense’ (G29/30 248; emphasis added). Heidegger continues to distinguish between: (1) the essential Need that permeates man’s essence but is neither caused by man, nature or any other being, nor is something that could ever be ‘overcome’, eliminated or satisfied through human agency; and (2) the proliferation of ‘real’ needs (Nöte), by which Heidegger means not only the ‘necessities’ of life, but all the phenomena that are commonly construed to be the causes of ‘nihilism’ (but which for Heidegger are only symptoms of the ‘non-essence’ of nihilism): ‘everywhere there are disruptions, crises, catastrophes, needs: the contemporary social misery, political confusion, the powerlessness of science, the erosion of art, the groundlessness of philosophy, the impotence of religion’ (G29/30 243). Such needs are from the outset experienced as ‘problems’ which are susceptible to ‘solution’; thereby, the essential Need of Needlessness, which is nothing of this sort, is obfuscated even more.

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The distinction that is made here can be reformulated as one between two ways of experiencing ‘emptiness’: authentically as the ‘emptiness of Being’ that has its source in the presencing of Being, a process which consists in Being’s self-withdrawal from beings and thought; and inauthentically as an objectifiable ‘lack’ that demands fulfilment through technological production and consumption. (In his reflection on nihilism, Heidegger distinguishes between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ nihilism along these lines.) When the problem is formulated in these terms, Heidegger’s reflection on the Need of Being and historical Dasein evinces a continuity (in the way of a deepening and unfolding) between Grundbegriffe and the writings of the late 1930s and 1940s. One can here also see how the problematic of Need is prepared in the existential analytic of Being and Time, specifically in its interpretation of Dasein’s primordial ‘being-guilty’ or ‘indebted’ (Schuldigsein) as that which is disclosed (‘heard’) through the call of conscience. The distinction made in Grundbegriffe between the fundamental Need of Dasein (which remains hidden) and the omnipresent, expanding ‘needs’ (Nöte) that press themselves upon contemporary man, is anticipated by Heidegger’s distinction, in Being and Time, between the ordinary ‘moral’ understanding of guilt/indebtedness and a primordial being-guilty.42 The everyday understanding that Dasein has of itself is determined from out the sphere of its practical concerns with beings in beingwith-others. This means that one always measures oneself, as it were, in relation to the standards that govern such activity, i.e., with regard to whether one satisfies or fails to satisfy the public demands of practice. In failing to satisfy demands one does not merely incur ‘guilt’, one is oneself guilty, indebted, deficient in some manner. The ordinary experience implies a determination of Dasein’s Being as essentially ‘lacking’ in two senses: first, in failing to satisfy a given moral demand or ‘ought’ Dasein is the ground of a ‘lack’ in the Dasein of other Dasein; second, the ground, the cause, of this failure – i.e., Dasein itself – is ‘lacking’. Dasein is taken as the responsible cause of both its failure to satisfy the demand (guilt is something acquired through action or inaction) and its own Being as defined by a ‘lack’ of something. Hence, the moral interpretation of Dasein implicitly takes the ‘Being’ of Dasein as incomplete, deficient and dissatisfied in a fundamental respect. This is the implication of the understanding of ‘guilt’ in relation to moral demands. Heidegger thus explicates the ontological self-understanding of Dasein that makes possible the ordinary experience and traditional definition of guilt: Guilt is necessarily determined as a lack, as a missing [Fehlen] of something which can and ought to be. But being-missing means not-being-present-at-hand. A lack as a not-being-present-at-hand of what ought to be is a determination-ofBeing of the present-at-hand. In this sense there can essentially be nothing lacking in Existenz, not because it would then be perfect, but rather because its character of Being remains distinct from all presence-at-hand. (SZ 283; BT 283 emphasis added)

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Even everyday Dasein then is aware of itself as imbued with a ‘lack’, a ‘destitution’ or ‘nullity’. The broader point here though is that this ‘lack’ is interpreted, as it were, a priori ‘within the domain of concern in which we calculate things’, i.e., the ‘lack’ in existence becomes subject to calculation; it is something for which one is ‘responsible’ through one’s failings. Therefore, this lack is a ‘debit’ represented as something that one can ‘pay off’; the fulfilment of obligations is represented as the ‘balancing’ of an account (SZ 283). ‘The everyday interpretation [of conscience] keeps within the dimension of concernfully calculating “guilt” and “innocence” and balancing them off. This then is the horizon within which the voice of conscience gets “experienced”’ (SZ 292). Similarly, Heidegger later defines technology as the ‘organization of a lack [Mangel]’. Here the Need – the ‘emptiness’ left by the default of Being – is experienced within the horizon of the calculability of beings; it thus impels Dasein into an attempt to ‘fill up’ (ausfüllen) the emptiness. The call of conscience is ordinarily ‘heard’ in a manner which at once harbours and perverts (verkehrt) an authentic understanding of Dasein’s beingguilty, the ‘nullity’ and finitude of its Being-a-ground. Indeed the call summons Dasein back from its lost immersion in the domain of concern (where guilt is ‘reckoned up’ and ‘balanced off’) and towards an understanding of itself as being-guilty, defined formally as ‘being-the-null-ground-of-a-nullity’. Authentically understood – in contrast with the moral understanding – the nullity is not something that is acquired through what one does or does not do. It is rather ‘thrown’ or, indeed, thrownness itself. For the authentic hearing of the call of conscience is the awareness that Dasein does ‘not have power over its being from the ground up’. It implies a radical and irremediable finitude that Dasein cannot ‘eliminate if it makes sufficient progress’, as is presumed in the ordinary understanding of guilt (SZ 285). The interpretation of the call of conscience as what ‘summons’ and ‘demands’ of Dasein that it take over its essential ‘nullity’ anticipates the interpretation of deep boredom insofar as there is, in the latter, the announcement of a ‘demand’ that Dasein open itself to the Need (of the absence of distress) manifest in deep boredom. In this cursory overview of the most evident similarities in heidegger’s treatment of guilt, the ‘Need of the absence of distress’, and the ‘Need of Needlessness’, three matters of perplexity stand out. First, the most fundamental problem that Heidegger poses in this reflection is that of understanding how concealment, withdrawal, staying-away, nullity and emptiness belong to Being itself and, since Dasein is essentially the abode of Being, how these traits determine historical existence. A second problem at the centre of Heidegger’s reflection on history lies in comprehending how the Need and default of Being itself, as something that is not experienced ‘as such’, becomes effective in history through its conversion into a ‘lack’ in man’s relation to beings and a corresponding ‘Needlessness’ in relation to Being. This later formulation of the problem is anticipated in earlier texts: in Being and Time with regard to how Dasein’s essential guilt (nullity)

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becomes transformed and levelled off in ordinary experience; in Grundbegriffe with regard to how the fundamental Need of emptiness in the whole of beings becomes converted into the drive to determine and satisfy expanding human ‘needs’. Third, the problem remains as to how the Need of Being and all that is implied in this concept (i.e., both the default (Ausbleiben) of Being and the ‘homelessness’ of man with respect to his essence) can become accessible to thought in the first place. Heidegger’s reflection upon the History of Being at once presupposes and intends to help make possible such access for others. Access is gained through an experience and understanding of the contemporary epoch – in opposition to the prevailing interpretations of the epoch, its crisis, and the attempts to resolve its problems – as inherently determined by a fundamental but hidden ‘absence of distress’ (in Grundbegriffe) or ‘Needlessness’ (in the later texts on nihilism). This can happen through the fundamental attunement of the situation. The first steps of thinking and the primary task of philosophic pedagogy happen through the historical situation insofar as it harbours the possibility of experiencing the absence of Need ‘as such’ – i.e., as one that issues historically out of the manner in which Being employs the essence of man for its presencing, i.e., as the Need of Being itself. This then is the ‘fundamental experience’ of our epoch, ourselves, and thus of Being that Heidegger strives to open in and for his ‘students’. Heidegger writes: If Needlessness is the most extreme Need and is precisely as if it were not, then in order for the Need to be compelling in the realm of man’s essence, his capacities must first be directed toward the Needlessness. To experience Needlessness as such is the necessity [Notwendigkeit] (Nii 396; emphasis added).

Chapter 3

Student Dasein

The topic of this and the preceding chapter can be stated in the form of the question: what does Heidegger’s introduction to philosophy demand from and presuppose on the part of the students? In accordance with the understanding of man as ‘Dasein’ – a being which ‘is’ essentially in being ‘outside’ itself – and the determination of philosophy as the fulfilment of this transcendence, the proper Being of the students is addressed within the framework of historical being-in-the-world. Heidegger restates this position succinctly in a 1930 lecture course: ‘The presupposition of philosophy is not an assumption with whose help we tentatively experiment, only to exchange it hastily for some other assumption. Rather, its pre-supposition is the history of the manifestation of beings as a whole, which is already taking place and where we find ourselves already situated’ (G32 53). The consideration of Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik has shown that the ‘presuppositions’ of philosophizing are not to be construed as human assumptions or opinions and that the fundamental experiences and comportments that philosophizing demands are not to be construed psychologically as capacities of the soul. They are rather conceived as ways of Being of Dasein in its relation to the whole of beings. In other words, the requisite capacities are not psychological but at once historical and metaphysical. We have seen how, in Grundbegriffe, the initiation of a ‘living philosophizing’ concerns the awakening and explication of how the auditors ‘find themselves situated’ in the manifestness of the whole. This is the awakening of deep boredom as the fundamental attunement of the contemporary situation. Heidegger’s reflection on the situation of philosophy is not exhausted in this text. The course of Heidegger’s work from the time of Grundbegriffe (1929) until the mid-1930s evinces intense preoccupation with the situation and conditions of the questioning of the truth of Being. The way in which the pedagogical task and the students themselves are ‘already’ situated in history fall necessarily into the focus of this philosophic self-reflection. In one of the short speeches delivered during his rectorate at Freiburg in 1933, titled simply ‘Deutsche Studenten!’ Heidegger treats in a most direct manner the requisite disposition of the student for academic study. The national revolution, Heidegger says here, is to bring about a ‘complete transformation [Umwälzung] of our German Dasein’ (G16 184). As its title suggests, the theme

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of this address concerns the Dasein of the German students, and thus their transformation. Heidegger here employs an imperative and exhortatory mode of speech so that the statement about the Dasein of the students is at the same time an appeal to the manner in which they ought to be. Viewed in terms of the description of authentic solicitude in Being and Time, this discourse makes the students ‘transparent’ to themselves in their own care so that they can ‘become free for it’ (SZ 122). Thereby this very appeal itself prepares a transformation of Dasein. Heidegger says to the student, ‘Your will to know seeks to experience what is essential, simple and great. You long [verlangt] to be exposed to that which besets you most directly and to that which imposes upon you the broadest obligations [dem Nächstbedrängenden und Weitestverpflichtenden ausgesetzt zu werden]’ (G16 184). The students as students are assumed to possess a ‘will to know’. Heidegger then clarifies more precisely what this will consists in and how it is to be fulfilled. In the first place, this suggests that such clarification is necessary – i.e., that the will of the students lacks both self-transparency and determinacy. It also indicates that the speaker is able to interpret the will of the students for them, that he, as it were, knows the them better than they know themselves and can thereby help them to self-transparency. However the student may understand for himself what it means to want to know, and whatever the student may believe to be the object of his will to know, Heidegger explicates both of these moments for him. First, the will to know is in fact a ‘seeking’ to ‘experience’. The quest for knowledge does not aim to acquire a demonstrable explanation of things in distinction from ‘experience’ taken as something pre-theoretical, rather the will to know itself is oriented towards and subordinate to ‘experience’, a mode of receptive openness to something, a willing ‘exposure’.1 Second, the will to know is not taken as a disinterested or value-free pursuit but a search for an experience of what is ‘great’. ‘Greatness’ here is conjoined with the ‘essential’ in a way that seems to unite concerns with knowledge or truth with those of nobility or excellence. Third, the ‘experience’ at issue relates to ‘the essential, the simple, the great’ as what ‘besets’ the student and ‘imposes’ a claim upon him in some way. The clarification of the disposition of the students requires a further elaboration of the identity, character, and source of that which ‘besets’ the student and imposes a claim upon him – i.e., of that which he wills to know and experience. It is notable that Heidegger describes the will to know of the students as directed at once to what ‘besets’ or ‘compels’, the Nächstbedrängenden – which recalls the ‘compulsion’, Bedrängnis, of the whole of beings in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik – and to what is ‘obligating’ (Weitesverpflichtenden).2 This latter recalls the statement in Einleitung in die Philosophie regarding the duty (Verpflichtung) to the historical community that is assumed with the vocation of academic study. For Heidegger, philosophy seems to demand of the students a posture of receptive openness to something which, incongruously perhaps, imposes a necessity that is at once moral or obligatory, metaphysical and historical. The terms of

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this description of the proper disposition of the student are not specific to this particular appeal, ‘Deutsche Studenten!’ but are implied in the main intention of the Rectoral Address. Here, task of self-assertion demands that teachers and students both, on the one hand, ‘expose [aussetzen] science to its innermost necessity [Notwendigkeit]’ and, on the other hand, ‘stand fast [standhalten] before the German fate in its most extreme Need [Not]’ (SU 10). Ultimately, perhaps, on the basis of the Rectoral Address it becomes difficult to distinguish the inner ‘necessity’ of science and the ‘Need’ of the German fate; for both are derived from their ‘simple’ origin in the ‘questionability of Being in general’ (SU 16). Nevertheless, a distinction can be observed between, first, that to which students – as students of science – necessarily are exposed (Ausgesetzsein); and, second, the fated Need that afflicts the students as Germans. In order to develop the guiding theme of this chapter – the question of the proper mode of Being of the student – each of these two moments must be considered in greater depth. For this reason, the two following sections of this chapter will respectively address these questions: first, how is the proper disposition of the student appropriate to the character of the whole of beings?; and, second, how this disposition is related to the fate of the German people?

Science as Questioning Confrontation with the Whole of Beings To understand science as a ‘necessity’ implies that this possibility is somehow integral to ‘our Being’, who we essentially are. This Being (according to Being and Time) is ‘historical’: it is a ‘whole’ encompassing that which it ‘has been’ and ‘can-be’, a whole that has the character of a communal destiny. Moving beyond the teaching of Being and Time – though thoroughly consistent with it – Heidegger speaks of an ‘inception’ [Anfang] to ‘our Dasein’. This inception is determined as the moment when Western Dasein discovers, confronts and relates to the ‘whole of beings’ as such for the first time – an event that proceeds through, but is not exhausted by, the emergence of the possibility of philosophic questioning.3 The retrieval of this historical ‘inception’ is a determination of ‘who we are’ as historical Dasein. Since science belongs to this inception, its retrieval explicitly incorporates science as something essential in our Dasein. Both science and ‘spiritual-historical Dasein’ have ‘historicality’ as their kind of Being, and this entails that both ‘our Dasein’ and ‘science’ are what they are through their relation to this inception. For ‘our Dasein’ this inception lies in the Greek-Western ‘confrontation’ with the whole of beings as such. Science, on the other hand, is essentially bound to the inception in that it always presupposes philosophic questioning – the human activity through which the confrontation with the whole of beings takes place. The retrieval of the beginning of our Being – of ‘our spiritual-historical Dasein’ – thus transforms

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the possibility of science from something merely accidental into a ‘necessity’ for us. That science ought to exist, is never unconditionally necessary. But if science ought to be [sein], and be for us and through us, under what conditions can it then truly subsist? Only if we place ourselves under the power of the inception [Anfangs] of our spiritual-historical Dasein. This inception is the outbreak of Greek philosophy. There, Western man stands out of a Volkstum by virtue of his language and stands up against the being as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen] and interrogates and conceives it as the being that it is. All science is philosophy, whether it knows and wills it or not. (SU 11) For science to truly exist requires that ‘we’ place ourselves under the ‘power’ of the inception. The power (Heidegger later speaks of the ‘greatness’) of the beginning of Greek philosophy lies partly in the action of Western Dasein and partly in the conditions of the possibility of philosophy: on the one hand, the act of ‘standing up against’, ‘interrogating’ and ‘conceiving’ beings as a whole, and, on the other hand, the Greek ‘Volkstum’ and language out which this emergence takes place. This action is one in which man confronts and opens the ‘beings as a whole’ for the first time. The magnitude (of power or greatness) in the act of confronting the whole is thus correlated to the ‘power’ of the whole itself. Through the retrieval of the inception, science can become ‘our innermost necessity’ because ‘our Dasein’ has its origin in the historical genesis of science. According to Heidegger’s presentation, however, the genesis of science of lies in an inceptive experience of the whole. At the inception, the whole of beings itself arrests Dasein and elicits the ‘passion [Leidenschaft] to remain near the beings as such and under their compulsion’ (SU 12). The retrieval of the inception of science thus recaptures for ‘our Dasein’ a similar openness to the autonomous (i.e., ‘compelling’) power of the whole of beings. Therefore, if science is described as ‘our innermost necessity’, this refers not simply to a human necessity, but to a claim that Being – the manifestness of the whole of beings – holds upon Dasein. Conceived as an ‘overpowering power’, Being claims man as a vehicle of its manifestation. To retrieve science as our ownmost necessity is thus to experience and respond to that more original demand. To will the essence of science is thus not simply to affirm a human activity or possibility, but to establish a position towards ‘beings a whole’ as something that manifests ‘power’ in its own right, a power which affects man in such a way as to call forth his ‘astonished perseverance’ before beings (SU 13).4 But the whole is not simply given in itself and on its own; it is rather ‘opened’ only in and through man’s questioning confrontation with it. Indeed, the will to know must first ‘fail’ in that it encounters resistance to knowing within the whole itself. In Being and Time, truth, as ale-theia, is a ‘wresting from hiddenness’. The truth of Being is opened only within a knowing confrontation in which man is forced to acknowledge ‘power of concealment’ in the beings themselves. ‘Knowing

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must unfold its highest defiance, for the whole power of the concealment of beings to first arise. The being thus opens itself in its ungroundable inalterability and confers upon knowing its truth’ (SU 11). According to Heidegger, the original essence of science is to be understood as ‘the questioning standing-fast in the midst of the constantly concealing beings as a whole’ (SU 12). Science has become removed from this essence throughout the tradition, especially through both the Christian-theological interpretation of the world and the mathematical-technical thinking of modernity. What has been obscured or forgotten in this tradition is, at once, the practice of science as ‘questioning confrontation’ and its correlate, the presence of the whole of beings as something that is elusive, concealed or self-concealing. These moments, taken together, belong to the inception. If Dasein retrieves the inception, a primordial relation to the whole becomes something that ‘stands before us’. Yet, Heidegger suggests, the relation to the whole to be established through retrieval is not identical to what prevailed for the Greeks. It is rather conditioned through the transformation (Wandlung) of ‘our ownmost Dasein’ through the death of God, here interpreted to mean the ‘abandonment of modern man in the midst of beings’. The principles through which the whole of beings has been interpreted thereby lose their evidence and effective force. They can no longer secure man’s position in the whole of beings. Upon retrieval, the Greek ‘astonished perseverance before the beings’ thereby becomes ‘completely unsheltered exposure into that which is hidden and uncertain, i.e., questionable’ (SU 13). The futural German science is thus contrasted with Greek science: the mode of ‘exposure’ to beings as a whole appropriate to German science is ‘completely unsheltered’ and questioning is ‘now no longer’ a mere stage on the way to answers, but itself the highest form of knowing. Heidegger does not here elaborate further upon the precise difference between Greek philosophy and the futural science.5 The emphasis falls rather on a possible transformation in the relation to the whole characteristic of modern science. A new mode of being-in-the-world is made possible through the death of God and the retrieval of the inception. Such questioning shatters the encapsulation of the sciences into separate disciplines; it will return them from the isolated fields and corners into which they have been dispersed without bounds and goals; and it will expose [aussetzen] science again directly to the fruitfulness and blessing of all worldforming powers [weltbildenden Mächte] of human-historical Dasein, such as: nature, history, language; Volk, custom [Sitte], state; poetry, thought, belief; sickness, madness, death; law [Recht], economy, technology. (SU 15) In the absence of any guiding purpose that could provide a meaningful unity and organization to the whole of science, the disciplines become ‘dispersed’ and develop their own methods, criteria of truth and separate fields. When

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man’s relation to the world is thoroughly mediated by science, this fragmentation imposes itself upon the whole of beings. Heidegger’s concern with the consequences of the specialization of the sciences is surely not novel but was central to the critique of modern science initiated by Rousseau and carried through by Kant and the German Idealists. They sought to establish the unity of science and human well-being – and the unity of man with the whole of what is – through the legislation of a comprehensive, ideal end grounded in reason itself. This ideal (in German Idealism) was to be realized historically through the institution of the modern university. That Heidegger situates his reflection on the essence of science ‘for us’ through reference to the death of God indicates that for him the Idealist attempt to secure man’s place in the whole through the legislation and realization of comprehensive rational ends is not viable. Husserl had maintained that science must ground itself through reflection on its own genesis in the prescientific life-world. Heidegger radicalizes this approach. He points not to a unifying, purposive reordering of the sciences, but rather to a retrieval of the fundamental experiences of the whole which all scientific investigation presupposes. The Greek inception – i.e., both the possibility of ‘questioning’ and the ‘wholeness’ of ‘das Seiende im Ganzen’ – does ‘not lie behind us but rather stands before us’, i.e., remains latent throughout the intervening tradition. Each of the items in the list of world-forming powers is already in some way the object of specialized sciences or a region of technical control through the application of science. As separate object-regions of science and technique, these matters have in each case already been objectified and determined in accordance with what constitutes their Being as possible objects. Nature as a whole, e.g., has been objectified through the guiding projection of mathematically determined time-space. According to Heidegger, the respective modes of Being of these matters are ‘powers’ in their own right, prior to and independent of modern scientific representation and objectification.6 Remarkably, the powers before which Dasein must place itself include existentials and possibilities of Dasein’s Being: language, thinking and custom. This suggests that man does not have complete disposal over the powers that are properly human; they too must be ‘taken over’ and appropriated. These powers are given in a semblance of proximity and everyday familiarity that conceals their essence as instances of Dasein’s transcendence of and confrontation with the whole of beings.7 They are powers which determine beforehand the world in which science exists, such that science must first return from the guiding representations which constitute special regions and disciplines in order to be ‘set out’ (aussetzen) into immediate experience of ‘all’ these powers as ways in which the world (and Dasein) is. What the items on the list have in common with one another then is that they are not subject to Dasein’s calculative power and control on the basis of cognitive certainty, but are rather forces which always hold sway over Dasein.8 In the Rectoral Address, Heidegger thus speaks of the worldforming powers in totality as a ‘superior power’ (Übermacht) (SU 15). Science is

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transformed into a mode of ‘unsheltered exposure’ and becomes receptive to the ‘fruitfulness and blessing’ of the world-forming powers. This suggests that such powers have their own Being apart from their possible status as means or objects of technical control. The whole of beings manifests the character of being ‘hidden’, ‘uncertain’, dangerous and ‘constraining’. An essential science must, accordingly, ‘stand fast’ before the whole. This knowing is ‘not the tranquilized taking stock of essences and values in themselves, but the sharpest endangerment of Dasein in the midst of the superior power of the beings’ (SU 16). But in what way is Dasein ‘endangered’ in knowing exposure to the whole of beings? It is necessary to pursue this question if we are to clarify the disposition of the students that Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy calls for. The comportment of the student is related to the whole of beings because it is a way of being ‘in’ this whole. Heidegger describes the position of Dasein in the whole as ‘endangered’. The necessary comportment of the student is thus a form of courage that is appropriate to this danger. Dasein is exposed to the ‘hidden and uncertain’ and ‘uncertainty’ here implies insecurity. The kind of ‘danger’ at issue here is related to this uncertainty. Accordingly, in willing the essence of science the teachers advance to the ‘outer posts of the danger of constant world-uncertainty’ (SU 14; emphasis added). The brevity of Heidegger’s statement here induces one to turn to other texts for clarification. Insofar as the question involves Dasein’s finding itself endangered ‘in the midst of beings’, this remark recalls Heidegger’s treatment of attunements in What is Metaphysics? and Being and Time. For according to these texts, it is in attunement that Dasein has the possibility of ‘finding itself’ placed before the ‘whole’ of beings (in contradistinction to the impossibility of comprehending the ‘whole’ of beings in themselves).9 Moreover, the attunements so constitute Dasein’s possibility of being affected by something in the world, that it is only through an attunement such as fear, for example, that something could be found to be a ‘danger’ in the first place (SU 137). That the ‘danger’ which threatens is described (in the Rectoral Address) as ‘constant world-uncertainty’ suggests that it springs not from particular beings but the ‘world’ itself. Whereas fear is afraid in the face of a more or less definite being in familiar circumstances, anxiety is anxious before ‘nothing’, i.e., no determinate thing, as the matters of everyday concern slide into insignificance. When beings within the world recede ‘as a whole’, the wholeness of the world obtrudes. Paradoxically, against the background of this nothing, i.e., the ‘world as such’, the Beingness of beings is experienced in a manner that for Heidegger leads into philosophic questioning of the beings in their Being, an ‘essential proximity to the pressure of all things’ (SU 14). Dasein could then here be said to be ‘endangered’ insofar as it is dislocated from the familiar, purposeful ‘home’ of its everyday concerns. Exposed in the midst of the whole of beings, Dasein finds itself ‘not-at-home’, unheimlich. This uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit, literally, ‘not-at-homeness’) belongs at once to Dasein’s ‘being-in’ and to the ‘world as such’. Dasein is moved to flee in the face of the world in its Unheimlichkeit.

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As Heidegger says, ‘When in falling we flee into the “at home” of publicness, we flee before the “not-at-home”, that is we flee in the face of the Unheimlichkeit which lies in Dasein . . . This Unheimlichkeit pursues Dasein constantly [ständig], and is a threat to its everyday lostness in das Man, though not explicitly’ (SZ 189).10 The course of Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time evinces a more pronounced emphasis on the ‘threat’ and ‘danger’ that pervade Dasein’s transcendence of beings.11 This is important to recognize if we are to understand the capacity for the courage to which Heidegger appeals in the students. The preceding and following remarks prepare us for this. Yet the intention of the Rectoral Address does not allow for more than allusions to Dasein’s essential situation in the midst of beings as a whole. On this topic, it is helpful to consider briefly certain passages from Introduction to Metaphysics where Heidegger turns to the interpretation of the choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone as a ‘poetic project of human-being’. Heidegger focuses on the lines: ‘There is much that is uncanny [Unheimliche], but nothing that surpasses man in uncanniness’. Here Heidegger returns to the phenomenon of Unheimlichkeit as the translation of the Greek word ‘deinon’. Notably, Unheimlichkeit belongs to the character of beings as a whole (as the ‘overpowering’, Überwältigende). ‘Un-heimlich’ describes the way in which the overpowering whole affects [anwirken] man. Heidegger explicates the point: We understand the Un-heimliche as that which throws one out of the ‘home’ [Heimlichen], i.e., the home-ly [Heimischen], accustomed, current, and unendangered [Ungefährdeten]. The unhomely [Unheimische] does not let us be at home [einheimisch]. Therein it is over-powering. Man is the most uncanny, not only because he procures his essence out the Un-heimlichen so understood, but because he steps back out of his usual, home-ly limits, because, as one that employs power [der Gewalt-tätige], he oversteps the limits of the Heimischen and indeed precisely in the direction of the Unheimliche in the sense of the overpowering. (EM 115–16) As in Being and Time, the ‘threat’ that issues out of das Seiende im Ganzen (now understood as the ‘overpowering’) is, in the first place, that of displacement from the familiarity and security of everyday existence. The latter essentially consists in a concealment of and flight from the indeterminate ‘no-thing and no-where’ of the whole. In contrast to the conclusion one might draw from the passages selected from Being and Time above, here the Un-heimliche does not befall man solely of its own accord – it is not simply suffered in the ordinary sense. For while it does ‘throw one out’ of the home-ly, man is at once said to ‘overstep’ the home-ly and confront it in the active employment of power. This recalls the statement in the Rectoral Address where the ‘knowing’ (Wissen) which the students are called to serve is itself the ‘sharpest endangerment in the midst of the superior power of the beings’ (SU 16). In other words, the danger first manifests itself in willing confrontation with the overwhelming, i.e., a conflict

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that is at once necessitated and freely assumed. Endangerment accompanies Dasein’s action, creation and knowing. Knowing occurs in the condition of being ‘not-at-home’. Accordingly, knowing must take place as an ‘initial and persistent looking beyond what is given at any time’ (EM 122), where the ‘given’ means the familiar, available and unquestioned. Thus the look beyond the given beings, ‘in the direction’ of their Being is an ‘unsheltered exposure to the hidden and uncertain’ (SU 13). Heidegger’s interpretation of Parmenidean noein brings out the manner in which knowing involves at once a ‘receptive’ exposure to Being and an active or powerful venture towards Being. Being is here understood as ‘physis’: ‘emerging-abiding power [Walten] that is in itself at the same time the shining appearing [scheinende Erscheinen]’ (EM 77). Heidegger says, Noein means to apprehend [Vernehmen], nous means apprehension, and indeed in a sense that is twofold, but intrinsically belongs together. . . . Apprehension in this twofold sense means: to let something come to one, whereby a receptive position [Aufnahmestellung] is not simply taken up, but is occupied over against that which shows itself. When troops occupy a receptive position, then they want to receive the approaching opponent and indeed receive it in such a way that they at the least bring it to stand [zum Stehen bringen]. This receptive bringing-to-stand of the appearing [des Erscheinenden] lies in noein. (EM 105) The use of the military example here indicates that knowing, as a relation to Being, is essentially implicated in polemos – conflict, strife or struggle (Kampf). Knowing at once ‘receives’ and, antagonistically ‘brings to a stand’ the emerging-appearing power of das Seiende im Ganzen. In order to understand this conflict it is necessary to touch upon the reference to Being as the ‘appearing’.12 Being is here understood as an ‘appearing’ which is also a ‘withdrawing’ (into not-Being). Moreover, in appearing, beings offer themselves in manifold ‘aspects’ that differ in accordance with the perspective from which they are received. The self-manifestation of Being is therefore at once a ‘concealment’. Concealment is to be taken here in a twofold sense: first, as the emergence from and fall back into the hiddenness of the obscure source; and, second, as the self-manifestation of beings as what they are ‘not’, i.e., a coming to stand in ‘appearance’ as ‘semblance’ (Schein). This at once belongs to (issues from) Being and, as ‘hiding’ is in conflict with it. Heidegger, interpreting Heraclitus, speaks of the relation of Being and appearance (Schein) as an intimate unity (Innigkeit) that is at once a ‘strife’ (EM 87). To ‘bring Being to a stand’ in knowing is therefore a struggle (Kampf) to wrest and hold Being apart from appearance; to differentiate between what is, what seems to be, and what is not (EM 83). That Being is ‘brought to a stand’ in beings means that beings are wrested from the confusion of their appearance (Schein) and delimited against what is not.

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At stake in this conflict is not simply knowledge of what is, but at once the very ‘becoming of the world’ and man’s existence as who he essentially is, i.e., existence in authentic ‘belonging’ to Being.13 Precisely in the hostile assault on the overpowering, man shows himself to ‘belong’ to physis: he is claimed by Being as a vehicle of the appearing-power. Apprehension is a violent act against the overpowering, for the sake of it, to facilitate its disclosure as world (see EM 135). But herewith it comes to sight that the knowing ‘exposure’ in the midst of beings as a whole is an extreme endangerment not only insofar as Dasein is exiled into the uncanny (as indicated above), but also because the over-powering always reasserts its essential ‘priority’ over the knowing and creative selfassertion of man. The work of ‘bringing Being to stand’ – through which man becomes who he is – faces the constant, necessary and inexorable threat of disaster (Verderb). Being holds priority over man first in that it demands of him knowing and creative ventures against the overpowering, but second, in that in such ventures ‘being-there’ is overpowered and ‘shattered’. As Heidegger says, The violent-activity against the superior power of Being must shatter against this, if that Being holds sway [waltet] in the way it presences, as physis, emerging holding-sway. This necessity of shattering can however only subsist insofar as that which must shatter is compelled [genötigt] into just such a being-there. Man is compelled into such a being-there, thrown into the Need [Not] of such a Being, because the overpowering, in order to appear, needs a place of manifestness. Out of the understanding of this Need as compelled from Being itself, the essence of human-being first opens itself for us. The Da-sein of historical man means: to be posed as the breach, into which the superior power of Being breaks-in by appearing, so that this breach itself shatters on Being. (EM 124) The ways in which the position of man as active knower and creator of works is endangered in the midst of the superior power of das Seiende im Ganzen are manifold: (1) man is ‘thrown out’ of his secure home in the familiar realm of appearance (Schein) and cast into uncertainty and Unheimlichkeit; (2) man is confronted with the possibility of death when he is compelled into action that brings Being to a stand and (3) man’s action against Being is from the outset doomed to incompleteness and failure because the drive to action is imparted by the overpowering as such. The action either achieves victory in that it succeeds in wresting Being into unconcealment or fails to do so and thereby ‘loses’ Being. The venture of knowing, action and creation is an attempt to wrest Being from concealment, to transcend the limits of human orders, and thus to transcend what already is. Heidegger maintains that the strength for this venture, along with the greatness of the accomplishment, arise and grow only through the intensification of the uncertain and dreadful character of the whole of beings. Thus not only defeat, but even victory in the task of ‘tearing

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Being into the being’ is ‘endangered’ by disaster. When Being is ‘stabilized’ in beings – through ‘works’ of the word, of poetry and of political founding – it ‘stands out’ against concealment, disorder and not-being. But even then, such works bear witness to the overpowering as such; they thereby manifest their own vulnerability to ruin. Moreover, the emerging-appearing power is here by no means captured and fixed once and for all. For Being ‘stands’ in the being only so long as the conflict and struggle which brought it to stand are sustained. Any ‘victory’ of human assertion here involves the cessation of conflict and thus the inevitability of decline. If the primordial conflict wanes, works become accepted among the other given and available beings within the world.14 Because they are obvious, such beings no longer bear witness to the powers of not-being; they cannot preserve the power of Being. Heidegger here again touches upon the ‘fallenness’ that afflicts being-there. ‘In each case the more towering the pinnacle of historical Dasein, all the deeper the abyss for the sudden crash [Absturz] into the unhistorical, where one drives about in issueless and place-less confusion’ (EM 163). Being shows itself in and through the process of being-brought to stand, ‘stabilized’ in beings through ‘works’ (works of the word of thought, works of art and the work of the historical place that is established). Hence the endangerment, indeed the ‘shattering’ of Dasein, is the necessary fulfilment of knowing and creative action. Man’s confrontation with Being thus seems to have the character of a sacrifice. The most uncanny (man) is, what it is, because from the ground up it cultivates and guards the home-ly [Einheimische], only in order to break out of it and to let what overpowers it break in. Being itself throws man in the track of this breach, which compels him to transcend himself as the one exposed to Being in order to establish this in the work and therewith hold open the being as a whole. For that reason, the one who acts powerfully knows no goodness [Güte] and conciliation (in the usual sense); he cannot be mollified or appeased by success or prestige. In all of that the violent-actor, as the creative, sees only the semblance of completion, which he despises. In willing that which is un-heard of, he casts off all help. Going-under [Untergang] is for him the deepest and broadest Yes to the overpowering. In the shattering of the effected work, in knowing that it is a disorder and sarma (waste), he leaves the overpowering over to its order [Fug]. . . . As history the overpowering, Being, confirms itself in works. (EM 125) The preceding discussion was intended to clarify the implication of Heidegger’s description of knowing, in the Rectoral Address, as ‘exposure’ to the ‘superior power’ of the beings as a whole. That description is important for understanding the Dasein of the students. To recall the point of departure: the students are imbued with a ‘will to know’ which ‘seeks to experience the simple, the essential, the great’ and wants ‘exposure’ to that which ‘besets most directly’. In the German students to whom he appeals, Heidegger discovers a latent ability to

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freely stand-fast before the whole of ‘what is’ in ways that make possible the experience of the ‘simple, the essential and the great’. This is the question of Dasein’s essential ‘position’ in the whole of beings. One cannot understand the disposition of the students (the ‘will to know’) that Heidegger seeks to awaken without regard for the Being of the beings as a whole; for the disposition in question ‘is’ only a manner of ‘being-in’, towards and for this whole. Conversely, one cannot raise the question of the Being of what is as a whole apart from the question of the disposition of the Da-sein, in and for which it can disclose itself.15 As we have seen, this belonging together of the Da-sein of man and the Being of beings as a whole – a belonging that is enacted when Dasein takes part in knowing exposure to the being as a whole – entails that Dasein is implicated in the strife, polemos, through which ‘the being is opened in its ungroundable inalterability and knowingly receives its truth’ (SU 11). This strife is then not initiated in human comportment but belongs to Being itself as overwhelming power. Insofar man is ‘thrown’ into and claimed by the Need of Being for its manifestation, man takes part in this ‘struggle’. Conflict and struggle thus pervade authentic existence as a struggle against appearance and a struggle against the ‘home-ly’ in which appearance prevails. The world which thereby emerges when the Germans take over the necessity of willing the essence of science is a ‘world of danger’ in which the determinate forces are held together in a unity of conflict. ‘Knowing’, for Heidegger, is essentially a way in which Dasein participates in the primordial polemos of Being. The will to know is necessarily attended by the danger of confusion, destruction and decline (in the various ways laid out above). From here one can begin to see why the disposition to which Heidegger summons the students is a distinctive form of courage. This is explicitly asserted in one of the speeches from the period of his position as rector. We are certain that the clear hardness and the sure, steady competency of unyielding, simple questioning about the essence of Being are returning. For a völkische science, the courage either to grow or to be destroyed in confrontation with what is [dem Seienden], which is the first form of courage, is the innermost motive for questioning. For courage lures one forward; courage frees itself from what has been up to now; courage risks the unaccustomed and the incalculable. For us, questioning is not the unconstrained play of curiosity. Nor is questioning the stubborn insistence on doubt at any price. For us, questioning means: not closing oneself off to the terror of the untamed and to the confusion of darkness. (G16 192; emphasis added) The conventional science that is here repudiated claims to rigorously seek and acquire knowledge of the beings, ‘what is’, ‘and nothing else’, but it is constitutionally incapable of experiencing the being as it is truly. In its ‘innermost motive’, problems, concepts and methods, it remains closed to the ‘confusion

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of darkness’ against which the being can show itself in its truth. Moving within a handed-down and unquestioned understanding of the Being of beings, science takes as given, certain and ‘calculable’ the presence of what it investigates. Science progresses merely in the acquisition of information about what is present-at-hand (about ‘what has been up to now’). It is implied that the ‘innermost motive’ for conventional science is not courage but rather a fear that closes off the terrifying. Within the horizon of such a standpoint, questioning – especially the questioning of ‘Being’ – is unintelligible as anything other than either an arbitrary ‘play of curiosity’ which has no foothold in what truly is, or as mere ‘doubt’. Thus here, as in What is Metaphysics?, Heidegger meets science on its own ground – the claim to confront ‘what is’ (the being) in its truth – by showing what a genuine confrontation with the beings demands: the courageous sacrifice of certain, safe, calculable and useful results for the possibility of disclosing Being itself, the possibility of truly ‘growing’ in confrontation with Being. Heidegger summons teachers and students to exercise the courage – what he calls ‘new courage’ – to confront the risk that inheres essentially in the possibility of science. At the same time, the affirmation of science rightly understood must face the risks that attend the break with the established practice of science. If science is to be restored to its essence as confrontation with Being, all of the following must risk ‘destruction’: the established order of science; the grounds of the teachers’ and students’ own conception of the importance and nobility of their activity as it is practised; and the basis for the public respectability that science has attained in modern society. It seems that the new situation opened up by the revolution makes possible a transformation in the university in part because the nationalist spirit of the revolution undermines the grounds upon which scientific research and teaching has justified itself. Heidegger can thus present the ‘idea of international scientific and scholarly progress’ as an illusion behind which science has concealed its uncertainty. Entry into the metaphysical polemos thus implicates the teachers and students of the German university in a political struggle, a ‘struggle for the institutions where our leaders are educated . . . a struggle over the configuration [Gestalt] of the teachers and of the leaders at the university’ (G16 763). This struggle is directed against the resistance and indifference of the faculties, against their unwillingness to expose themselves to fundamental questioning regarding the possibility, aims and presuppositions of their own activity. Accordingly, Heidegger’s most pointed remarks are directed against the outward display of conformity to political ideology. For this threatens to forestall a genuine revolution in the sciences by putting into place a mere semblance of reform.16 The struggle for the academic institutions proceeds through the attempt to replace established forms of education with a ‘new way of teaching’. This appears to be an effort to translate Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy into the forms of higher education. The prevailing manner of teaching consists primarily in the transmission of ‘information’ (Kenntnisse) acquired through

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research – an acquisition and transmission founded upon indifference to the question of what is ‘essential’. The ‘new teaching’, on the other hand, does not mean conveying knowledge, but allowing students to learn and inducing them to learn. To learn means to let oneself be beset by the unknown and then become master of it in comprehending knowing; it means becoming sure in one’s sense for what is essential. . . . The student is forced out into the uncertainty of all things, in which the necessity of engagement [Einsatz] is grounded. University study must again become a risk [Wagnis],17 not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the struggle, lies where he falls. (G16 763) The ‘new teaching’ adumbrated here is most clearly exemplified in Heidegger’s own lecture courses, especially Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, which we considered at length above. The moments of being ‘beset by the unknown’ and ‘knowing’ reiterate the articulation of philosophizing in Grundbegriffe as a conceptual knowing and questioning that presupposes the experience of ‘being-gripped’ by the whole (here the ‘uncertainty of all things’) by way of a compulsion that grounds the ‘necessity’ of inquiry itself. Learning involves a peculiar unity of freedom – a willing openness to things – and necessity – a being-beset and compelled by the autonomous power of that which is. In Grundbegriffe, the ‘inducement’ to learning lies similarly in the pedagogical task of ‘awakening and planting’ the fundamental attunement and Ergriffenheit of inquiry. Beyond these specific moments of correspondence between the pedagogy practised in Grundbegriffe and the ‘new teaching’ referred to here, Heidegger’s pedagogy in general, that is all Heidegger’s lectures and writings, could be said to exemplify the new teaching in that they ‘induce’ students to learn, or ‘force’ them to be ‘beset by the unknown’. They do so by setting forth an inquiry that conveys, as it itself uncovers and is driven by, the compelling and enigmatic character of Being.18 Before proceeding to develop further the special themes of this chapter – the question as to the Being, disposition and comportment of the intended student of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy – it is necessary to recapitulate the main points of the preceding discussion. The pedagogy practised in the lecture courses seeks to ‘bring philosophizing underway’ in the existence of students. This involves an exhortatory appeal that intends to awaken, direct and clarify a disposition that already exists latently within the Dasein of the student. This can be understood in a formal manner through recourse to the analysis of conscience in Being and Time, where Heidegger finds evidence of the possible authenticity of Dasein in its potential openness to, and willingness to heed, the call of conscience. In order to work out what this may mean in the factic existence of the students, we have turned to the speeches on education from the period of Heidegger’s rectorate. Here Heidegger directly addresses the German students as those who are moved by a ‘will to know’. Considered in

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relation to the reflection on the essence of science in the Rectoral Address, the knowing at issue comes to sight as a mode of Dasein’s Being in which it is ‘exposed’ and subject to the ‘sharpest endangerment in the midst of the superior power of the beings as a whole’. The perplexity as to why this position is one of ‘endangerment’ and the question as to what is implied in the determination of Being as ‘superior power’ led us on to consider briefly the interpretation of the Greek inception in Introduction to Metaphysics where, through the interpretation of Parmenides, Sophocles and Heraclitus, Heidegger extracts several leading traits of the originary relation of Being to man. Among these we emphasize this: Being is the simple self-emerging and self-withdrawing manifestness of beings as a whole; in order to appear in the beings as whole, Being needs and claims Dasein as the ‘place of manifestness’; the compelling power of Being (in appearing) arrests and throws man out of the ‘home-ly’ and into the uncanny where he experiences the ‘Need’ (Not) of Being’s claim upon him and is compelled into his essence as one who establishes and preserves the disclosure of Being through knowing and creation. Lastly, Dasein is ‘who’ it essentially is through participation in the originary conflict (polemos) that governs the self-emergence of Being in and as history. Such participation, a renewed questioning of Being, presupposes what Heidegger calls ‘new courage’: the willingness to grow or be destroyed in confrontation with Being. Accordingly, the ‘new teaching’ that Heidegger calls for in his speeches induces students to risk themselves in exposedness to the ‘uncertainty of all things’. What is lacking in this discussion so far is sufficient indication of the driving impetus for the new manner of teaching and, thereby for occupying the position in the whole that this implies, i.e., for willing the essence of science as ‘questioning, unsheltered standing fast in the midst of the uncertainty of the beings as a whole’, and for recovering in ‘our Dasein’ certain traits of the original Greek understanding of science. To be sure, the interpretation of the Greek inception shows that the questioning posture towards Being is necessitated in a ‘Need’ of Dasein which is initiated out of Being itself. But the reference to this trait of man’s relation to Being does not of itself establish that Dasein actually finds itself in such a Need. The Need can be the source of the way of existence at issue only insofar as it is factically experienced in historical Dasein. Thus, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger points to the ‘singularity’ and historicality (temporality) of any such exigency. The compelling Need is the unique dispensation of a historical people – it was so for the Greeks, and presumably is so for the modern Germans. As Heidegger says, Of this suddenness and singularity [Einzigkeit] of Dasein, the Greeks had a deep awareness, in which they were compelled [genötigt] through Being itself, which then disclosed itself to them as phusis and logos and dike-. . . . Because in the unique [einzig] Need of their Dasein, they employed power, and so did not set aside the Need, but rather intensified it, and wrested for themselves the fundamental condition of true historical greatness. (EM 125; emphasis added)

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Given the uniqueness of the initial Need in Greek Dasein, it is to be inferred that the retrieval of the essence of science from the Greek inception cannot be understood as a mere recovery in thought of a power that brought forth the initial philosophic disclosure of Being. For, if it were a mere historical study of ancient philosophy, what then would necessitate the retrieval in the first place? Rather, the reflection upon and retrieval of the essence of science must itself arise out a unique, historical Need of Being which exacts a claim upon German Dasein. In this case, the reflection upon the Greek inception – the Greek confrontation with Being – then serves to clarify the exigency that is already experienced in contemporary German Dasein. Accordingly, at the outset of the Rectoral Address, Heidegger emphatically insists that the task of science be affirmed in conjunction with the German Need. Science and German fate must come to power together in an essential will. They will become this when, and only when, we – teachers and students – on the one hand, expose science to its innermost necessity and if we, on the other hand, stand-fast [standhalten] with the German fate in its most extreme Need [Not]. (SU 10) The relation between science and the German destiny is not the joining of two independent forces, but an assertion of what already belongs together in a complicated and hidden unity. The problematic of the essence and necessity of science is from the outset intertwined with the issue of the German destiny. In posing the question as to whether science ‘ought to exist’, science is approached not as something unconditionally necessary, not as something construed to be valuable in itself and not as something believed to belong to a cosmopolitan humanity, but rather only in its existence and meaning ‘for us’ – i.e., teachers and students of the German university. The question about the condition under which science could ‘truly’ so exist is answered: ‘Only if we place ourselves under the power of the inception of our spiritual-historical Dasein’. This condition implies: only if ‘we’ – teachers and students – understand ourselves as belonging to the historical Dasein of a people whose spiritual destiny begins from and includes the inception of Greek philosophy (SU 11; emphasis added). Thus the problem of science is wholly incorporated within the guiding care for ‘our own Being’, while, at the same time, the teachers and students (as men of science) are called to understand ‘themselves’ from within the whole of German destiny. This völkisch-historical self-understanding explicitly guides the decision regarding the essence of science. It is thus emphasized that the properties of the ‘Greek’ essence of science are to be regained for ‘our Dasein’ (SU 11). The preoccupation with ‘our’ own Dasein that issues in the self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung] upon who ‘we’ are, and the coincident self-assertion of the German university, presupposes at the least that German Dasein find itself in the ‘most extreme Need’ that is said to afflict it. Yet here, with regard to the

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question of the character of this unique Need, the Rectoral Address is itself elusive and indirect. Nevertheless, what is stated on this issue here has special importance for both our guiding theme (Heidegger’s pedagogy in general) and, more specifically, the question about the students at whom this philosophic pedagogy aims. For, without stating clearly just what the Need of German Dasein is, Heidegger suggests that the German students – the ‘young and youngest force of the Volk’ – have not only somehow experienced the Need of their historical Dasein, but have also already shown themselves equal to this Need by responding in the right way. After indicating how the pedagogical leadership of the teachers serves to ‘awaken’ a genuine following of those ‘of the new courage’, Heidegger suggests that in one important respect it is not necessary to first awaken a following. The German students are on the march. And whom they seek are those leaders, through whom they raise their own determination to grounded knowing truth and place it into the clarity of interpretive-effective word and work. Out of the resoluteness of the German students, to stand fast with the German fate in its most extreme Need, comes a true will to the essence of the university. (SU 14–15) By actively ‘seeking’ leaders, the students show that they at some level recognize the limitations of their own self-knowledge. Here again, as in the other addresses to students, it is implied that the students do not know themselves. As in Being and Time’s treatment of authentic solicitude, leadership ‘elevates’ the determination or destiny of the other Dasein to ‘knowing truth’ – ‘helping the other to become transparent in his Care and to liberate him for it’ (SU 122).19 Yet despite recognition of the discrepancy between the students self-understanding and the ‘truth’ of the student’s determination as known and elevated by the leader, it is the will of students, as the ‘young and youngest force of the Volk’, and not political parties, the state, the leaders or the philosopher that supplies the motive force. The students thus bear a kind of responsibility for the will to the essence of the university and everything that according to the Rectoral Address follows from this task: the renewal of science, the fulfilment of the historical mission of the Volk and, thus, the salvation of the West. Whether or not the teachers and students manifest the ‘new courage’ to confront the fundamental questions of science, is a matter of ‘epochal importance’, Heidegger maintains, ‘for on this depends whether we Germans shall remain a Volk that is, in the highest sense of the word, a knowing Volk’ (G16 763). Heidegger generally speaks of tasks and the conditions of their fulfilment as matters of future accomplishment. The qualities required of the students are thus spoken of through exhortatory address. Here, by contrast, Heidegger maintains that the ‘resoluteness’ of the students – the capacity to stand fast before the German Need – has already been attested through their act of ‘self-legislation’ in accepting the new Student Law. Heidegger finds in this

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action an act of the ‘highest freedom’ that constitutes a rejection of the prevailing, ungenuine notion of academic freedom. The distinctive Need of German Dasein is here not directly defined, but indicated in an indirect manner. The resoluteness of the students in the face of their Need means a rejection of an existence defined by ‘evasive lack of concern [vorwiegende Unbekümmertheit], arbitrariness of intentions and inclination, lack of constraint in everything one does’ (SU 15). The resoluteness of the students is thus a confrontation with a state of affairs marked by a prevailing indifference and lack of seriousness. This recalls how, in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, ‘our contemporary Dasein’ is attuned by an ‘essential Need [Not] as a whole’ – one that is suppressed by the multiplication of particular needs and the attempts to overcome them – a Need that is the ‘staying-away’ of an ‘essential compulsion’ (Bedrängnis), a ‘satiating comfort in being unendangered’ (G29/30 245).

The Sources of Philosophic Courage In November, 1933, Heidegger delivered the following memorial speech before the assembled students of Freiburg. Commemoration of Schlageter In the midst of our work, during a short break in our lectures, let us remember the Freiburg student Albert Leo Schlageter, a young German hero who a decade ago died the most difficult and the greatest death of all. Let us honor him by reflecting, for a moment, upon his death in order that this death may help us to understand our own lives. Schlageter died the most difficult of all deaths. Not in the front line as the leader of his field artillery battery, not in the tumult of an attack, and not in a grim defensive action – no, he stood defenseless before the French rifles. But he stood and bore the most difficult thing a man can bear. Yet even this could have been borne with a final rush of jubilation, had a victory been won and the greatness of the awakening nation shone forth. Instead – darkness, humiliation, and betrayal. And so, in his most difficult hour, he had also to achieve the greatest thing of which man is capable. Alone, drawing on his own inner strength, he had to place before his soul an image of the future awakening of the Volk to honor and greatness so that he could die believing in this future. Whence this clarity of heart, which allowed him to envision what was greatest and most remote? Whence this hardness of will which allowed him to will what is most difficult? Student of Freiburg! German student! When on your hikes and outings you set foot in the mountains, forests, and valleys of this Black Forest, the

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home of this hero, experience this and know: the mountains among which the young farmer’s son grew up are of primitive stone, of granite. They have long been at work hardening the will. The autumn sun of the Black Forest bathes the mountains and forests in the most glorious clear light. It has long nourished clarity of the heart. As he stood defenseless facing the rifles, the hero’s inner gaze soared above the muzzles to the daylight and mountains of his home that he might die for the German Volk and its Reich, with the Alemannic landscape before his eyes. With a hard will and clear heart, Albert Leo Schlageter died his death, the most difficult and the greatest of all. Student of Freiburg, let the force of this hero’s native mountains flow into your will! Student of Freiburg, let the force of the autumn sun of this hero’s native valley shine into your heart! Preserve both within you and carry them, hardness of will and clarity of heart, to your comrades at the German universities. Schlageter walked these grounds as a student. But Freiburg could not hold him for long. He was compelled to go to the Baltic; he was compelled to go to Upper Silesia; he was compelled to go to the Ruhr. He was not permitted to escape his destiny so that he could die the most difficult and greatest of all deaths with a hard will and a clear heart. We honor the hero and raise our arms in silent greeting. (G16 759–60) At first glance, it may strike one as implausible to read this speech as a particularly revealing example of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. The following provisional considerations, in addition to a careful interpretation of the speech itself, suggest otherwise: First, Heidegger delivers this speech ‘in the midst of our work, during a short break in our lectures’ so that the meaning of this remembrance belongs in that context. Second, as a reflection on authentic being-towards-death, this speech vividly presents anew the mode of experiencing human existence that is essential to philosophy.20 Third, although Schlageter was a soldier, not a philosopher, Heidegger introduces him as a ‘student of Freiburg’ and emphasizes this once again at the end of the eulogy. Lastly, the speech does not address political matters that are separable from the proper work of academic study. Like Heidegger’s properly philosophic lectures and (in a different way) the existential analytic of Being and Time, this discourse is peculiarly self-reflexive: it is delivered by a student (and teacher) of Freiburg, about a student of Freiburg, and for students of Freiburg and their comrades at other universities. Here one should recall how, in his introductions to philosophy and discourses on education, Heidegger frequently directs attention to the manner in which the simple fact of being a ‘student’ at the university implies a commitment to academic study and the sciences, a commitment which is essentially directed to

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philosophy – which itself is the existential, historical and essential origin of academic study. To speak to and about students as students is thus to speak on some level both about and from out of the possibility of philosophy. In addition to all that inheres in being a ‘student’, the speaker and auditors share in common with the subject of the speech a common Alemannic homeland (Heimat) and a common German Dasein. By calling attention to what the students share in common with Schlageter, the latter emerges for the student addressees of the speech as a kind of model of what they themselves can be. The capacities which the figure of Schlageter exemplifies are however not related to any specific activity or pursuit – be it academic study or military action. The distinctive nobility (‘greatness’) that the ‘hero’ of Heidegger’s eulogy manifests is something that transcends the specific deeds and circumstances which provided the opportunity for the conduct highlighted in the speech. This transcendence is underscored by the fact that the nobility in question concerns conduct that is subsequent to the utter failure and futility of the hero’s actual activities and aims. This nobility is thus presented as a capacity of the man as such: Schlageter withstands the ‘hardest thing a man can bear’ and achieves the ‘greatest thing of which a man is capable’. In this way then, Heidegger’s speech cultivates a likeness between the hero and the Dasein of the student addressees of the speech. This likeness consists not only in what the students factically share in common with Schlageter – being German students in the Alemannic homeland – but in a common human Dasein. The situation, fate and capacities that the figure of the hero embodies are thus exemplary for human Dasein as such. They are relevant in the consideration of the mode of existence that Heidegger demands on the part of students and, by implication, of those who would enter the question of Being. As Being and Time – and the many other texts that we have reviewed in this study – shows, the question of Being is proximally experienced as the question of one’s own factic Being. What the students share in common with the hero as ‘German students’ is not separate from what they share in common with him as human beings. What the ‘we’ of the speech – Heidegger’s auditors – are ‘to understand about our own lives’ from ‘reflection’ on Schlageter’s fate seems to be that the human greatness that this figure exemplifies is rooted in what factically determines his – and ‘our’ own – thrown historical existence.21 Although Schlageter is indeed accorded the highest praise, and although the speech undeniably implies a measure of admiration for Schlageter’s actual life as a military officer, the figure of the ‘hero’ is here honoured precisely for evincing those qualities which the historical Schlageter may or may have not actually possessed. Heidegger’s speech is thus as much a praise of the qualities and capacities that the figure of the hero exemplifies, and thus a praise of the ‘students of Freiburg’ who carry these qualities within themselves, as much as it is a eulogy of the actual Albert Leo Schlageter. The depiction of ‘Schlageter’ clearly cannot be a factual report: one cannot know what the ‘inner gaze’ of another human being actually ‘envisioned’ at the moment of death. The tenth

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anniversary of Schlageter’s death becomes for Heidegger an occasion for ‘us’ – teacher and students of Freiburg – to ‘help us understand our own lives’. Similarly, the fact that the occasion for this remembrance of Schlageter in the university was a directive from the political authorities (to take place throughout the German universities) shows again how Heidegger generally took advantage of conventional academic responsibilities – like that of giving academic lectures, particularly ‘introductions to philosophy’ to undergraduates – as opportunities for fulfilling his deeper philosophic and pedagogical intentions. But if the memorial speech never intends to be a factual presentation of Schlageter’s life, just what kind of discourse is it? One can approach the intention of the speech if one considers the extent to which it manifests the character that Heidegger (in Being and Time) ascribes to authentic historiography (Historie). Three points in particular are worth noting here: (1) The explicit disclosure of the past (historiography) arises out of the authentic mode of Dasein’s (the ‘historian’s’) own historicality. Authentic Dasein understands the past in and through a ‘repetition’ of the possibilities. This understanding is made explicit in historiographical understanding which ‘projects the Dasein which has-been-there upon its ownmost possibility of existence’ (SZ 394; BT 446). Heidegger’s eulogy evinces this characteristic of authentic historiography insofar as Schlageter is ‘projected’ in his ownmost possibility of being-towardsdeath and insofar as the hero exemplifies other possibilities. (2) But Heidegger’s speech intends not simply to represent possibilities in an indifferent way. Rather, possibilities are depicted in order that the students may encounter them as their ‘own’. According to Being and Time’s treatment of historiography, the possibilities which ‘have-been-there’ should be disclosed ‘in such a manner that the “force” of the possible gets struck home into one’s factical existence’ in order that these possibilities ‘come towards that existence in its futural character’ (SZ 395; BT 447). This characterization of authentic Historie precisely describes the pedagogical character of the Schalgeter eulogy. The comparison reveals a hitherto unrecognized ‘pedagogical’ aspect of Being and Time’s account of historiography.22 In this reflection on Schlageter’s ‘death’, the latter is understood in accordance with the ‘existential concept of death’ sketched out in Being and Time. Death is not the actual, natural perishing of the man. Except for the reference to the date of his demise, nothing is said about what happened to the man when the bullets struck. Rather the speech concerns how Schlageter acted and what he envisioned as he faced the rifles. Accordingly, death does not appear here as an objective event, it is rather depicted from ‘inside’ the experience of the one who faces this possible impossibility of his existence.23 In Being and Time, authentic ‘freedom towards death’ is said to be ‘unsupported by concernful solicitude [besorgende Fürsorge]’ (SZ 266). This absence of support is emphasized in the depiction of Schlageter as both ‘defenceless’ and ‘alone’. These can be understood in both narrower and broader senses. First, Schlageter is ‘defenceless’ in that he does not die in the course of attack or

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defence, where the immediate concerns of fighting would take precedence over the certainty of impending death. The more far-reaching purposes for which Schlageter has fought have already collapsed in failure and humiliation. Schlageter is defenceless in a broader sense: he dies without any alleviating consolation that his life has served to contribute to his people’s struggle, i.e., to the realization of any greater good. Second, Schlageter is bereft of the ‘solicitude’ of and for his comrades in arms. There is nothing that he can do for his comrades and nothing that they could do for him in this situation. In the broader sense, he is ‘alone’ because all prospects of honour or glory from the nation for his sacrifice are denied him; he has been ‘betrayed’, abandoned, and humiliated by the very people for whom he has struggled. Schlagater thus becomes aware that there is nothing to expect in the way of compensation for his suffering and sacrifice on behalf of his people. His bearing is thus completely free of any calculation regarding what would concern his own good or the good of his people. Schlageter’s predicament thus shows, in a particularly vivid manner, certain aspects of being-towards-death as projected in Being and Time where it is said that death ‘individualizes Dasein down to itself’ and ‘makes manifest that all being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all being-with others, fail when the ownmost can-be is at issue’. Accordingly, with this failure of his concern and solicitude, Schlageter becomes free for death, he is freed from being lost in possibilities that may be imposed by accident’ (SZ 264; BT 308; emphasis added). The greatness that the hero of the speech displays before death is proportional to the difficulty of his predicament, the difficulty that is marked by defencelessness and solitude. It is remarkable here that Schlageter’s greatness is not assessed with regard to any fulfilled purpose. His death ‘could have been borne with a final rush of jubilation, had a victory been won and the greatness of the awakening nation shone forth. Instead – darkness, humiliation, and betrayal’. The nobility of Schlageter manifests itself, not as a contribution to the fulfilment of a concrete good, but in a situation marked by the collapse of any such purposes. Schlageter’s greatness manifests itself in defeat, humiliation and betrayal. It does not arise from any successful effect of his actions in the world of concernful solicitude. As Heidegger presents it, his nobility seems to lie not in the result, the ‘what for’ of any action, but rather in the ‘how’ of his conduct. Schlageter’s greatness seems to arise from his response to a situation defined not only by impending death, but also by this defencelessness, defeat, humiliation, betrayal and solitude. Heidegger does not elaborate upon, or even mention, what might be the ordinary human response to these circumstances, though this seems implied where the extra-ordinary character of Schlageter’s conduct is at issue. It seems that in such a predicament, an ordinary man would give way to despair before his failure to accomplish his goals, self-pity for the suffering he has endured and moral indignation for receiving humiliation instead of honour and other rewards for a life of self-sacrifice. The quality of ‘hardness of will’ thus appears to be an ability to stand unmoved by such

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human-all-too-human temptations to fear, despair, self-pity, resentment, indignation and desire that he be rewarded for his suffering. This steadfastness itself seems to arise out of the hero’s capacity to accept his impending death. In Being and Time, Heidegger says, ‘Anticipation, however, unlike inauthentic being-towards-death, does not evade the fact that death is not to be surpassed; instead, anticipation frees itself for accepting this. . . . Anticipation discloses to existence that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up [die Selbstaufgabe] and thus shatters every attachment [Versteifung] to whatever existence has been reached’ (SZ 264; BT 308). To accept death as the uttermost possibility enables one to ‘put up with’ all misfortune and suffering. This points again to the way in which authentic anticipation of death as one’s ownmost possibility ‘liberates’ Dasein. Dasein is ‘hardened’ towards misfortune and takes these in stride. For in light of (i.e., in ‘projecting upon’) the most extreme possibility of the ‘impossibility’ of existence, Dasein can be unmoved by such sufferings as Schlageter endures. These are in a way nullified and Dasein can become ‘free for its ownmost possibilities, which are determined by the end and are so understood as finite [endliche]’ (SZ 264; BT 308). Just as authentic being-towards-death makes possible hardness of will, understood as a capability to withstand extreme hardship, so does this hardness make possible a ‘clarity’ of heart, i.e., a capacity for ‘vision’ that is unclouded by the illusions brought forth by fear, self-pity, resentment and indignation. In Being and Time, Heidegger singles out fear for oneself as a state-of-mind in which Dasein becomes ‘bewildered’ and driven about distractedly among the nearest available possibilities of concern with the beings that present themselves. Schlageter’s fearlessness before the rifles is evinced in the clarity of vision that he attains by virtue of his acceptance of the possibility of death. Through this, Schlageter becomes ‘liberated from possibilities which ‘count for nothing’ [nichtgen] and free for those which are authentic’ – i.e., the vision of what is ‘greatest and most remote’ (SZ 344; BT 395).24 It is crucial to the meaning of Heidegger’s speech that the hero’s ‘vision’ and projection of the future greatness of his Volk – which is itself a ‘decision’ and determination of the Being of his people – takes place in and through the anticipation of his own death as a pure possibility. Schlageter thereby transforms his whole existence into a sacrifice. ‘As he stood defenseless facing the rifles, the hero’s inner gaze soared above the muzzles to the daylight and mountains of his home that he might die for the German Volk’. One could say generally that any possibility, of any existing Dasein, has the intentional, ‘projective’ character of being ‘for the sake of’ a possibility of Dasein’s own Being. The existential analytic of Being and Time also reveals in a compelling manner that any possibility, of any existing Dasein, is founded upon an awareness, however dimmed down or evasively misinterpreted, of its own mortality. Every possibility, aim, desire, comportment, thought and action is thus at once a way in which one exists ‘for the sake of’ Being and a way of being-towards-death (both evince

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the basic structure of Dasein’s Being as ‘ahead of itself’). These two traits belong together: in authentic existence, those possibilities of Dasein’s own Being ‘for the sake of which’ it exists are disclosed, projected and determined on the grounds of an anticipation of its own death. The image of Schlageter envisioning the future greatness of his people and his Allemanic homeland as he, alone and defenceless, faced the rifles clarifies, in a poetic or figurative manner, the relation between the disclosure of Being and the finitude of Dasein. The capacities exemplified in the figure of Schlageter – hardness of will and clarity of heart – enable him to ‘die for’ his people. Schlageter is extolled for dying his death as a sacrifice, and for exemplifying the capacities that make it possible for him to do so. The ‘greatness’ that is attributed to the figure of Schlageter is inseparable from the manner in which this involves an ultimate self-sacrifice. The meaning of sacrifice is here, however, something distinct and perhaps at odds with the common understanding of its special character. For Heidegger, that which one ‘dies for’ – i.e., a futural possibility of Being – is not an aim that is assumed as given. It is not something arbitrarily determined from the tasks, rules and standards that circulate in everydayness prior to facing and reckoning upon the possibility of death as an attendant consequence of action committed to actualize such an aim. To the contrary, the authentic anticipation of death makes possible the original disclosure of authentic possibilities.25 That possibilities are determined out of a deepened awareness of and projection upon Dasein’s mortality implies a clarity about the essential finitude of all such possibilities, i.e., a clarity concerning the manner in which they are essentially to be ‘owned by’ the fateful destiny of a particular, historically existing Dasein and supported only by the resolve of such Dasein. To construe possibilities as universal purposes grounded in a transhistorical natural, rational or divine order of being obscures the manner in which such possibilities must be ‘possessed’ in order to exist. For Heidegger, this traditional representation of the possible further conceals the fact that, as aims of a mortal being, all possibilities are themselves predestined to inevitable failure. Heidegger’s conception of what constitutes noble self-sacrifice – we recall that Schlageter enacts the ‘the greatest of which a man is capable’ – contravenes the ordinary sense of what constitutes this nobility. For the hero’s ‘deed’ does nothing to contribute to the actualization of any real good or even any strategic objective. Sacrifice is esteemed not for the results attained by any action (objectives) but rather because it is a way of existing in which Dasein ‘transcends’ reliance on beings, is ‘held out’ in nothingness and can become open to Being as that which is simply other than beings. If one considers the exposition in Being and Time of anticipatory resoluteness in light of Heidegger’s poetic reflection upon the greatness of Schlageter’s death, authentic existence itself is seen to have the character of a sacrifice, a sacrifice that involves commitment to possibilities determined by the prior ‘running-ahead towards’ (vorlaufen zum), and acceptance of death as a certain and unsurpassable possibility of Dasein’s Being – but does not necessarily

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require the factual demise of the human being.26 On the one hand, the authentic anticipation of death brings the awareness that its ‘uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up [die Selbstaufgabe]’ (SZ 264). On the other hand, anticipation ‘gives Dasein its aim outright’. If authentic existence itself has the character of self-sacrifice, then Heidegger’s depiction of Schlageter’s death clearly does not simply extol the martial courage that the hero embodied, but rather exemplifies a fundamental experience of man’s essential Being in relation to Being itself. We have already commented above on how the use of military metaphors in the interpretation of Parmenidean noein is intended to elucidate how human knowing is implicated in the metaphysical polemos. Schlageter’s experience, as depicted in Heidegger’s speech, is thus an example of man’s fundamental experience of the disclosure of Being. This interpretation finds support in comments that Heidegger makes elsewhere on how the existence of great thinkers and poets is itself a kind of sacrifice. The highest form of pain is dying one’s death as a sacrifice for the preservation of the truth of Being. This sacrifice is the purest experience of the voice of Being. What if the German is that historical humanity which, like the Greeks, is called upon to poetize and think, and what if it must first perceive the voice of Being? Must not the sacrifices, then, be as many as the causes immediately eliciting them, since the sacrifice in itself has its own essence and does not require goals and uses? Thus what if the voice of the inception should announce itself in our historical determination? (G54 249–50; P 167; emphasis added) It is suggested here that nihilism is transcended precisely by understanding one’s activity as ‘necessitated’ by something other than one’s own ‘purposes’ or ‘values’. Throughout Heidegger’s discourse on the German students, the will and ‘determination’ of the students is presented as a singular, fortunate dispensation which supplies the motive forces for the renewal of the university, science and the West as a whole. The conditions of this distinctive resoluteness of the students can perhaps be found in the interpretation of the constitution of the Being of Dasein (Being and Time) – as we have suggested through reference to the analysis of the call of conscience as a summons to accept the thrownness of being-in-the-world. Yet, in Being and Time, the proper hearing of the call, and the direction this takes, is by no means necessitated (or guaranteed) by the call itself, which is for the most part concealed and evaded in Dasein’s everyday selfunderstanding. The factic conditions for resoluteness (i.e., willing-to-have-aconscience) are themselves thrown, i.e., beyond the power of Dasein itself to cause, and are thus delivered over to historical destiny. In the speeches to German students, however, Heidegger addresses directly the common destiny of the German students – and thus their disposition and qualities – in their historical singularity. In this eulogy to Albert Leo Schlageter on the tenth

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anniversary of his death, Heidegger reflects on distinctive qualities of the German student exemplified by Schlageter, points to the source of these qualities and indicates how these qualities are to be fostered within the students. The question now pursued for the benefit of the students of Freiburg, the main point of this speech, concerns the source of these virtues, i.e., the question ‘from whence’ comes this hardness of will and clarity of heart. The answer given to the query is surprising and perplexing, especially if we are accustomed to think of such qualities, virtues or traits of character as the product of an education under the discipline of moral and religious authorities. Heidegger does indeed speak of Schlageter’s upbringing as the son of a farmer, but says nothing of education in any usual sense and even subordinates the fact of his upbringing to the more important influence of the earthly surroundings of the native homeland in which Schlageter was raised. Student of Freiburg! German student! When on your hikes and outings you set foot in the mountains, forests, and valleys of the Black Forest, the home [Heimat] of this hero, experience this and know: The mountains among which the young farmer’s son grew up are of primitive stone, of granite. They have long been at work hardening the will. The autumn sun of the Black Forest bathes the mountain ranges and forests in the most glorious clear light. It has long nourished clarity of the heart. (G16 760; emphasis added) The virtues of the student are fostered in his attachments to his own particular homeland. Man’s essential Being is ‘Da-sein’, ‘to be there’, which always implies being in a particular, temporally and spatially determinate ‘there’ as a ‘place’.27 The qualities of ‘heart’ and ‘will’ are thus not construed psychologically or anthropologically as habits of soul, rather both ‘hardness’ and ‘clarity’ pertain to the ‘how’ of possibilities of being-there, in the sense of being in a place and being in relation to the beings and forces of this world. Although Heidegger’s language here may be figurative, it does seem to suggest that the virtues in question are not to be construed as artificial products of political or pedagogical technique. Rather the prevailing forces of this unique landscape work through its inhabitants to nourish what is best within them.28 Heidegger stresses the primeval antiquity of these forces: the mountains are of ‘primeval stone’ and have ‘long’ been at work. Their influence works outside calculable time and gives lasting support to the Dasein who dwell there. Yet this is not a matter of simple immersion in the ‘nature’ of the land: the natural forces are presented as what foster historical greatness. Clarity of heart is what enabled Schlageter to ‘place before himself the image of the future irruption [Aufbruchs] of the Volk to honor and greatness’. What Heidegger means by ‘home’ – as in ‘die Heimat dieses Helden’ – implies an original harmony of the ‘natural’ landscape and historical Dasein.29 This image of a primordial wholeness may recall Rousseauean ideals of lost unity, especially in light of the fact that the very appeal to the

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Heimat implies that the students are removed and alienated from what is most their ‘own’. Here, however, the recovery of original and genuine being ‘at home’ does not entail artificial reconstruction of what is lost or an approximation to an ideal, but rather an appropriation of what already belongs to one.30 For Heidegger, however exemplary Schlageter and his Heimat may be, they do not represent irretrievably lost possibilities: the students still dwell in proximity to the Allemanic countryside and are, just as Schlageter was, students of Freiburg. This recalls how, in the Rectoral Address, the transformation of science happens through a willing exposure to the powers which already form the historical world.31 Similarly, the aim of this portrait of Schlageter’s bearing before the most extreme adversity is to exhort German students to open themselves to the given powers of their native land, powers which somehow foster the essential virtues of their Dasein. Student of Freiburg, let the strength of this hero’s native mountains flow into your will! Student of Freiburg, let the strength of the autumn sun of this hero’s native valley shine into your heart! Preserve both within you and carry them, hardness of will and clarity of heart, to your comrades at the German universities. (G16 760) Heidegger enjoins the student to become receptive to the forces of the native home. This implies that they are to some extent removed from this home and the influence of its forces. Insofar as this influence is mediated by the free comportment of willing – i.e., a ‘letting’ – on the part of the student, their belonging to the land is, in principle, distinguished from contemporaneous teachings that conceive the ‘rootedness’ of a people within the framework of naturalistic biology. A primordial mode of ‘being-in’ their world can be restored. The qualities demanded of the students can be ‘learned’. To ‘learn’ here means ‘to let oneself be beset by the unknown and then attain mastery of it through knowing’ (G16 763). Further, it is worth noting that the listeners are also enjoined to ‘carry’ hardness and clarity to other students at other schools. Although the manner of this transmission remains quite vague, the injunction recalls other statements to the effect that, since Dasein is always being-with and for others, the awakening and seizing of possibilities of being-in-the world carries within it the need to assist others to authentic existence. Moreover, it is significant that this influence proceeds from out of the Allemanic Heimat – the home of Schlageter, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the students – and spreads out into the universities of the German people generally. For Heidegger, this particular place is thus a kind of centre and original fount of the forces which will renew science, the German university, the German Volk and the European peoples of the West.

Chapter 4

Philosophic Pedagogy and Historical Community

The statement on leadership in the introduction to Einleitung in die Philosophie discussed above (see Chapter 1) clarifies in several important respects Heidegger’s philosophical pedagogy, both as it is thematically developed (in theory) and as it is carried out in practice. In particular, it provides indication of how, for Heidegger, the education to philosophy is not limited to the introduction of problems to students taken in a narrow sense, but has a more comprehensive, historical reach. Heidegger’s comments on the theme of leadership belong in the context of the problem of introducing students to philosophy. The steps proceeding into the statement on leadership can be briefly summarized: (1) the introduction to philosophy ultimately requires the awakening and seizing of philosophy as a possibility of existence; (2) the act of seizing the possibility must however be guided by a ‘pre-understanding’ of what philosophy is; (3) insofar as the possibility of philosophy already in some way belongs to the existence of the listeners, and insofar as the actualization takes place within their historical existence, the point of departure for arriving at such a pre-understanding is gained from out of self-reflection on the immediate historical situation of the students; (4) this reflection discovers that science and leadership are the two powers which essentially determine the Dasein of those who belong to the university. Hence the ‘pre-understanding’ for the introduction is to be procured ‘out of the illumination of the essence of philosophy in its relation to science and leadership’ – a task to which the remainder of the lecture course is devoted (G27 8). Leadership is introduced as a ‘power’ which determines existence at the university. For participation in the university implicitly harbours a duty and a claim ‘to assume something like a leadership in the whole of historical beingwith-one-another’ (G27 7). From the outset this leadership is set apart from the forms of governance in public life. Indeed what is at issue here is an ‘absolutely non-public leadership’. It lies not in the assumption of ‘so-called leading posts’ but in a depth of understanding: ‘Leadership is the obligation to an existence which in certain ways understands the ultimate possibilities of human Dasein as a whole more primordially and in this understanding ought to be a model or example [Vorbild]’ (G27 7). Perhaps to avoid confusion with ordinary notions of

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leadership by ‘example’, Heidegger stresses that leadership does not mean the demonstration of moral superiority.1 An obligation to leadership – as an exemplary understanding of Dasein’s place in the whole – is given with participation in the university because the university is defined by devotion to scientific research and education. Science is here understood as the grounding of man’s relations to all things through knowledge. This conception of science recalls the teaching of German Idealism. Fichte, Schelling and von Humboldt instituted the modern German university as the institution in which science is historically embodied and organized. If science is understood in this manner, the university, rather than the Church or even the state, becomes the grounding centre of man’s place in the world.2 Heidegger’s conception of leadership evidently presupposes the modern understanding of the university as the ruling centre of human life. At the same time, however, Heidegger abstracts from the earlier modern justification of this centrality: that, insofar as the university is the embodiment of reason in human society, it is the medium for the actualization of the ideals of rational, moral, progressive civilization. In other words, Heidegger takes over the conception of the university as the site where a ‘new position in the whole of the world’ is prepared. Yet where the German Idealists articulated this ‘position’ and defined man’s ‘relation to all things’ in rationalist terms, Heidegger formalizes the traditional conception of the university and science. The question of how the relations to all things are factically determined and grounded is thereby left entirely open. Why does there now lie precisely in the actual belonging to the university a peculiar claim to such leadership? It is given from out of the way the university, through the cultivation of scientific research and in imparting [Mitteilung] a scientific education [Bildung], prepares the possibility for a new position in the whole of the world [Stellung im Ganzen der Welt], in which all relations of Dasein experience a transformation [Wandlung] and in which Dasein can become more akin [verwandter] with all things in new ways, because a proper transparency and enlightenment comes into Dasein. (G27 7) Similarly, in assigning to science and scientific education the task of opening a new determination of Dasein’s place in the whole of the world, Heidegger passes over the contemporary condition of science as divided into fields, directed towards technical aims, and unified only by the external organization of the university. This science uproots and fragments anything like a relation to the ‘whole’ of the world. Heidegger thus appeals to the ‘essence’ of science which is implied in the currently uprooted condition of science. Science is here understood in its unified essence as a way of existence which is determined by the question about what and how beings are as such and as a whole. Science is a position of Dasein in the whole of beings which is ‘led’ by the beings as they are manifest in truth.3 Heidegger does not expressly mention philosophy in this brief statement on the possibility of leadership that inheres in the idea of science. Yet science prepares

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a position in ‘the whole of the world’, rather than the concern with particular regions of beings as special fields of sciences. Thus science is here to be understood from out of the ground of its possibility, which means, from out of philosophy. One can infer that the claim and obligation to leadership ascribed to science belong essentially to philosophy. These comments on leadership then pertain in a special way to Heidegger’s own activity. This inference is confirmed in the subsequent statement on the inner requirements of ‘genuine leadership’. The latter involves not only a deeper understanding of Dasein’s possibilities, but moreover, a reflection on the whole. For the ‘transparency’ of Dasein that leadership introduces, ‘needs its own clarity and security, i.e., Dasein itself needs a reflection [Besinnung] on the fundamental positions [Grundstellungen] of Dasein to the whole of the beings, a reflection which constantly renews itself. This is a reflection which immediately determines itself out of the current historical situation of Dasein and works itself into it [in sie hinein sich auswirkt]. What thus lies in leadership – indeed not only in it –, we call Welt-anschauung’ (G27 8). It is necessary to forego here any account of Heidegger’s treatment of Weltanschauung. But this will suffice to support the argument that the ‘reflection’ on the position of Dasein to the whole from out of the historical situation (e.g., the situation of the modern university) not only encompasses Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy in general, but self-reflexively describes what is enacted in this very lecture course and statement on leadership.

The Conditions of Leadership The topic of ‘leadership’ brings one to the question of the relation between philosophy and human community in general. If philosophizing itself carries an obligation to leadership, then it must occur within a community. Later in this lecture, Heidegger asserts that ‘Philosophic Dasein is according to its essence being-with others [Mitsein mit anderen]’ (G27 397). Leadership consists primarily in the more primordial understanding of the possibilities of Dasein, an understanding which ‘ought to be an example [Vorbild]’. This suggests that philosophic leadership is an exemplary and primordial form of being-with others, out of which all relations between Dasein should be understood. The fact that this leadership is ‘hidden’ and ‘non-public’, however, heightens the perplexity as to how it can be construed as ‘exemplary’. In Being and Time, the structure of being-with-others is articulated into two basic modes of care or solicitude (Fürsorge) for others: the everyday mode of existence in which Dasein becomes dominated (subjected to the dictatorship of das Man) and an authentic way of being-with-others which liberates Dasein. The analysis of the latter can be seen to provide a formal sketch of the grounds of philosophic leadership and thus to shed light on the task and procedure of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy.

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In contrast to [inauthentic solicitude], there is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude [Fürsorge] which does not so much leap in for the other as leap ahead of him in his existentiell can-be, not in order to take away his ‘care’ but rather to give it back authentically as such for the first time [sondern erst eigentlich als solche zurüeckzugeben]. This solicitude, which affects [betrifft] the existence of the other and not a what with which he is concerned, helps [verhilft] the other to become transparent [durchsichtig] in his care and become free for it. (SZ 122; BT 158–59) This analysis of authentic solicitude anticipates the concept of leadership in Einleitung and a comparison reveals important similarities. Both exhibit a movement ‘ahead’, or ‘before’ (vor-) others in understanding their possibility. ‘Care’ as the name for the Being of Dasein is a structural unity of moments that includes ‘being-ahead-of itself’ in the sense of being-directed towards possible ways of Being that can never have the character of ‘being-actual’. Authentic solicitude understands and acts with others in terms of who they ‘can-be’. This is described as a movement of ‘leaping-ahead’ (vorausspringen). Similarly, leadership is described as a way of being an example or model, a Vorbild, i.e., a precedent form or proto-type. That Heidegger intends to call attention to the sense in which leadership is a ‘going-ahead’ of others becomes visible in the further elaboration of what it means to be a Vorbild. ‘Leadership here means: the disposal over higher and richer possibilities of human existence, which are not imposed on [aufgedrängt] the others, but rather become unobtrusively lived-ahead or set as an example before them [unaufdringlich vor-gelebt]’ (G27 8). This statement is immediately followed by the remark that ‘This hidden exemplification [verborgene Vorbildlichkeit] of genuine leadership however needs its own clarity and security.’ That is, leadership is ‘hidden’ not only in being ‘simply non-public’, but also, or perhaps primarily because it is unobtrusive. That is, like the existential-ontological interpretation (which, it will be argued, is itself, as an act of communication, an example of philosophic leadership) and in direct contrast to the dictatorship of das Man, leadership ‘will never want to make an authoritative pronouncement [Machtspruch] over existentiell possibilities and obligations’ (SZ 312). Still, it is not altogether clear what is meant by being an example ‘in’ understanding the possibilities of Dasein. The ordinary sense of leadership by example seems to imply that this becomes effective through a process of imitation. But here again, Heidegger rejects both the idea that leadership involves the assumption of a position of public prominence and the assumption that to be an ‘example’ here means to set oneself up as a model of moral action, to exhibit moral superiority. So what kind of action inheres in being an example, in ‘this hidden exemplification [Vorbildlichkeit]’? What precisely can be understood by ‘leaping ahead’ and ‘giving back’? What can it mean to exemplify, in opposition to imposing, ‘higher and richer possibilities of human existence’?

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Remarkably, an instance of this hidden exemplification is available in this very same lecture course, i.e., in Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. Recall that a claim to leadership was said to inhere in attendance at the university ‘through the care for scientific research and in imparting or communicating [Mitteilung] a scientific Bildung which prepares the possibility of a new position in the whole of the world’ (G27 7). A possibility can be exemplified in that it is presented to others. Such a presentation is exhibited in Einleitung itself. Here, the task of ‘introducing’ philosophy ultimately aims at making philosophizing possible in the existence of listeners. However, the awakening of the possibility in the student requires his participation, will and freedom. The fundamental requirements of philosophizing cannot be imposed or even directly communicated. This marks a limit to leadership itself and therefore determines its distinctive character. Communication can only prepare, anticipate and make possible understanding, learning and thus true ‘introduction’ – it can in no way assure or guarantee such access. Therefore the lecture course itself here is limited to elaborating, from out of the historical situation, a ‘pre-understanding’ [Vorverständnis] which can function as a provisional guide for the listener. As Heidegger says, ‘Whatever should become free in us, we must take up in our freedom, we must awaken and seize philosophizing in ourselves freely. But for this we must recognize it; we need a pre-understanding of philosophy’ (G27 5). Yet, in order for it to be presented as a genuine possibility, this way of existence must have been experienced and understood as such by the one who imparts it. Hence, the ‘before’ or ‘ahead’ that characterizes authentic solicitude and leadership (as in ‘leaping-ahead’, being a Vor-bild, and vor-leben) is to be understood in two senses, as pertains to the difference between leaders and followers. First, possibilities are projected and predelineated ‘ahead’ for other Dasein, prior to being awakened and seized by the other Dasein. Second, leadership involves a going ‘ahead’ of others in the sense of ‘preliving’ and ‘antecedently’ understanding ‘higher and richer possibilities of human existence’. Heidegger thus occasionally describes as a condition of leading students into the matters of philosophy, that one must have ‘already been there’. A passage from Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik exhibits the necessity of both, on the one hand, the antecedent understanding of the one who leads and, on the other hand, the need of followers for preparation – a provisional glimpse and provisional understanding – that prepares, but cannot assure, their participation. The lecturer [Vortragende] must, in certain ways, already have in view the way’s direction, he really must have, as it were, already been where he wants to lead us [wohin er führen will]. The manner in which he leads [führt] must betray whether he has already really been there, or whether he is only relating what others surmise about it, who have not themselves been there either. But to provide the student with a preliminary glimpse [Vorblick] we will do well to come to an understanding about the idea of philosophy, though in a very

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provisional [vorlaufigen] way. That is not required merely in consideration of the particular steps of this lecture course, but even more so in consideration of your having devoted [bereitgestellt] your current Dasein to academic studies, and that always means, explicitly or not, to philosophy. To what extent this is happening and has happened out of an inner freedom, whether there is an actual resolve behind this [Entschluss], how far the compass of this form of existence at the university as such is clear or is deliberately left in darkness and indifference, all that is a matter for the individual. (G26 9; MFL 7–8) One may here perceive a certain ambiguity that appears frequently in Heidegger’s lectures: it is not clear whether the issue concerns the problem of introducing others to philosophy as a way of existence or the problem of conveying an understanding of a certain subject matter, whether that be the foundations of logic, the ‘being as such as a whole’, the essence of truth or the understanding-of-Being. However, it is of the utmost importance for an understanding of Heidegger’s thought as a whole that the problem of leading-in, of introduction, to philosophy – and everything that belongs to this beginning for both leaders and followers – is identical with the problem of gaining access to the ‘things themselves’, i.e., whatever may be the special subject matter of any particular discussion. Hence a certain circularity is here exhibited: on the one hand, the character and approach of Heidegger’s pedagogy (leadership) is adapted to the Being of the ‘matters’ (Sachen) which philosophizing confronts, i.e., the manner in which the phenomena are manifest (or concealed) for Dasein. Heidegger’s pedagogy is thus not a technique which would be applicable to any subject matter whatsoever. On the other hand, thematic disclosure of the phenomena happens in and out of a questioning comportment and precisely this requires ‘introduction’. In other words, philosophic pedagogy depends on the subject matter, while, at the same time, the subject matter ‘needs’ philosophic pedagogy in order to become manifest in what and how it is. Heidegger’s presentation of any special theme within the guiding problematic of Being is thus always accompanied by self-reflection upon philosophy as a way of existence. This self-reflection involves deliberations about such matters as the following: what philosophy is; the fundamental experiences and attunements of philosophizing; the factic and ontological conditions of philosophy; what introduction involves; philosophic method, discourse and communication. The conceptual interpretation of any philosophic subject matter is possible only in philosophic existence. Insofar as the latter consists in a total transformation (Verwandlung) of Dasein’s everyday existence, the philosopher who seeks to make possible a genuine understanding in his listeners must somehow attempt to make possible this transformation.4 That is the task of a philosophic pedagogy and the reason why Heidegger constantly returns to the question of the possibility and necessity of philosophy.5 The accomplishment and communication of philosophic understanding then places extreme demands of self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) upon both ‘teacher’ and ‘student’.

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Such demands are not necessary for understanding in the sciences, where the subject matter can be represented and conveyed without the participation of the ‘whole’ existence of teacher and student.6 Self-reflection on the possibility of philosophy thus belongs to any education to philosophy. On this issue, Heidegger’s critique of Karl Jaspers’ Psychologie der Weltanschauungen is especially instructive. Heidegger singles out what can be called the pedagogical intention as the ‘authentic’ aim of Jasper’s analysis of the different possibilities of world view, but then maintains that Jaspers fails to realize this intention insofar as he does not reflect upon his way of apprehending and presenting the phenomena. That pedagogical, authentic intention is, according to Heidegger (citing Jaspers’ introduction), to give a clarification of the possibilities of world view ‘as means of self-reflection’ (G9 6–7). ‘To drive [others] into self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung]’ is the task that Heidegger shares with Jaspers. At the same time, however, Jaspers presents his study as a work of ‘contemplation’ (Betrachtung) on human life. Heidegger maintains that insofar as contemplation is a comportment suited to reveal only what is present-athand, it is fundamentally incapable of understanding the phenomena of world view, human life and possibility. The contemplative approach, according to Heidegger, abstracts completely from the question of what is required to gain access to the phenomena of human existence. The approach thus contravenes the intention of awakening others to self-reflection. For the latter task to succeed, Jaspers would have to reflect upon and thematize his own ‘philosophizing’ as itself a possibility of existence (i.e., a ‘worldview’). Dasein’s ‘possibilities’ cannot then be authentically ‘understood’ without being experienced, projected and thus ‘opened up’ ‘in and for’ appropriation by other Dasein (G9 42). By pointing out what is missing in Jaspers’ study, Heidegger indicates what a genuine philosophic pedagogy requires: the task of liberating other Dasein needs a heightened self-awareness about both what is involved in philosophic interpretation and the distinctive Being of that which is to be interpreted. Heidegger thus concludes the review of Jaspers: Jaspers falls prey to a deception when he thinks that it is precisely in a mere contemplation that he would achieve the highest degree of non-involvement in the personal decision [of others] and so be able to liberate the individual for his own self-reflection. . . . A genuine self-reflection can liberate one in a meaningful way only if it is there, and it is there only in a rigorous awakening [Gewecktwerden]. Moreover, there can be genuine awakening only if the other is relentlessly compelled to engage in reflection, so that he sees that the appropriation of the objects of philosophy is bound to a certain rigor in the enactment [Vollzug] of method. All sciences fall short of this kind of rigor, because in the sciences merely the requirement of objectivity [Sachlichkeit] is decisive, whereas in philosophy what belongs together with the matters [Sachen] treated is the philosophizing itself and its notorious poverty belongs to the matters [Sachen] of philosophy. One can drive others into reflection, and

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make them attentive, only if one proceeds the way oneself for a stretch. (G9 42; emphasis added) Of course, it is possible to identify the task of ‘driving others into self-reflection’ with that of introducing philosophy (and taking up the question of what philosophy is) only if the ‘self’ of the others, the recipient of this philosophic pedagogy, is essentially bound up with the possibility of philosophy in some way. So far, it has been shown how this holds true on more than one level: first in the general sense that philosophizing, as the explicit understanding of Being is predelineated in the essence of Dasein (see Chapter 1); second, insofar as mere attendance at the university implies a devotion to academic studies – ‘and that means, whether explicitly or not, [devotion] to philosophy’ (G26 9). It is especially noteworthy that in the review of Jaspers, Heidegger singles out the pedagogical task of ‘driving others into self-reflection’ as the authentic and most important aim. In asserting that ‘one can only drive into reflection . . . if one proceeds the way oneself for a stretch’, it appears that the care-for and leadership of others is not merely incidental to ‘proceeding the way oneself’ but rather its fulfilment. This is a further indication that philosophizing is always a mode of being-with others. However, when Heidegger stresses the necessity that one who leads others into philosophy must have ‘already been where he wants to lead us’ (G26 9), that he must ‘proceed the way himself for a stretch’, he suggests that in ‘going ahead’, and ‘having already been there’, he has preceded the others on his own, as it were, without taking them along. The sense of ‘going-ahead’ – as in vorausspringen, vor-leben, being a Vor-bild and giving Vor-verständnis – that characterizes leadership, implies a capacity to go on one’s own or in solitude. Heidegger emphasizes this point in the Rectoral Address: If we will this essence of science, then the faculty of the university must advance into the most extreme posts of the danger of constant world-uncertainty. If they stand fast there, i.e., if from there grows – in the essential nearness of the compulsion of all things – the common questioning and communally attuned saying, then they will become strong for leadership. Because the decisive thing [das Entscheidene] in leading is not merely going ahead [Vorangehen], but rather the force to be able to go alone [Alleingehenkönnen], not out of selfishness and desire to dominate, but rather by virtue of a deepest destiny and furthest reaching duty. Such force binds to the essential, procures the selection of the best, and awakens the genuine following of those who are of the new courage. (SU 14) ‘Common questioning’ then grows out of a state of ‘essential nearness to the compulsion [Bedrängnis] of all things’, a nearness that is possible in ‘going alone’, a kind of solitude. The capacity to ‘go alone’ is decisive here because it makes possible this ‘nearness’ and the corresponding experience of ‘world uncertainty’. Such a Dasein stands not in proximity to ‘things’ (Dingen) per se,

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but to the Being of what is, i.e., their Bedrängnis – compulsion, pressure, oppression. In this respect, it is significant that Heidegger often employs similar formulations of what is experienced in the solitude of Dasein such as ‘in nearness to the essence of all things’ or ‘in nearness to the world’. The attainment of such nearness (Nähe) is identified as the ground of philosophy and, at the same time, is posited as the goal of education itself. As Heidegger says, ‘We have provisionally sketched out academic studies as the communal drive to cominginto-nearness to the world as a whole. It is our task, to awaken this drive [Drang wieder zu wecken], so that it can be set on its way and can actually happen. Science and philosophy ought to be the distinctive possibilities of human Dasein in order to come into nearness to the world’ (G28 348). The drive to come into nearness to the essence, world or Being of things – like philosophizing in Einleitung – is something to be ‘awakened’ because Dasein is already in a relation of ‘nearness’ to the world, but this relation remains latent, implicit, asleep. The world as such – the Being of beings (as something other than the actual beings) – remains hidden to the extent that Dasein is absorbed in beings available for use. Awakening to essential nearness to the world is then a movement by which Dasein becomes who it essentially already is, i.e., the being which exists as being-in-the-world. Such a modification of everyday existence is an experience of Dasein in its individuation and solitude because here Dasein understands itself out of the finitude of its own existence. We have been exploring the first of the two senses in which authentic solicitude and leadership involve a movement of going-ahead of others. The leader must have already traversed the way in which he leads. Insofar as this way leads into a proximity with the ‘essence’ of things, going ‘ahead’ implies the capacity to go alone. This is the capacity to exist in solitude before Dasein’s ownmost possibility of death, a way of existence in which Dasein undergoes its own individuation. The capacity to ‘go alone’ then, in a sense, qualifies Dasein for leadership. In Heidegger’s discussions of being-with-others and in his various descriptions of philosophy, one finds the insistence that the most authentic community is rather made possible by the most radical solitude of those who lead the others However, the leader’s capacity for solitary individuation before death and the world must be understood as possibilities that inhere in a Dasein that is essentially with and towards others. Going back to the statement from the Rectoral Address, it is evident that the ‘capacity to go alone’ maintains a relation to other Dasein in the following ways: (1) the ‘strength’ for solitude arises out of the ‘deepest destiny’ and ‘broadest duty’; (2) the solitary experience of worlduncertainty and nearness to the Being of things are said to make possible a ‘communal’ questioning and ‘saying’ and (3) the capacity to go alone is designated a condition for the ability to ‘awaken’ a following. Accordingly, the relationship between philosophy and human community is here posed. The issue can be articulated in the form of three interrelated difficulties. First, how is the experience of the ‘essential’ made possible by

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communal destiny and what can it mean for philosophy to be bound by a ‘duty’ to a people? More generally stated: in what way is thinking ‘rooted’ in the destiny of a particular historical people?7 Second, what can this communal questioning consist in? How can anything communal coexist with, let alone ‘arise from’, the experiences of ‘worlduncertainty’, solitude and fundamental questioning? And third, what does it here mean for the philosopher to ‘awaken a following’? In the remainder of this chapter we will begin with a consideration of this third difficulty (because it is closest to our starting point and guiding theme), and move from there to address the second difficulty. To the extent that the preceding will involve extensive considerations of what, for Heidegger, ‘historical destiny’, community and ‘peoples’ essentially are, this will prepare a better grasp of the first (and most important) difficulty. It is necessary then to return to the question of how one can be liberated for authentic existence through another Dasein’s care for one’s own Being. Such a clarification is all the more requisite because a generation of existentialist readings of Being and Time has overlooked this problem entirely. The reason for such an oversight is easy enough to understand: Heidegger maintained that this leadership is necessarily ‘unobtrusive’ and ‘hidden’ (verborgene) (G27 8). Being and Time evinces this unobtrusiveness on two levels. In the first place, within the analysis of Dasein, the role of authentic solicitude in helping to make the authentic existence of others possible is not highlighted in any special way. In the second place, Heidegger provides only indirect indications that the philosophic discourse of the existential analytic itself – as communicated through the work, Being and Time – itself enacts authentic solicitude and has the pedagogical aim of ‘leaping ahead and liberating’.

Being the ‘Conscience’ of Others So we begin with the question of how authentic solicitude enables the authentic Being of others. In another comment on the phenomenon of authentic solicitude, Heidegger describes how a Dasein that has become resolute as a self can become the occasion for the authenticity of others. Resoluteness, as authentic Being-a-self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’. And how should it, when resoluteness as authentic disclosedness, is authentically nothing else than being-in-the-world? Resoluteness brings the self right into its current concernful being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous being with others. In the light of the “for the sake of which” of one’s selfchosen can-be, resolute Dasein frees itself for its world. Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let the others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost can-be and to co-disclose [miterschliessen] in the solicitude

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which leaps ahead and liberates. The resolute Dasein can become the ‘conscience’ of the others. Out of the authentic self-being of the resoluteness there first arises [entspringt allererst] the authentic with-another, but not out of the ambiguous and envious stipulation and talkative fraternizing in das Man and in what das Man wants to undertake. (SZ 298; BT 344) To restate what is at issue here: the ‘others’ can ‘first’ be in their ownmost can-be if they are liberated by a Dasein that has already become resolute towards itself. Authentic solicitude is described as the possibility of one Dasein being the ‘conscience’ of another. Yet Heidegger places the word ‘conscience’ under quotation marks. Such a qualification indicates that one cannot in a strict or full sense be the ‘conscience’ of another, but rather perhaps act at once in a manner like one’s own conscience and in the service of the conscience of another Dasein. To interpret the suggestion that one Dasein act as the conscience of another in a literal sense would seem to contradict the careful phenomenological interpretation of conscience in general – especially the treatment of ‘who’ the caller (of the call of conscience) is. The problem arises for phenomenological interpretation because of the characteristic ‘indefiniteness’ of the caller. The ‘call’ discloses by way of silence and does not allow itself to be understood in everyday worldly terms such as ‘name, status, origin or repute’. Heidegger says: ‘That which calls the call, simply holds itself aloof from any way of becoming well-known, and this belongs to its phenomenal character’ (SZ 274). Moreover, the identity of the caller is not only indeterminate, but also, in a way, alien. The call is not consciously voiced by Dasein, it is rather something that comes ‘against our expectations and even against our will’. The call announces itself as something alien to Dasein’s everyday selfunderstanding. ‘The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday das Man-self; it is something like a strange voice [etwas wie eine fremde Stimme]’ (SZ 277). The existential interpretation of these phenomenal findings is directed primarily against the ordinary tendency to attribute the voice of conscience to a being other than Dasein – namely God. Insofar as the Being of the caller is then necessarily that of ‘Dasein’, the possibility might be left open that the caller could be another Dasein – but that possibility is dismissed (SZ 275). In any case, Heidegger argues that the ‘caller’ phenomenally manifests itself as the very same Self of the Dasein that hears the call; the thrown, individuated, uncanny Self of Dasein makes an appeal to itself as it is absorbed in the publicness of das Man. ‘Conscience manifests itself as the call of Care: the caller is Dasein, which, in its thrownness . . . is anxious about its can be. The one to whom the appeal is made is this very same Dasein, summoned to its ownmost can-be. Dasein is falling into das Man, and it is summoned out of this falling by the appeal’ (SZ 277). Given the phenomenal finding that ‘in conscience Dasein calls itself’, a reading of Heidegger’s text which maintained that the caller is another Dasein, taken in any strict sense, would strain plausibility.8

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But might not one Dasein address another in a way that makes the other receptive to the call of its own conscience? Such a possibility might help explain both the phenomenon of authentic solicitude and, therefore, Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. Although the call of conscience is not a vocal utterance, it is nevertheless a primordial form of discourse (Rede), indeed one that is understood through the act of ‘hearing’.9 In these respects, communicative discourse and the ‘discourse’ of conscience have a similar structure. Most discourse pertains to Dasein’s circumspective concerns with beings in the world. Conscience, on the other hand, has nothing to say about matters of concern; it gives no directives. But Heidegger does discuss the possibility of an authentic discourse between Dasein that is not limited to the matters of concern within the world. In other words, while conscience itself is not a form of communication between two Dasein, there is a kind of communication that can bring Dasein into a shared understanding of what the call conveys: Dasein’s ‘ownmost can-be’. As Heidegger says, ‘Listening to [Das Hören auf] . . . is the existential being-open of Dasein as being-with for the other. Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic openness of Dasein for its ownmost can-be – as in hearing the voice of the friend that every Dasein carries with it. As a being-in-the-world that understands, with the others, it is “in thrall” [hörig] to Mitdasein and to itself; and in this thralldom [Hörigkeit] it belongs [zugehörig]. Listening to one another, in which being-with develops, has the possible ways of following [Folgen], going along with and the privative modes of not-hearing, resisting, defying and turningaway’ (SZ 163; BT 206). This openness to the ‘ownmost can-be’ (which, as ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, implies the understanding of Dasein as beingtowards-death and as guilty at once) is at the same time an openness to both other Dasein and the world. It constitutes Dasein’s ‘belonging to’ and being in ‘thrall’ to being-in-the-world as a whole.10 In hearing and understanding the call of conscience, Dasein is not cut off from, but rather originally opened to other Dasein. The openness that is characteristic of listening may then permit an authentic discourse of one Dasein to another which does not supplant the call of conscience. The question arises, however, as to whether there can be true communication between one Dasein and another regarding an ‘ownmost can-be’, especially if the latter is understood to mean Dasein’s death. The exposition of the phenomenon of authentic solicitude makes it necessary to address this question, not because solicitude would consist primarily in liberating another Dasein for its death, but rather because the impossibility of any authentic communication concerning death as a possibility would make authentic solicitude (‘being the “conscience” of others’) wholly unintelligible. For death, in Heidegger’s exposition, most clearly manifests Dasein’s finitude. At stake here is the question of whether there can be something like a shared experience of finitude. Communication (Mitteilung) is, according to Heidegger, an expressed discourse ‘which aims at bringing the hearer to participate [in die Teilnahme] in

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a disclosive Being-towards what is talked about in the discourse’ (SZ 168). The phenomenon of death as existential possibility at first sight seems to suggest that there can be no shared ‘being towards’ death – and thus no Mitteilung – because one’s own possible death is phenomenally inaccessible to another Dasein. Heidegger argues that the phenomenon of death itself cannot be theoretically grasped through consideration of the death of other Dasein; here – unlike the public world of concerns where one Dasein can be substituted for, ‘represent’ (vertreten), and occupy the position of another – representation is impossible. The phenomenon of death as a possibility is only disguised through the everyday ‘communication’ about death, expressed in such typical sayings as ‘everyone dies’. Here, instead, ‘dying’ is encountered as an actual event (SZ 253). The possibility of genuine communication might then seem to be denied here on the grounds that death is essentially ‘non-relational’. Death is the impending ‘failure’ of all relation to other Dasein and things in the world. The anticipation of death thus individuates Dasein to itself. At the same time, however, being-towards this possibility remains no less a being-with others and being-alongside things. It is a being-with that has become explicitly finite. The most extreme individuation, in being-towards-death, does not negate, it rather opens the most radical understanding of Dasein’s beingwith others. ‘As the non-relational possibility, death individuates – but only in order to make Dasein as being-with understand the can-be of others’ (SZ 264). From out of the anticipation of its own possible death, Dasein can understand the possible death (can-be) of another Dasein. There is then a sense in which Dasein can ‘be towards’ the death of the other and be with the other in its possibility of death. In being-towards-death Dasein is authentically ‘ahead’ of itself, and this is what seems to allow for the possibility that in understanding others in their own finitude (though this may be for them, as fallen, proximally obscured) it can, as Heidegger says, ‘leap ahead’ of the other ‘in its ownmost can-be’ and ‘give it back for the first time’. Thus a common being-towardsdeath is indeed possible, though it must be recognized that an inescapable alterity remains between, so to speak, ‘your’ being towards ‘my’ death and my own being towards my own death. Authentic being-towards-death by definition implies that Dasein here anticipates the possibility of death as its ‘own’. So authentic being-with others necessarily involves recognition of this alterity, i.e., of this limit to what can be shared. A plurality of Dasein can then authentically be together with one another in being-towards death only on the basis of an awareness that each must die his own death. Paradoxically then, the possibility of mutual being-towards-death exists on the basis of its particular ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit), while the individual’s comportment towards his death – as the possible failure (Versagen) of beingwith-others – is at the same time conditioned by being-with-others. While death itself is essentially non-relational, being-towards this possibility is never a strictly individual experience. In anticipating death as including the impending ‘failure’ of solicitude, solicitude is not negated, rather it – along with the self – is

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understood (projected) out of the ‘ownmost’ can-be (eigenste Seinkönnen) and so becomes what it essentially is, i.e., it becomes authentic (eigentlich). As Heidegger says, Dasein can only then authentically be itself if it is made possible for itself from itself. The failure [Versagen] of concern and solicitude [in death] in no way signifies a cutting off of these ways of being-there from authentic selfbeing. As essential structures of the constitution of Dasein they belong to the condition of the possibility of existence. Dasein is authentically itself only so far as it projects itself as concerned being-alongside . . . and solicitous beingwith . . . primarily on its ownmost can-be, but not on the possibility of the das Man-self. (SZ 263) Thus ‘solicitous being-with’ can be grounded on Dasein’s ownmost (individuating) can-be. Accordingly, the ‘non-relational’ character of Dasein’s death and guilt does not preclude the possibility of mutual understanding and communication. Rather, an authentic mode of being-with can arise through a mutual ‘being-towards’ Dasein’s ownmost can-be.11 We have dwelt on this issue of how it is possible for there to be a relation between Dasein, a being-with-one-another in being-towards-death because such a relation underlies the possibility of authentic solicitude and therefore, leadership and philosophic pedagogy. Authentic solicitude is, again, a ‘leap ahead of the other in its existentiell can-be’; it affects the ‘existence of the other and not a what for which it is concerned’ (SZ 122; BT 159). For the most part, Dasein relates to others in terms of ‘what’ it does because in everydayness Dasein indeed ‘is’ for the most part ‘what one does’; one is defined by one’s occupation. Relations to others are based upon the common concerns that an occupation involves. With the possibility of authentic solicitude, on the other hand, Heidegger articulates a manner of being-with one another that is based upon one Dasein’s ability to understand and ‘affect’ (betrifft) the ‘existentiell can-be’ of the other. To be sure, this ability remains problematic. As was noted above, this relation between ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ can be understood as analogous to the relation in conscience between caller and listener (so that one Dasein acts as the ‘conscience’ of others). This suggests that the manner of being-together at issue in authentic solicitude is a shared ‘being-towards’ Dasein’s can-be that is fulfilled in communicative discourse, Mitteilung. But the character and content of this kind of ‘communication’ remains to be laid out. First of all, it is important to note that for Heidegger, being-with is itself not grounded in communication. All communication rather presupposes beingwith. It is not the case that communication, in bringing the listener to take part (Teilnehme) in a disclosive ‘being towards’ something, conveys new opinions from one Dasein to another. The subject matter of communication – in authentic solicitude that means Dasein’s ownmost can-be – has ‘already’ been disclosed insofar as Dasein exists at all. Such a disclosure already belongs essentially to

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every Dasein but it is, for the most part, concealed through Dasein’s absorption in das Man. Hence, authentic communication functions as a means by which both prior being-with-one-another and the prior understanding of the matter at issue become explicit, awakened, drawn out of concealment and appropriated. As Heidegger says, In this more general kind of communication, the articulation of being-with understandingly is constituted. Through it a mutual attunement [Mitbefindlichkeit] gets ‘shared’, and so does the understanding of being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences such as opinions or wishes from the interior of one subject into the interior of another. Mutualbeing-there [Mitdasein] is already essentially manifest in a mutual attunement and a mutual understanding [Mitverstehen]. In discourse being-with becomes ‘explicitly’ shared; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been seized hold of and appropriated. (SZ 162) In authentic solicitude, Dasein liberates others precisely through such communication that makes explicit both a prior, given relation of being-with others and a prior, implicit understanding of that which is communicated.12

Thrownness and Authenticity The priority of being-with others – as what is ‘already’ shared – is understood by Dasein through the call of conscience. It was emphasized above, over against prevailing misinterpretations of Being and Time, that authentic being-towards death – Dasein’s ‘ownmost can-be’ – does not somehow cut Dasein off from others but rather makes possible a primordial community of Dasein. To be sure, as this possibility involves a ‘shared’ being-towards death that is essentially nonrelational, the phenomenal basis for this assertion remains weak. However, at the conclusion of the chapter on being-towards death, Heidegger not only acknowledges that the existential-ontological projection of authentic beingtowards-death remains an ungrounded projection, he turns to the interpretation of the phenomenon of conscience precisely in order to find phenomenal evidence, an ‘attestation’ within Dasein’s existence, that Dasein can truly understand itself from out of its ownmost can-be. In the treatment of the phenomenon of conscience, one then finds an account of Dasein’s authentic self-understanding – Dasein’s understanding of its own way of Being – that at first appears different from self-understanding in being-towards death (although these are eventually, in Being and Time, section 62, revealed as a unity): whereas in confronting its death as a possibility Dasein experiences its ‘self’ as ahead-ofitself (anticipating its death as the horizon of its future), in understanding the call of conscience, Dasein becomes open to its Being as ‘having been thrown’ (Geworfenheit), i.e., in the manner that it ‘always already’ is.

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Heidegger’s interpretation of the fundamental experience of conscience has sometimes been read as further confirmation of the presumed solipsism of authentic self-understanding. In fact, however, the interpretation of this experience makes manifest how the structure of being-with pervades the self from the ground up. It thus exhibits the possibility of authentic being-with others as the presupposition of the mode of communication involved in authentic solicitude and philosophic pedagogy. We shall here focus only upon the manner in which the understanding of the call of conscience reveals Dasein’s ownmost self as always already implicated in a determinate communal whole. Conscience makes known to Dasein its essential guilt (Schuld) by ‘summoning’ Dasein to assume this guilt. Existence itself is thus defined as a mode of ‘being-guilty’. When distinguished from the ordinary moral interpretation of conscience and guilt, being-guilty means, in formal-indicative terms, that its existence is a ‘being-the-null-ground-of-a-nullity’. To say that Dasein’s Being is permeated with nullity is to indicate that Dasein ‘never has power over its ownmost Being from the ground up’ (SZ 284). Dasein’s existence is thus constituted by fundamental limitations to its choice, will and power that cannot be surpassed. Nullity (Nichtigkeit) is experienced as being-guilty or indebted (schuldig-sein) because Dasein is in a sense ‘indebted’ for those elements of existence which do not lie in the sphere of Dasein’s power. Contrary to the ordinary moral understanding of ‘guilt’ as something acquired through Dasein’s actions – and thus something that can be redeemed or cancelled – primordial guilt can only be accepted, taken-over or, conversely (as occurs in everyday existence) obfuscated. Dasein has the tendency to obfuscate essential guilt because the awareness of such limitations to its power are burdensome. Obfuscation here takes the form of attempts to alleviate the burden. The question now is: how does Dasein’s understanding of its nullity indicate its factic belonging to Mitdasein? Nullity inheres in Dasein’s Being in the first instance in the facticity of its birth. Dasein is ‘thrown’ into existence,13 it does not come into being through its own choice or power. Dasein is thus fundamentally and irreversibly ‘indebted’ for its very ‘life’.14 Heidegger emphatically does not infer from this thrownness any moral obligation to parents as biological cause; the responsibility for facticity that Dasein here lacks cannot simply be placed on an antecedent natural cause or determinate ‘creditor’.15 The concept of ‘thrownness’ is employed in order to indicate precisely this enigmatic origin of Being: ‘this characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this “that it is” – is veiled in its “whence” and “whither”’ (SZ 135; emphasis added). The experience of facticity (that it is) and the nullity that inheres in facticity – that it has not given birth to itself – are covered up through recourse to a ready explanation for how and why it might have come to be. In other words, not only is the historical irreducible to the natural, but moreover, the historicality of Dasein includes such ‘natural’ events as birth and death.16 The nullity of Dasein that is manifest in the fact that it has ‘never come into existence by its own decision’, then implicates Dasein, from the ground up,

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in existence with others in many ways that transcend and are irreducible to the natural relation between parent and offspring. Although Dasein belongs to family, locality, tradition and Volk, these phenomena are not to be construed either as causes that are responsible for the fact that Dasein ‘is’ or as creditors to whom Dasein is indebted; rather these phenomena have the same kind of Being as Dasein. Along with Dasein’s ground, these forms of being-with are also ‘thrown’ and imbued with the very same ‘inexorable enigma’.17 Such manifestations of Mitdasein belong to Dasein – make up ‘who’ it is – but do not initially exist by virtue of any choice (although authentic existence here does indeed involve an ‘appropriation’ of these constituents of Dasein’s ground, a ‘decision’ to adopt as its own, as it were, what it already ‘is’ – limitations and all).18 Moreover, in confronting its thrownness, Dasein further comes up against the fact that it always finds itself within a determinate circle (Umkreis) of others that has not arisen through the power of Dasein’s choice. ‘Nullity’ further belongs to this state of affairs insofar as such a circle is always exclusive, limited to ‘these’ Dasein and not others.19 Here, however, it must be emphasized that Dasein is not thrown into existence with others in the sense that one being is given within a plurality of beings. The misleading tendency to conceive the ‘relations’ between Dasein and things in terms of the categories of Vorhandenheit may be particularly difficult to overcome here, where everything depends on the ontological difference between Dasein’s peculiar mode of being-with and the way in which beings present-at-hand may be found ‘together’. To say that Dasein is thrown into a determinate circle of others means that it is from the ground up open to the Being of others – and indeed for the most part not as ‘others’ but as those from whom it does not distinguish itself. Moreover, the openness for Mitdasein does not primarily mean a solicitude for others as such. It implies that Dasein’s understanding of itself, other beings and Being in general arises in and out of a given whole (a ‘determinate circle’) of being-with, a common understanding of being-in-the-world that Heidegger variously terms ‘traditional interpretedness’, and ‘public interpretedness’. All understanding and comportment towards things and other Dasein enact ‘possibilities’ (possible ways for Dasein to exist) that reside in a common historical world. As thrown, Dasein has been submitted to a ‘world’, and exists factically with others. Proximally and for the most part the self is lost in das Man. It understands itself out of those possibilities which ‘circulate’ in the ‘average’ public interpretedness of Dasein today. These possibilities have mostly been made unrecognizable by ambiguity; yet they are well known to us. The authentic existentiell understanding is so far from extricating itself from the way of interpreting Dasein which has come down to us, that in each case it is in terms of this interpretation, against it, and yet again for it, that any possibility one has chosen is seized upon in one’s resolution. (SZ 383; BT 435)

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Here again, Dasein’s thrown existence is permeated with nullity. Dasein has no ‘power from the ground up’ with respect to the determinate world in which it is thrown, the others whom it finds itself with, and those possibilities circulating within the public interpretedness. Dasein is originally ‘guilty’ (indebted) for the possibilities out of which it understands itself, other Dasein, and all other beings. The ‘thrownness’ of Dasein’s understanding – including the understanding of Being – implies that Dasein is indebted to ‘others’ in the sense of a public and traditional way of understanding the historical possibilities which Dasein always ‘is’ (whether in the mode of authenticity or inauthenticity).20 The full meaning of what the call of conscience gives to understand (guilt as nullity) is brought out in this description of how Dasein is originarily ‘indebted’ for its possibilities of Being. In particular, this treatment clarifies how Dasein, by virtue of its thrownness, finds itself implicated in a circle of mutual being-there with others. We having been seeking this clarification in order to grasp how the form of communication through which authentic solicitude liberates other Dasein does not of itself create a community of Dasein but presupposes relations of being-with. Such a prior ‘community’, it has been seen, is given with Dasein’s facticity. Here, however, one might object that the modes of belonging ‘with’ others – taken in terms of Dasein’s understanding of itself out of public and traditional interpretedness – could hardly be taken for ‘community’. Despite the fact that Heidegger says that it is a ‘determinate world’ into which Dasein is thrown, what has been adduced so far about this world as a common world appears as nothing more than an amorphous reservoir of arbitrary possibilities that lacks any determinate form, wholeness, boundaries or content. Yet Heidegger maintains that the character of being-with others undergoes a transformation through Dasein’s resolve to take over its thrownness. This act of resolve – we shall show – culminates in a kind of communication (discourse). Prior to appropriation, being-with exists as a merely implicit whole. It becomes what (or rather ‘who’) it already essentially ‘is’ precisely through this action. To recall, ‘In discourse being-with becomes “explicitly” shared [“ausdrücklich” geteilt]; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been seized hold of and appropriated’ (SZ 162). Genuine community (Gemeinshaft) is a latent possibility of shared being-in-theworld that arises out of the movement of ‘appropriation’ of thrown possibilities. The ‘prior’, ‘implicit’ form of being-with has not been ‘appropriated’ or ‘explicitly shared’. This form was analysed in the treatment of the publicness of das Man. In any case, we here call attention to the fact that Heidegger differentiates between a fallen, everyday mode of being-with others and genuine community. The latter arises out of a transformation – an ‘explication’ – of possibilities that are latent in the former. This peculiar way of understanding human community is central to Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy taken in its ‘broadest sense’, by which we mean to include his concern with the process through which a ‘historical’ people can ‘become’ who it essentially ‘is’.21 One can discern here at least

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a sketch of the alternative presented by Heidegger to the modern liberal understanding of ‘community’ as originating out of the contract of free individuals. The call of conscience makes known to Dasein the thrownness of its relations with others. At the same time, conscience ‘summons’ Dasein to ‘take over’ or appropriate (übernehmen) its thrown existence as a ground over which it does not have power.22 To understand and accept this summons is to ‘will’ to take up this ground, to resolutely hold open (Entschlossenheit) thrown being-in-theworld as a whole over and against the everyday tendency to close off and obfuscate Dasein’s finitude. Dasein in this way ‘comes back’ to itself as it ‘always already was’ – but this means, as it ‘essentially’ (implicitly) was.23 This retrieval of its essence liberates Dasein from the self-obfuscation which defines its existence in the publicness of das Man. This entails that in ‘taking over’ itself as thrown being-with-others, being-with-others is itself modified and disclosed anew. As Heidegger says, Thrown into its ‘there’, every Dasein has been factically submitted to a determinate ‘world’ – its ‘world’. At the same time those factical projections which are closest to it have been guided by its concernful lostness in das Man. To this lostness, one’s own Dasein can appeal, and this appeal can be understood in the way of resoluteness. But in that case this authentic disclosedness modifies with equal primordiality both the way in which the ‘world’ is discovered (and this is founded upon that disclosedness) and the way in which the Dasein-with of others is disclosed. The ‘world’ which is ready-to-hand does not become another one ‘in its content’, nor does the circle of others get exchanged for a new one; but both one’s Being towards the ready-to-hand understandingly and concernfully, and one’s solicitous Being with others, are now determined [bestimmt] from out of their ownmost can-be-a-self. (SZ 297–8; BT 344; emphasis added) It is clear that this modification does not involve an ontic change in the ‘content’ of being-in-the-world – the things or others whom it is with. The modification rather concerns the disclosedness, the ‘how’, i.e., the manifest Being of these beings. The only indication that Heidegger provides here as to what this modification of Mitsein consists in, is that the relations to others are now ‘determined out of’ Dasein’s understanding of its ownmost can-be, i.e., out of death as its ownmost possibility and guilt as the thrownness (‘nullity’) of this can-be. But how does this modify being-with other Dasein? In being-towards death, Dasein experiences its own self not in terms of its present actuality, but as constantly ‘ahead’ of itself, as who it can-be, that is as a possibility. From out of its experience of itself as thrown into existence with others, Dasein’s ownmost self is ‘already’ implicated in Being-with others, it is a self that can express itself as a ‘we’. Therefore if being-with is ‘determined’ out of the ownmost can-be, this means that Dasein experiences its relations to others explicitly as and in terms of a shared future that – as thrown – is also a shared past.24

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It is necessary to point out that in this interpretation the phenomenon of ‘community’ is depicted from the perspective of the individual Dasein, i.e., as a modification in the individual Dasein’s relation with others. The modification of Mitsein takes place through the resoluteness of a Dasein that has been individuated (vereinzelt). As Heidegger says, ‘Resoluteness brings the self right into its current concernful being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes [stösst] it into solicitous being-with the others’ (SZ 298). Insofar as Dasein is ‘always already’ with others, it is clear that this ‘being pushed’ into solicitude is not to be construed in the sense of an individual’s entry into a collective, but as an ‘explicit’ sharing of an existence that was ‘already’ shared, but not seized and appropriated.25 The question still remains as to what the modification of Mitsein involves. It was concluded above that the full sense of Dasein’s thrownness into existence with others encompasses Dasein’s ‘indebtedness’ to Mitdasein (as public-traditional interpretedness) for its possibilities. Accordingly, it is in the interpretation of how possibilities are disclosed when Dasein takes over its thrownness that the phenomenon of Mitdasein as it authentically is (and implicitly has been) comes to sight. In the preceding discussion, human community has shown itself to have an ambiguous status. On the one hand, being-with others is ‘thrown’, both in the sense that Dasein is thrown into existence with others and that for an individual Dasein the ‘community’ itself, in which it exists, is ‘thrown’. On the other hand, shared being-in-the-world only ‘explicitly’, truly and authentically exists when Dasein takes-over its thrownness and thereby ‘determines’ itself in being-with others. Community thus exists proximally for Dasein in an implicit, indeterminate and hidden way. Yet it becomes what it truly is only when seized upon as Dasein’s own possible future. The prior, antecedent existence of community is then disclosed for the first time, as it were, when being-with is taken as something which in a sense does ‘not yet’ exist, i.e., when it is seized as the past of a possible future. The character of ‘having been’ that belongs to being-with as thrown is first determined in the resolute projection upon and disclosure of the possibilities of being-with others. Such possibilities are not then given as present-at-hand prior to and for a subsequent volition. The act of assuming (Übernehmen) thrownness first opens up what ‘has been thrown’. As Heidegger says, ‘One would completely misunderstand the phenomenon of resoluteness if one should want to suppose that this consists simply in taking up possibilities which have been proposed and recommended, and seizing hold of them. The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time’ (SZ 298). The question as to what authentic being-with others consists in (the question of the Being of ‘community’) is worked out through a consideration of resoluteness as such a disclosure of Dasein’s possibilities. For, as has been adduced so far, existence ‘with’ others is not comprehended as an actual presence-at-hand, an aggregation, of individual human beings. The Being of being-with is rather to be understood in terms of common possession of and participation in

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possibilities of existence. ‘Possession’ of possibilities – i.e., Dasein’s way of ‘having’ them – is not construed in the sense that an object that is presentat-hand possesses properties. Rather, possession is a matter of ‘understanding’ and ‘projecting upon’ possibilities. The mode of possession varies according to whether these are determined through authentic resolution as thrown possibilities of finite Dasein or implicitly assumed as given.

Resoluteness and Tradition Dasein always understands itself from out of a given public and traditional interpretation of possibilities, an interpretedness which conceals the thrownness of what is factically possible. The possible is conveyed in a form that is average, leveled and ambiguous. Being-with is here a lostness in the public, a subjection to the rule of das Man. At the same time, however, the public-traditional interpretedness – as something uprooted – is implicitly and originally a ‘heritage’ or ‘inheritance’ (Erbe) that can be disclosed and restored when Dasein takes over its thrownness. The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing from out of the inheritance [Erbe] which it takes over as thrown. The resolute coming-back to thrownness harbors [birgt] a handing-down to oneself of possibilities which have come-over [überkommener Möglichkeiten], but not necessarily as having thus come over. (SZ 383; BT 435) Here, the ‘thrownness’ of possibilities is described more concretely as a ‘coming-over’, Überkommen. This expression should be understood in several senses at once: first as a ‘coming-over’ from the past, from beyond an immediate self; second, as a being ‘overcome’ by something that is beyond one’s power and choice.26 Possibilities ‘come over’, through publicness and tradition, although this transmission is not necessarily recognized as such. ‘Circulating’, as Heidegger says, like coins in a money economy, possibilities are taken for granted in the publicness of everyday existence. The existence of possibilities is not understood to demand Dasein’s participation, resoluteness and seizure. Yet the being-possible of a possibility cannot be separated from the thrownness, finitude and nullity that permeates the Being of the being for which it is a possibility. Something that is possible could always also ‘not’ be. If Dasein ‘takes over’ its thrownness and so understands its being-in-theworld as mortal and thrown, then the following undergo modification: (1) that ‘out of which’ Dasein usually understands itself and its possibilities (the public interpretedness); (2) that which is conveyed through the public discourse (possibilities) and (3) the very manner of being-conveyed (‘coming-over’). Accordingly, through modification: public interpretedness becomes an

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‘inheritance’ (Erbe); the ambiguous, levelled and merely accidental possibilities are restored to being determinate possibilities of Dasein; and a subjection to what simply ‘comes-over’ becomes an active ‘handing down to oneself’ of what has come-over. The character of this transformation in Dasein’s relations (to itself, other Dasein, other beings and the world as a whole) is brought out most clearly in Heidegger’s elaboration upon how possibilities manifest themselves differently through the appropriation of thrownness. All such relations are categorized as ‘possibilities’ (SZ 143). In inauthentic everydayness, the given possibilities have the character of multiplicity and arbitrariness. In taking over thrownness, however, arbitrariness and indeterminateness are transmuted into the necessity of a determinate fate. The more authentically Dasein resolves – and this means that in anticipating death it understands itself unambiguously out of its ownmost distinctive possibility – the more unequivocally [eindeutig] does it choose and find the possibility of its existence, and the less it does so by accident. Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and ‘provisional’ possibility driven out. . . . Once the finitude of existence has been seized, it is snatched back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest – those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly – and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate [Schicksals]. (SZ 384; BT 435; emphasis added) Inauthentic Dasein confronts an ‘endless multiplicity’ (endlos Mannigfaltigkeit) of possibilities. Choice between possibilities is determined solely by the accidental presence of what is available in the publicness of das Man. Dasein is accordingly ‘lost’ and ‘dispersed’ in whatever happens to take place. ‘Everyday Dasein has been dispersed (zerstreut) into the many kinds of things which daily “come to pass”’ (SZ 389). If Dasein always understands itself ‘out of’ its possibilities, and if this is an ‘endless multiplicity’, inauthentic existence is then characterized by a lack of wholeness: ‘So that if it wants to come to itself, it must first pull itself together from the dispersion and disconnectedness of the very things that have “come to pass”’ (SZ 390; BT 441). By way of contrast, the anticipation of death as ownmost possibility not only draws Dasein out of dispersion in the present, but also manifests the ultimate limit of existence. The ‘ownmost distinctive possibility’ is itself the ground of a decision between what is truly Dasein’s own and what is accidental circumstance (SZ 264). Such a decision thereby discloses a simplicity, coherence, wholeness and necessity that are concealed in everydayness. But again, the possibilities which Dasein hands down to itself are drawn from the public tradition (‘interpretedness’) which itself ‘comes over’ (and to which Dasein is ‘thrown’ and ‘delivered over’). Thus these possibilities have been and are the possibilities of other Dasein; they are possibilities that are always shared. ‘Circulating’ in the medium of the public, the possibilities are not Dasein’s

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‘own’. They become Dasein’s own through the act of ‘handing-down’, ‘seizure’ and appropriation. Heidegger likens this to the way in which one assumes ownership of a bequeathed estate. In becoming ‘one’s own’ the shared character of possibilities is not cancelled. Rather, in appropriating common possibilities, the ‘ownership’ becomes, in a sense, common. Dasein’s relation to others, which is always already mediated by implicitly shared possibilities, is determined as Dasein determines itself out of such possibilities. Thus the ‘community’ – a mutual being towards the ‘same’ possibilities – becomes what it essentially is through the authenticity of individual Dasein. Or, in other words, in being authentically historical – by handing-down a heritage of common possibilities (and, at the same time, handing-itself down ‘to’ such a heritage) – the individual Dasein is determined in its Being-with-others. Individual ‘fate’ thus implies communal destiny while, at the same time, communal destiny requires the resoluteness of the individual for its own disclosure and ‘liberation’. If fated Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in being-with others, its happening or historizing [Geschehen] is a mutual [mit-] happening and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the happening of a community [Gemeinschaft], of a Volk. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than being-with-oneanother can be conceived as the occurring together of several subjects. Fates have already been led [geleitet] in advance, in our being-with-one-another in the same world and in our resoluteness for determinate possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic happening of Dasein. (SZ 384; BT 436)

The Historicality of Community The description of fate, community, destiny and Volk is here extremely condensed. In general terms, the whole of Being and Time, as an interpretation of the essential Being of Dasein, intends to explicate Dasein’s essential Being, not in terms of the ontological categories appropriate to beings other than Dasein, ‘things’ in the broadest sense, rather ‘Being’ is to be understood with respect to ‘how’ Dasein ‘is’. Community and people are accordingly conceived as a Geschehen, a happening. ‘Fateful destiny’ describes how community happens: an individual and communal resolute appropriation of (futural) possibilities from a common heritage. Although the familiar ways of understanding the phenomena at issue here are only very briefly and summarily dismissed, it becomes evident that the existential-phenomenological way of conceiving these matters ‘out of’ and as the Being of Dasein itself (which is of course not isolated but essentially open to the Being of other beings) implicitly excludes the predominant ways in which

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communal phenomena are interpreted from both common sense and theoretical perspectives. That the wholeness of the community is not to be understood as aggregation of individual subjects at the same time implies that the Being of the community cannot be truly explained in terms of properties of human nature, human needs or passions which might presumably cause actual individuals to enter into community. The phenomenon of community is thus not accessible when articulated in terms of the Being of beings other than ‘Dasein’. This entails that all anthropological explanations are excluded from the outset. The recognition of the ontological distinctiveness of Dasein implicitly prohibits positing nature or God – i.e., beings other than Dasein – as a lower or higher ground, cause or principle for the Being of communal Dasein. Thus, e.g., Heidegger at one stroke excludes: (1) the modern liberal understanding of community as something formed in order to secure pre-existing (vorhandene) natural rights of individuals through contract;27 (2) the diverse ways of conceiving human communities as cultural expressions of natural or irrational forces (e.g., ‘life’, race, labour power)28 and (3) the traditional ways of comprehending societies according to the model of human technical or natural production of beings. The characterization of the Being of historical community in terms of ‘fateful destiny’ [schicksalhafte Geschick] thus supplants the primacy of categories of natural and technical causality. Yet while the implicit ontological models for understanding history, community, society and politics are silently set aside, Heidegger does not abstain from introducing a guiding metaphor to illustrate the ‘happening of a community, of a Volk’, a figure drawn from the sphere of (premodern) property relations, that of ‘inheritance’. Through fateful destiny, Dasein ‘hands itself down’ into a (communal) possibility that it has inherited and yet has chosen. The movement of history – i.e., the ‘happening’ (Geschehen) of a community – lies precisely in this ‘handing down’ of a ‘legacy’ (Erbe) of possibilities. ‘Erbe’ signifies at once ‘heritage’, ‘legacy’ and ‘estate’. The thrownness of Dasein’s possibilities of Being – which is the thrownness of the possibility of a community or Volk itself – is depicted through the figure of inheritance: what is handed-down as a legacy is precisely something that does not have its origin in the exercise of one’s own power. Inherited property is not acquired when an independent individual transforms raw natural material through his own labour, it is rather ‘handed down’ by ancestors and claimed by virtue of the contingent facticity of birth within a determinate world of being-with others. Moreover, an inheritance, a bequeathed estate for example, is essentially something that can be owned by someone. The Being of an inheritance – like that of ‘possibilities of Being’ – is only as something possibly one’s ‘own’. One possesses an inheritance, not as something permanent (a ‘property’ present-at-hand), but rather in an act of taking-over (Übernehmen), seizure (Ergriffenheit) and ‘handing-down’ (Überlieferung) of what has been handed-down or come-over (Überkommen) from the past. Heidegger’s employment of the figure of inheritance draws on the older sense of a patrimony as something that embodies its

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possessor’s existence. An inherited estate is here strongly identified with who its possessors are – with their ‘essence’. Such a heritage cannot be arbitrarily given away, divided, sold or lost without the loss of the possessor’s own Being. Moreover, the handing-down of a legacy is at once an opening of the future, the determination of the future ‘task’ (Auftrag) for the sake of which Dasein exists. Heidegger says, ‘our task predetermines us out of our dispensation [Sendung]: out of that, which from earlier presences [west] in our essence [Wesen] and as our essence, even if it was also earlier disguised and misinterpreted’ (G38 127; emphasis added). Still, insofar as an inheritance must of necessity be ‘appropriated’ (zueigenen), it is a possession that can not only be acquired (gewonnen) but ‘lost’ as well. That is, every inheritance is finite, its character is constituted in essential reference to the unavoidability of the death of its possessor; insofar as Dasein is mortal, possession cannot be permanent. Property is bequeathed to heirs when the possessor anticipates his own death. The description of Dasein’s possibilities as an inheritable legacy further underscores the fact that Dasein is always being-with others. For the act of handing down and taking-over an estate concerns not only the fate of an individual, but ‘frees’ the ‘destiny’ of a community, a family for instance. However, the correspondence between the common sense idea of inherited property and the historicality of Dasein has its limits; the metaphor is applied in ways that are, in light of the familiar significations, extremely paradoxical, yet for that reason all the more revealing. For instance, Heidegger repeatedly employs the ambiguous phrase ‘Sichüberliefern’, to indicate that Dasein ‘itself’ hands down possibilities to itself (or that Dasein ‘hands itself down’). Of course, in ordinary experience, if someone inherits an estate, it is generally known who bequeaths this legacy. Yet Heidegger’s unusual formulations consistently circumvent the possibility of identifying the legator as anyone other than the Dasein that receives the ‘inheritance’. Dasein is ‘indebted’ for its possibilities (as it is ‘guilty’) but is not thereby factically obliged to determinate others (ancestors) who precede it. In ordinary experience a landowner, in anticipation of his death, takes stock of his possessions and decides what will be handed down and to whom (or, if laws of primogeniture are in place, the decision is already made). By way of contrast, Dasein, in anticipation of death (‘coming towards’ itself as futural, zu-künftig) comes back to itself as what it has been. This ‘coming back’, in turn, ‘harbours’ a handing-down, seizure and determination of the possibilities which have already ‘come over’ through agency of no one (das Man). In ‘handing down’ possibilities to itself, Dasein thus becomes both its own ancestor and its own heir.29 Accordingly, the ‘loyalty’ (Treue) due to the one that bequeaths a legacy (Erbschaft) is accorded to Dasein’s own self; it is a ‘loyalty’ that consists in ‘accepting’, i.e., being true to, its inheritance, its thrownness, and that means giving up illusions of authorship over its own Being (i.e., both illusions of its own authorship, and those of being ‘authored’ through others). According to Heidegger, the proper attitude of the heir is a kind of ‘reverence’. However, reverence is not to be directed towards any presumed cause of

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the legacy, but, paradoxically, to the legacy itself. ‘Resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own Self. As resoluteness which is ready for angst, this loyalty is at the same time a possible way of revering the sole authority which a free existing can have – of revering the repeatable possibilities of existence’ (SZ 391). Heidegger thus reconciles ‘reverence for’ (thus a kind of submission to) the authority of tradition with freedom by conceiving what tradition hands down precisely as retrievable possibilities. What this entails is exemplified in Heidegger’s ‘reverent’ appeals to the great works of philosophy and poetry (and, indeed, in his conception of his own ‘works’). Such legacies are not to be construed as the conveyors of ‘actual’ authoritative teachings to be preserved, followed, criticized or dismissed. They are rather decisive events (Geschehen) of disclosure and concealment (i.e., what ‘happens’ [geschieht] or does not happen) in the history of Dasein’s relation to Being. In other words, the thought and poetry of the past are possible rejoinders to the (historical) manifestness of the whole, a manifestness that becomes experienced and articulated in the form of ‘fundamental questions’ or ‘problems’ that can be repeated.30 Heidegger thus employs the figure of inheritance in a way that obviates reference to past events or to predecessors as being in any way the cause of what is in the present and what will be in the future. Accordingly, over and against the vague common signification of ‘fate’ as an external, governing cause of events, Heidegger interprets fate as Dasein’s own ‘power of projecting itself upon its own being-guilty/indebted’ (i.e., the ‘power’ to ‘hand itself down’ and thus exist ‘fatefully’). This power of projecting rests upon a more radical ‘powerlessness’ (Ohnmacht) in that it can only ‘take-over’ the thrown inheritance of its Being. What Dasein ‘has been’ (which is here included in its Being) is opened up from out of its being towards its futural possibility (death). Yet what is disclosed authentically as ‘having been’ does not have the mode of being of past actuality, but rather ‘repeatable possibility’. Hence Dasein’s predecessors are not the antecedent causes that have ‘effects’ in present circumstances. Predecessors – Dasein that ‘have-been-there’ – are disclosed as, in a sense, anonymous bearers of possibilities.31 When a possibility that has been is handed-down through retrieval, the Dasein that has-been-there [das dagewesene Dasein] is disclosed, not however in order to actualize [verwirklichen] it. The repetition of the possible does not bring again [Wiederbringen] something that is ‘past’, nor does it bind the ‘present’ back to that which has already been ‘surpassed’. The repetition, arising from a resolute self-projection, is not persuaded by the ‘past’, in order that this, as something which formerly was actual, may recur. The repetition rather responds to the possibility of the existence that has been there. But when such a rejoinder is made to this possibility in a resolution, it is made in a moment of vision; and as such it is at the same time the renunciation, of that which in the ‘today’, is working itself out as the ‘past’. The repetition neither abandons itself to that which is past, nor does it aim at a progress. (SZ 385–86; BT 437)

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Here is where the necessity of authentic solicitude and what Heidegger calls leadership comes into to play. ‘Community’ is not created, not grounded in or caused by a natural or supranatural substratum, it is rather ‘set free’, determined and awakened as ‘who’ it ‘already was’. The essential historical Being of community requires the communication of authentic solicitude. Fates have already been led [geleitet] in advance in our being-with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for determinate possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic happening of Dasein. (SZ 384) At this point the relation between individual and communal Dasein begins to become clear. A tradition of interpretation of Heidegger has presumed – on the basis of a neglect of Heidegger’s attention to the phenomena of being-with, authentic solicitude, destiny, and philosophizing as a way of existence – that Being and Time presents a teaching of extreme individualism which, in the 1930s, is abruptly supplanted by a ‘collectivist turn’, in which ‘Dasein’ suddenly becomes the Dasein of a people. In fact, Being and Time shows that Dasein is always both ‘communal’ and ‘individual’; the relation between individual and community is more complex than any ‘individualism’ or ‘collectivism’ would have it. On the one hand, the individual Dasein’s resolute taking of over of thrownness (which, as discussed above, encompasses being-with) reveals the implication of Dasein’s ownmost ‘self’ in the destiny of its people. Fate is ‘led in advance’ by the now disclosed destiny of the Volk. On the other hand, the work of ‘communication and struggle’ on the part of fated Dasein ‘sets free’ – and so in a different sense precedes – the power of communal destiny. To recall, it is through communication that being-with others is appropriated and ‘explicitly shared’ (SZ 162). This historical communication is the way in which authentic solicitude can ‘affect’ the existence of the other Dasein and ‘help it become transparent in its care and become free for it’ (SZ 122). In the context of that earlier statement, authentic solicitude may have seemed to describe simply the relation between individual Dasein(s). Yet if the communication of authentic Dasein awakens or ‘sets free’ the power of destiny – precisely through enabling others to become ‘free for care’ – then the field of solicitude comes to be seen in a more expansive, comprehensive manner, on the order of what in Einleitung is called the ‘duty [Verpflichtung] in our Dasein to take over something like a leadership [Führerschaft] in the current whole of historical being-with-oneanother’ (G27 7). Historical community – as destiny – then precedes and makes possible individual authenticity. At the same time, authentic (individual) Dasein has the decisive task of actualizing the power of communal destiny and does so through a kind of communication. Heidegger highlights the importance of this individual task of leadership in a passage from a 1934 lecture course, i.e., precisely in the context of his so-called collectivist turn: ‘There are things, which

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are essential and decisive for a community [Gemeinschaft], and precisely these things do not grow in community but in the ruling force and solitude of an individual. . . . The future reformation will place us before unusual tasks and force us to find the genuine inner limits [Grenze] of a community. There are things, which are decisive for a communal setting [Lager], but the essential does not first grow in and out of this setting, but before it’ (G38 51). The apparent clarity of this statement on the relation between individual and community conceals the complexities involved in the existential-ontological understanding of being-with-others in its historicality. As we have seen, the Being of the community – understood as its ‘happening’ – is correlated to a resoluteness which determines shared possibilities in a movement of handing-down and repeating. Yet, in this approach, the phenomenon of ‘community’ remains conceptually indeterminate to the extent that the decision as to what possibilities constitute the destiny of a Volk can be disclosed only in the resoluteness of the historical Dasein. The depiction of this resoluteness or happening in terms of the figure of inheritance is implicitly juxtaposed to the traditional understanding of community in terms of antecedent causes. Heidegger thus denies the possibility of truly comprehending the Being of community by reference to fundamental beings or principles that exist outside of Dasein’s inheritance. That community manifests itself truly in the resoluteness of historical Dasein means that it ‘is’ only within a singular people’s resoluteness to Being. But the Being of a people is thereby always open for determination, just as the future is concealed. The resolute openness to one’s own Being thus implicates one in the question: ‘who are we as this people’.32 The community does not ‘happen’, apart from the historical resoluteness of communal Dasein; it comes to be ‘who it (already) is’ in and through this movement. Arising from resoluteness, authentic belonging to community is thus neither simply preordained, nor is it a matter of arbitrary choice; it is rather a unity of necessity and choice in which Dasein ‘chooses’, (adopts as its own) the community in which it ‘finds’ itself.33 But if the determination of the community arises out of the situation of resoluteness, there is no external criterion by which the determination of a community could be theoretically decided in advance. In Being and Time, Heidegger specifies that destiny (as ‘mutual historizing’) designates the ‘happening of the community, of the Volk [das Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes]’ (SZ 385; emphasis added). That Heidegger says ‘the’ community and ‘the’ Volk – rather than ‘a’ community – indicates that what community ‘is’ decides itself in and out of the situation of resolute Dasein rather than from a theoretical overview of many communities and peoples. A community is always then singular and determinate. It should be addressed as ‘this’, ‘the’ or ‘our’ community and Volk. If one interprets the work, Being and Time on its own terms, it presents itself as the self-interpretation and communication ‘of’ historical being-in-the-world. The possibilities of disclosure that are here fulfilled must themselves be, at some level, ‘led in advance’ by the destiny of a community. But the phenomenological method of this self-interpretation – and the formal-indicative concep-

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tual discourse that belongs to it – prohibit any concrete determination of the factic possibilities of existence. The ontological analysis holds back from concrete determination of ‘our historical possibilities’ in order to point out, ‘indicate’, the phenomenon of ‘whence in general Dasein can draw those possibilities upon which it factically projects itself’ (tradition) and, the manner in these are ‘drawn’ (historical resoluteness) (SZ 383). With the formal-indicative conceptuality of fundamental ontology, one can then only indicate or ‘point to’ [anzeigen] the necessity of historical self-determination that happens in the question ‘who are we’; one can only point to the singular community to which that question belongs. Existential analytic itself cannot directly answer that question. To the extent that the community is constituted in the common projection on factic possibilities, the methodological ‘exclusion’ of factic possibilities from the ontological investigation limits what can be thematically presented of these matters. But it should be recognized that such limitations adhere to the special method, discourse and immediate intent of the existential analytic. They do not necessarily constrain all philosophic understanding. Moreover, the fact that such methodological limitations are placed on existential-ontological interpretation does not preclude the necessity that conceptual description be founded in direct experience of the phenomena that they indicate. This suggests that existential-ontological interpretation of Dasein’s authentic way of being-historical is founded upon a ‘situation’ of communalhistorical self-determination. It would seem necessary that the existential interpretation of Dasein ground itself through a ‘clarification’ of both its existential-ontological and existentiell presuppositions. And yet, as we have seen, the formal-indicative character of the interpretation itself imposes a limit upon such clarification.

Leadership in What is Metaphysics? With this problem in view, we will now consider the manner in which Heidegger presents the nature of philosophy after Being and Time. Heidegger here adopts a different procedure, mode of communication and pedagogical approach. These modifications make possible a more complete clarification of the situation of the question of Being. The lecture courses, like Einleitung in die Philosophie, which depart from a clarification of the historical situation, are thus a necessary complement to Being and Time. In these lectures, Heidegger speaks from out of an immediate relation to a determinate ‘community’ of auditors. Moreover, he speaks in terms of factic possibilities of inquiry that are ‘explicitly shared’ through their very communication. Therefore, in a situation where Heidegger speaks from out of an immediate relation to a particular, determinate, historical body of listeners – and speaks in terms of shared factic possibilities of inquiry – the concepts of

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‘community’ and ‘Volk’ are imbued with the kind of concrete meaning that is prohibited in the conceptuality of Being and Time. In Heidegger’s lectures (those from 1928–35 in particular), the exemplary community is that of the university. For instance, at the outset of the lecture What is Metaphysics? Heidegger leads into the problem of the Nothing by awakening a common reflection on the shared destiny of the community: ‘Metaphysical inquiry must be posed as whole and from within the essential position of the Dasein that questions. We are questioning, here and now, for ourselves. Our existence – in the community [Gemeinschaft] of researchers, teachers, and students – is determined by science. What is happening [geschieht] with us, essentially, in the grounds of our existence, when science becomes our passion’ (G9 104 ). The academy is here designated a ‘community’ by virtue of a common determination through the possibility of science. This community becomes thematic here because philosophic inquiry must proceed ‘out of’ the historical situation of the questioner, i.e., from out of the ‘essential position of the Dasein that questions’.34 Inquiry is rooted in the existence of Dasein. This entails that the self-determination of – and self-reflection upon – the Being of Dasein is an essential prerequisite of philosophic questioning. This is the reason why, in Being and Time, the question of Being takes as its point of departure an existential-ontological interpretation of Dasein. However, the formal selfinvestigation presented in the existential analytic presupposes the kind of resolute, existentiell and historical self-determination and questioning that is carried out in Heidegger’s lecture courses. In What is Metaphysics?, on the other hand, the philosophic question about metaphysics proceeds more directly out of the question of an immediate ‘destiny’. Destiny, to recall, designates the ‘mutual happening’ (Mitgeschehen) of the community – a ‘happening’ (Geschehen) which is factically ‘decided’ precisely through a question such as ‘What happens with us . . .?’ (‘Was geschieht mit uns?’). When this question is posed in What is Metaphysics?, the ‘us’ is spoken, not simply as a conventional mode of public address, but to emphatically recall listeners to ‘themselves’, i.e., to summon them to a selfhood that is determined in belonging to this factic historical community. Heidegger’s appeal to ‘this community [Gemeinschaft] of researchers, teachers and students’ refers not to an actual community but to a possibility, i.e., to what the academy ‘can and ought to be’. The essence of the university as a community is grounded in the possibility of science. Yet, at present, science is in actuality uprooted from its ‘essential’ ground. Accordingly, the university presents itself as an assemblage of independent disciplines whose organization reflects something more akin to a liberal ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) than rooted community (Gemeinschaft) – i.e., something that is not itself an original whole, but rather a mere aggregation in which each discipline defines its own purpose independently of the others. As Heidegger says, ‘The fields of the sciences lie far apart. The modes of handling their objects are fundamentally different. This disintegrated multiplicity of disciplines is today meaningfully held together

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only through the technical organization of universities and faculties and through the practical setting of goals in each discipline. The rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has perished’ (G9 104). But, just as the uprooted state of contemporary science coincides with the actual disintegration of the academic community, the possibility and task of recovering the essential rootedness of science is identical to the possibility of establishing an authentic, unified community of researchers, teachers and students. Heidegger sets forth the ‘most proper intention’ of science over and against the fragmented dispersion of fields, methods and disciplines. This presentation serves the pedagogical task of projecting the community of science upon what it can and ought to be. The proper intention concerns a certain disposition towards ‘beings themselves’ (das Seiende selbst): ‘to seek beings themselves in order to make them objects of investigation and to determine their grounds’, or, more simply to ‘approach what is essential in all things’. (G9 104). All human doings are ways of relating to beings, but science, in ‘its most proper intention’, is distinctive among them in that it is a free commitment to the truth of beings. Science, ‘gives the matter itself [die Sache selbst] explicitly and solely the first and last word’. The distinctive rank of science among forms of human conduct lies in that it is a willing ‘submission’ to beings themselves. This submission lies in the commitment to ‘objectivity [Sachlichkeit] in questioning, determining, and grounding’. Such submission and objectivity is, notably, a position of ‘service’ (Dienststellung) to beings themselves; it allows the beings to become manifest in what and how they are, it ‘helps beings to themselves for the first time’ (G9 105).35 Science thus accomplishes a relation to the world which is distinctive. It is not, however, wholly detached from pre-scientific or extra-scientific modes of conduct. Precisely the ‘servile’ position of scientific existence towards the beings (the devotion to truth) grounds ‘the possibility of a proper, although limited, leadership [Führerschaft] in the whole of human existence’ (G9 105). This statement reaffirms the correlation between science – in both its essence and present-day practice – and the human ‘community’ in which it is situated. Yet just how science’s service for the truth of beings makes leadership possible is not expressly stated here.36 The connection pointed out here between the servile objectivity of science and communal leadership however suggests that there could be no leadership in the ‘whole of human existence’ if the knowledge of science were strictly autonomous of extra-scientific existence. The assertion of leadership therefore implies that the truth of beings brought forth through science is of itself something held in common. In Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heidegger elaborates at length upon this unspoken condition of scientific leadership when he addresses the relation between truth – the manifestness of beings – and being-with-one-another: ‘Unconcealment, in which Dasein takes part [teilen] is something essentially communal [Gemeinsames] which belongs to Dasein’ (G27 120). Leadership ‘in the whole of human existence’ points beyond the university to a broader community in which science somehow acts as a guide. The academic

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community is essentially (possibly, though not actually) a shared possession of the possibility of science. Science establishes a distinctive relation to the world if science is unified and understands itself in terms of the commitment to the manifestness (i.e., truth) of beings. Such manifestness itself opens the world to which Dasein belongs – including pre-and extra-scientific Dasein. Science can then occupy a position of leadership because it can explicitly fulfil the orientation to truth that is latent in other spheres of existence. As a ‘community’ the university does not simply ‘depend’ upon a more comprehensive whole of being-with-one-another. Heidegger often dismisses out of hand the prevailing view of philosophy as a part of ‘culture’ (G9 200). On the grounds of its distinctive relation to the world and its possibility for ‘leadership’, the relatively narrow scientific community maintains an exemplary status with regard to the more extensive community in which it belongs. ‘Leadership’, for Heidegger, includes not only the authentic solicitude that one individual has for others, but the possible leadership that a distinctive ‘community’ as a whole may exercise within a more comprehensive whole. The relation between the scientific community and the more comprehensive ‘whole of human existence’ led by science is pointed out, indirectly, where the guiding question, ‘what happens to us when science has become our passion’ is answered through the suggestion that the relation to the world borne by science is to be understood as a ‘happening’, an event through which beings emerge in their Being: ‘Man – a being among others – “drives [treibt] science”. In this “drive” there happens nothing less than the irruption or entry [Einbruch] of a being, called man, into the whole of the beings, so indeed, that in and through this irruption, the being breaks-out [aufbricht] in what and how it is. The breakingout that breaks-in, in its ways, helps the beings to themselves for the first time’ (G9 105; cf. KPM 221). Beings themselves, in their Being, thus need man, so to speak, to pose the question of what and how they are in order for them to be in truth as they are.37 Moreover, since ‘man’ is included as one being among others, it is through the leadership of science that man himself becomes what and how he essentially is; this is the way in which the ‘position of service’ of science towards beings themselves grounds the possibility of leadership.38 Yet this intelligibility of beings (i.e., truth as aletheia) is a violent occurrence, a ‘happening’ or ‘historizing’ of man and not a permanent character of beings themselves. As an event, it proceeds from out of a prior relation to the world in the ‘whole of human existence’. In the Rectoral Address, Heidegger returns to describe this aufbrechende Einbruch and thereby to clarify precisely that ‘out of which’ man rises in order to ‘enter’, as it were, the whole for the first time. Heidegger claims that the ‘inception of our spiritual-historical Dasein’ is ‘the out-break [Aufbruch] of Greek philosophy. There western man stands up out of a people [Volkstum], by virtue of his language, against the being in the whole and interrogates and conceives it as the being that it is. All science is philosophy, whether it knows and wills it, or not. All science remains bound to that inception of philosophy’ (SU 11).

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In Being and Time, ‘destiny’ was called the ‘happening of a community, of a Volk [Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes]’. The exemplification of these concepts in What is Metaphysics? and the Rectoral Address allow us to clear up the uncertain relation between community and Volk. ‘Community’ – as in the ‘community of researches, teachers and students’ – is a whole of Being-with grounded in a shared possibility, while a Volk is the site in which and out of which the possibility is seized. With the factical, existentiell question about ‘ourselves’ – as in ‘what happens to us when science has become our passion?’ or ‘who are we?’ or ‘what is man?’ – Dasein’s authentic self-understanding can be concomitantly determined on different planes: as individual, community and Volk. If a Volk encompasses that more extensive ‘whole of human existence’ in which science essentially possesses the possibility of leadership, then the community of science exists at once ‘out of’ a people and yet in some sense ‘for’ it as well. When Heidegger locates the inception of ‘our’ – that is the German – spiritual-historical Dasein in Greek philosophy and thus Greek ‘Volkstum’, the destiny of the German Volk then belongs to an even more comprehensive communal whole, that of Europe – which itself belongs to the West (das Abendland). In his lectures Heidegger discloses for his immediate listeners their common belonging to a communal historical whole – whether that be on the level of the university community, the German people, Europe or the West. Such a disclosure is an instance of the ‘communication and struggle’ in which ‘the power of destiny’ – i.e., the Being of the community and people – is ‘set free’ (SZ 384). The immediate task of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy – freeing the possibility of philosophy for the immediate circle of ‘listeners’ – thus at once implies an assumption of responsibility for a successively more comprehensive historical whole: the university, the German Volk, the West. Philosophic pedagogy and authentic solicitude thus unfold into spiritual-historical leadership. This could only be the case, however, if Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy works from out of the ‘centre’ of these spheres of existence: the question of Being must be central to science; science must be central to the university; the university must central to the German Volk and the German Volk must be the spiritual centre of the West (as the heir of the Greeks). Man’s essential position ‘in the middle of beings as a whole’ thereby receives historical determination.39 For example, Heidegger first proposes to take over from the Greeks the meaning of science as the ‘innermost determining center [Mitte] of the whole national-political [volklich-staatlich] Dasein’ (SU 12). Second, the German Volk is both geographically and metaphysically the ‘centre’ of the West. As Heidegger says, ‘We lie in pincers. Our Volk, standing in the center, experiences the sharpest pressure, and is in all that the metaphysical Volk. . . . If the great decision over Europe should not fall on the way of annihilation, then it can only fall through the unfolding of new historical spiritual forces out of the center [Mitte]’ (G27 29). Through his philosophic pedagogy, Heidegger thus intends to liberate the ‘powers of destiny’, i.e., the historical, communal forces of students, the

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university, the Volk, Europe and the West from out of his own individual historical fate to stand in the ‘centre’ of all of these mutually implicated spheres of being-with-one-another. And yet while the more comprehensive spheres of common existence are implied in the narrower, Heidegger preserves an articulation between them and indicates that they do not co-exist without conflict between them. As Heidegger indicated in Being and Time, the mutual happening of a community is set free not through communication alone, but ‘communication and struggle’ (Kampf ) (SZ 384). The grounds of this ‘struggle’ lie in the fundamental tension within Dasein between the tendency to obfuscate its thrownness and the call to resolute appropriation of its thrown situation. When Heidegger speaks of a communal whole (a ‘whole of historical being-with-one-another’), this means neither an aggregation of individual components nor a homogeneous order. For example, in the Rectoral Address the university is described as ‘community of struggle’ (Kampfgemeinschaft): there is an opposition between the will of the body of teachers and that of the students; between leaders and followers; between leading and following itself – ‘Every following carries resistance [Widerstand] within itself. This essential opposition in leading and following is neither to be wished away, nor extinguished. The struggle alone holds the opposition open’ (SU 19).

Epilogue

On the basis of the considerations of the preceding chapters, it may now be possible to broach the question as to how we should assess Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. The task of assessment is not an easy one. The difficulty here does not primarily stem from incompleteness in exposition or insufficient familiarly with what Heidegger has written. Rather, the difficulty lies in the fact that Heidegger’s pedagogy – in its necessity, possibility, character and method – is inseparable from the problem Being itself. We can only briefly here recall how this is the case. The need for philosophic pedagogy arises from the fact that the phenomenon of ‘Being’, while universally ‘understood’, yet always eludes one’s ability to comprehend it, to determine what it means. More precisely, the need here arises from our inherent inability to experience this lack of comprehension as something problematic. The latter involves not only a failure to recognize the importance of a philosophic question, but the difficulty of living in steady awareness of the questionability of Being. This means, also, the questionability of one’s own Being; thus it means to live within a mystery one is naturally inclined to flee. In addition, the ‘need’ for philosophic pedagogy is not only necessary for ‘students’ but is a ‘need’ of Being itself. Being ‘needs’ man for its self-disclosure. Philosophy, for Heidegger, accomplishes this disclosure. Therefore the ‘introduction’ to philosophy, the awakening of this possibility, serves the need of Being. The possibility of education here lies in the essence of Dasein’s Being itself: Dasein is the being that is by virtue of its understanding-of-Being. This prior understanding can itself become questionable. Moreover, according to Heidegger, Being manifests (and conceals) itself for Dasein historically. Thus the possibility of becoming awake to the questionability of Being is essentially related to a situation within the history of the manifestness of the whole. The very capacities demanded of the student are modes of comportment to the manifestness of beings as a whole. Such capacities are thus not to be construed psychologically or anthropologically, but as, at once, metaphysical and historical. The character and method of Heidegger’s pedagogy are also correlated to the manner in which the guiding subject matter becomes accessible. If, as Heidegger maintains, Being manifests itself as something questionable through ‘fundamental attunement’, then the pedagogical task assumes the form of awakening of this attunement.

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To carry out a wholly adequate assessment is then difficult because it would require that one has entered. Such mastery seems to have eluded Heidegger himself. Our main intention in embarking on this study was simply to gain clarity about the conditions of initial entry to the question of Being. Groundless claims to competence in these matters would only defeat our own basic intention. That said, a brief overview of the course of Heidegger’s pedagogy between 1926 and 1935 may offer something like an internal criterion for a provisional assessment. In lecture courses given between 1927 and 1930, Heidegger takes up a ‘pedagogical’ problem that Being and Time seems to leave standing. The investigation of Being and Time and the question of Being presuppose (are ‘rooted in’) a ‘fundamental experience’. But what does that experience consist in and how is it possible? That is the same as asking: how can one enter and participate in the inquiry? The lecture courses from 1927–1930 – especially Einleitung in die Philosophie, Einführung in das Akademischen Studium and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik – address this issue on two levels, theoretical and practical. First, Heidegger thematically develops what an ‘introduction to philosophy’ requires. Second, the philosophic lecture is carried out as the preparation of students for a ‘living philosophizing’, i.e., as a task of leading-into the requisite experience. Our exposition was repeatedly drawn into a consideration of Heidegger’s speeches and writings from the period of his rectorate because these texts reveal a development of the pedagogical problem in a direction that is consistent with the lecture courses of preceding years. On the one hand, the Rectoral Address and contemporaneous speeches contain Heidegger’s most direct statements on education, the university, teaching, learning and what is intrinsically demanded of the student. On the other hand, Heidegger here explicitly assumes in practice the ‘duty’ to spiritual ‘leadership’ that was spoken about in 1928, in Einleitung in die Philosophie. The depth of Heidegger’s concern with education at this time suggests that he continued to adhere to Count York’s statement that ‘the practical aim of our standpoint is pedagogical in the broadest and deepest sense of the word’ (SZ 402). The pedagogical intention however becomes indistinguishable from the aims of Heidegger’s leadership of the university. What were Heidegger’s intentions in assuming leadership of the university? In 1945, Heidegger summarized the considerations that grounded his decision. What determined me as a whole towards assuming the rectorate is something threefold: 1. I then saw, in the movement coming to power, the possibility for an inner gathering and renewal of the Volk and a way for it to find its historical-Western determination. I believed that in renewing itself, the university could be called upon to cooperate in the inner gathering of the Volk in an authoritative way.

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Heidegger further reaffirms that the necessity of ‘renewal’ and ‘reflection’ arose from insight into the historical situation of the West, referring in particular to what he learned by thinking through Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter in conjunction with Nietzsche’s teaching about the death of God. This account suggests that Heidegger’s perspective on the historical situation remained consistent between 1930 and the late 1940s while his understanding of the history of the West underwent a process of deepening. In particular, Heidegger came to see the totalizing, planetary scope of nihilism. Heidegger says, ‘What Ernst Jünger thought in the ideas [Gedanken] of Herrschaft and Gestalt, and what is seen in the light of these ideas, is the universal dominance of the will to power inside of history viewed globally [planetarisch]. Today everything, whether it is called communism or fascism or world-democracy stands in this actuality’ (SU 24–25). In defence of his rectorate, from the standpoint of 1945, Heidegger asks whether the historical situation itself did not present sufficient ground and need (Not) ‘to attempt, amongst us Germans, to awaken [erwecken] and lead into [ins Feld führen] that site for reflection on the spirit of the West, that site which held as the seat for the cultivation of knowledge – i.e., the German university?’ (SU 25). In this retrospective account of the deepest intentions underlying his rectorate, one can discern the reiteration of several points that have, in this study, been found to belong Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy generally. (1) A perspective is opened upon the hidden grounds of the historical situation of the West as a whole. (2) An experience of this situation of itself opens the ‘need’ (Not) for fundamental self-reflection on the history of the West from its origin. This history begins in original metaphysical questioning and it culminates in a comprehensive determination of ‘what is’ as the universal dominance of the will to power. Therefore, the necessary reflection takes the form of a renewal of the question of Being. (3) The situation also opens the possibility and need for the ‘inner gathering’ and ‘renewal’ of the German people. The main difficulty here lies in understanding how the renewal of a people occurs in conjunction with both the experience of the historical situation and the awakening of fundamental questioning. (4) On the basis of our study of Heidegger’s pedagogy, the peculiar manner in which Heidegger characterizes what he intended to accomplish may seem familiar. Heidegger claims to have perceived in events and in conditions (of the university, the German Volk, the West) latent ‘possibilities’ and ‘enabling forces’. Accordingly his efforts were directed at ‘awakening’, ‘strengthening’ and ‘renewing’ these implicit possibilities.

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This last point requires elaboration. Our examination of Heidegger’s pedagogy has again and again brought before us a new and primordial way of conceiving human existence. For this reason, perhaps, our study may incidentally be of assistance in the attempt to understand Heidegger’s ‘politics’. Heidegger does not refer to a permanent human nature endowed with fixed needs, desires, passions and intellectual faculties. Nor are the necessary tasks understood as ideal ends projected by human reason. Nor does Heidegger fall back on ‘history’ construed in the fashion of positivism (i.e., without reference to the whole of beings in which human beings exist). To be sure, a clear understanding of the implications of Heidegger’s conception of human existence still eludes us. Our study of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy is therefore more of an exposition of the paradoxes that arise from Heidegger’s discourse on human beings than an explanation. Here we have tried to make headway by focusing upon how Heidegger tries to introduce the exemplary ‘possibility’ of human existence – philosophic questioning. In Heidegger’s treatment, this ‘possibility’ is ambiguous. It is ‘essential’ to Dasein as the being which understands Being. This possibility is ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it concerns and even determines man’s relation to manifestness of the whole of beings. It is ‘historical’ in that it is conveyed by tradition and determined out of a particular situation. Therefore the ‘possibility’ of philosophizing cannot be understood in isolation from the ‘essence’ of man, from Being, from the whole of beings or from the history of the manifestness of the whole. On the basis of this overview of the relation between Heidegger’s pedagogy and his rectoral intentions, certain difficulties arise. First, the projected aims of rectoral leadership during this period were not fulfilled. Indeed they appear to have issued in the very catastrophe that Heidegger predicted would accompany the failure of this attempt. At the conclusion of his Rectoral Address, Heidegger warned: ‘But no will ask, whether we will or do not will [the essence of the German University], when the spiritual force of the West fails and this cracks up in its joints, when the moribund semblance of culture collapses from within and all forces are dragged into confusion and suffocate in madness’ (SU 19). Second, there is a glaring contrast between, on the one hand, the insistence – characteristic of Heidegger’s the lectures of the late 1920s – that a living philosophizing can and ought to break out in ‘our Dasein, here and now’, and, on the other hand, Heidegger’s acknowledgement, in the 1950s, that the fundamental question has not yet been experienced by his contemporaries: ‘the characteristic feature of our destiny is the fact that the question of Being, which I pose, has not been understood yet’ (G27 6; SG 83). These observations suggest that Heidegger’s pedagogy was a failure – at least during the period which this study has focused upon. We cannot know for certain how, in subsequent years, Heidegger came to view the philosophical-pedagogical attempt at introduction broached in lectures like Einleitung in die Philosophie or Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Yet he

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clearly did comment upon his rectorate. If, through his rectorate, Heidegger carried out the pedagogical intentions of those earlier lectures, a consideration of the evident failings of the rectoral program may shed light on possible defects in his philosophic pedagogy. Any comprehensive treatment of the reasons why Heidegger’s intentions during his rectorate were thwarted goes far beyond the scope of this study. We can only concentrate on a few points that seem especially important. In subsequent remarks (in 1945) on his aims during his rectorate, Heidegger seems to admit that he had, in 1933, failed to recognize the impossibility of renewing science by restoring it to its original essence. The case of the rectorate of 1933/34, although for itself insignificant, is indeed a sign for the metaphysical and essential condition of science, which can no longer be determined through attempts at renewal and held up in its essential change into pure technology. I first learned that in the following years. . . . The rectorate was an attempt to look beyond the inadequacies and baseness of the ‘movement’ that had come to power and to see in it what was most far-reaching, i.e., what could perhaps one day bring a gathering [Sammlung] to the Western historical essence of the Germans. It should in no way be denied that I at that time believed in such possibilities and committed an act of betrayal before the most proper calling of thinking for the sake of an official effect. (SU 39) The point of departure for Heidegger’s pedagogy in lectures like Einleitung in die Philosophie, and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik was the fact that ‘our’ existence is ‘determined by the power of science’ (G27 8). Heidegger attempted to lead students back into an experience of the fundamental philosophic problems that lie in the essential origins of science. This implied a certain transformation of scientific existence. The reassessment of this possibility of renewing science thus has implications for Heidegger’s pedagogy. It bears upon Heidegger’s pedagogy further because the attempt to retrieve the essence of science was an integral element of a project that involved other far-reaching aims connected with Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy: the freeing of the destiny of the German people through ‘communication and struggle’; the ‘restoration’ of the rootedness of the Germans in their history. One is thus led to consider whether Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy (including that of the late 1920s) was not based upon other assumptions about what was ‘possible’ which, from a retrospective standpoint, came to be seen as what were in fact not truly possible. One is forced to consider whether mistaken assumptions lie at the basis, not only of Heidegger’s rectoral project, but also the failure of the attempt to awaken a living questioning of Being. Perhaps the following assumptions, discussed in preceding chapters of this study, were in some way mistaken: (1) the assumption that philosophy ‘belongs to the essence of man’; (2) the assumption that the student, by virtue of a special historical destiny and situation is potentially receptive to the ‘fundamental experience’ of

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philosophizing – that the student bears within himself the capacity to live in ‘exposedness’ to the whole of Being and (3) the assumption that a human ‘community’ can be founded upon (or through) philosophic questioning. From the standpoint of the tradition, it seems possible that a community could be established on the basis of teachings about the whole of beings (metaphysics), i.e., that human orders may presuppose answers to the question ‘what is the being as such as a whole’. But the prospect of a community that is maintained in the experience of the questionability of Being seems to be unprecedented. (4) And, lastly, there is the assumption that the dictatorship of the public (the phenomenon discussed in Being and Time that anticipates Heidegger’s later conception of technology), once it has uprooted Dasein, still leaves open the possibility of a recovery of what has been lost. Heidegger’s unexplained assertion, from 1931, is open to doubt: that because the rootedness of Dasein’s ‘can be destroyed, it can for that reason also be saved and regained’ (G34 210). However that may be, it should be noted that from the perspective of 1945, Heidegger did not come to believe that his earlier rectoral project rested upon completely mistaken assumptions about what was then possible. Heidegger writes in his assessment of his rectoral project: ‘The different assessments of this rectorate within the horizon of an ordinary academic affair may be in their own ways correct and even in the right, but they never reach the essential matter. Even today, though less than at that time [noch weniger als damals], there exists the possibility of opening blinded eyes for the perspective of what is essential [dieses Wesentlichen]’1 (SU 39; emphasis added). In 1945 Heidegger thus maintains that the basic ‘possibility’ of ‘opening blinded eyes’ – i.e., what we have described as a pedagogical task – was indeed a genuine ‘possibility’ in his earlier rectorate and, by implication, his earlier pedagogy. Moreover, even after his withdrawal from the rectorate, Heidegger continued to maintain that there was an inner relation between philosophic inquiry and teaching. In 1945, Heidegger described the implications of his withdrawal from the rectorate for his own work. From 1934 on, I lived outside the university to the extent that I no longer troubled myself about its ‘proceedings’, but rather attempted merely to fulfill the most needful teaching duty [das Nötigste der Lehrverpflichtung] according to my powers. But in the following years, teaching was more a self-conversation of essential thinking with itself. Perhaps, here and there, men were affected and awakened [getroffen und geweckt], but it did not develop into a nascent structure of a determinate mode of conduct, from which something originary could have again sprung [aber es gestaltete sich nicht in ein werdendes Gefüge eines bestimmten Verhaltens, dem selbst wieder Ursprüngliches hätte entspringen können]. (SU 38–39) After his rectorate, then, Heidegger’s teaching still aimed at the emergence of the ‘originary’ through an ‘awakening’ – and this in accordance with what he continued to understand as his ‘duty’. But this task proved difficult for a suspect

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professor in the Third Reich. Still, Heidegger does not indicate that his pedagogical endeavours fell short of their aims because of the external constraints imposed upon his work under political despotism. Prevailing political systems order man’s relations to all beings as a totality. But in doing so, such orders only reinforce the oblivion of Being that arises not from human shortcomings, but from out of Being itself. The forces determining the present situation – those which obviate the questionability of Being – are metaphysically grounded in the history of Being. The imperviousness of science to renewal is only one important consequence of this destiny. Heidegger’s pedagogy intends to prepare a ‘complete transformation of Dasein’. There remains a stark contrast between such expressed aims and the modest ‘results’ (as suggested in the statement that nothing ‘originary’ emerged from his efforts). But ‘success’ and ‘failure’ may not be suitable criteria for assessment. Heidegger’s pedagogical efforts seem ultimately to result in a deepened awareness of the world as darkened by oblivion of Being; an oblivion, one must add, that is reinforced by efforts to overcome it, efforts that implicitly or explicitly conceive man to be responsible for nihilism. Thus even where Heidegger falls short of the more far-reaching pedagogical aims, the clarity that results precisely from such a ‘failure’ may constitute a necessary step ‘towards’ the question of Being.

Notes

Introduction 1

2

For Heidegger’s extensive interpretation of the Greek sense of theory and practice, see G27 167–184. Heidegger maintains that, ‘The everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one which Dasein has grown into in the first place, with never a possibility of extrication. In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting and communication, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed’ (SZ 169; BT 213). Accordingly, a philosophic-ontological interpretation that truly discloses Dasein’s Being is necessarily ‘violent’ because it is at root a manner in which Dasein interprets its own self, a ‘self’ which always moves within a given, developed, ‘everyday’ self-interpretation which tends to conceal the very phenomena that philosophy attempts to explicate. ‘Dasein’s kind of Being thus demands that any ontological interpretation which sets itself the goal of exhibiting the phenomena in their primordiality, should capture the Being of this being, in spite of this being’s own tendency to cover things up. Existential analysis, therefore, has the character of constantly doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness’ (SZ 311; BT 359). The ‘demand’ spoken of here first appears to be simply a methodological requirement. This statement articulates how a general methodological rule that constrains all philosophic and scientific investigation applies in the case of the interpretation of Dasein. Heidegger elsewhere formulates this general directive in the following way: ‘The subject matter [Sachgehalt] and the kind of Being of a being prescribe the appropriate possible manifestness (truth) . . . The openness, which belongs to every being according to its subject matter and according to its own ways of Being, prescribes the specifically determinate, possible and appropriate ways of access to the beings that are to be apprehended’ (G29/30 135). The peculiar kind-of-Being (Seinsart) of any being itself thus ‘prescribes’ and ‘demands’ the approach and the way of dealing with it that the knower of that being must assume. When the being at issue in the interpretation is human Dasein, i.e., when that which interprets and that which is to be interpreted are one and the same thing, the methodological demand at issue here is self-reflexive. In the interpretation of human Dasein, the knower

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submits to a ‘demand’ that springs from the Being of human Dasein, i.e., not from something external, but from his own existence. At the same time, this demand entails that he must oppose the characteristic ways in which the being under consideration is concealed, a tendency towards concealment that likewise inheres in the interpreter’s very own existence. What at first may have appeared to be merely a methodological rule of interpretation thus now appears to consist of a practical imperative – indeed one that reminds us in certain respects of the Kantian moral imperative in that it at once comes out of human Dasein and also necessitates an opposition to a fundamental tendency (Seinstendenz) of human Being. The examination of the source of Being and Time’s methodological demand to disclose Being in spite of the tendency toward concealment that governs inauthentic everydayness leads one back to the interpretation of the call of conscience as a ‘demand’ (Forderung) that initiates the movement against fallenness. After Being and Time, the obscure necessity that calls for philosophic inquiry and interpretation is no longer located in the phenomenon of conscience. Below, we shall take up more extensively how, in 1929, what Heidegger calls the fundamental ‘need’ (Not) is understood to issue out of beings as a whole and how, in writings of the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger attributes this need to Being itself so that Being ‘needs’ and claims of man a site for disclosure which is opened precisely through the activity of philosophic thinking. The statement quoted above on what the ‘kind-of-Being’ (Seinsart) of Dasein ‘demands’ from the philosophic interpreter brings out something essential to the investigation of Being and Time (and for philosophy generally): ‘method’ is not an arbitrary technique that could readily be exchanged for another but rather, in accord with the original Greek meaning of methodos, the way in which Dasein ‘goes towards’, ‘gains access to’ (Zu-gangsart) and relates to the matters in question (see here SZ 27, 35). Heidegger’s method thus claims to be rooted in the constitution of Dasein’s Being. The method is also not a mere instrument of philosophy but philosophizing itself. ‘Methodological’ considerations found in Heidegger’s work are especially revealing insofar as they help us understand both the relation of Dasein to Being and philosophy as the fulfilment of this relation. ‘Pedagogy’, is derived from the Greek words ‘pais’, child and ‘ago- ’, to lead; the word thus literally refers to a mode of ‘leadership’. That ‘pedagogy’ is commonly understood to mean the art of educating others while ‘leadership’ has far broader connotations extending into the political realm is to be noted, for, as will be argued, the educational problem of introducing others to philosophy itself unfolds into a comprehensive activity of ‘spiritual leadership’, as Heidegger calls it, first in Einleitung in die Philosophie (1928), later in the Rectoral Address (1933). In the interpretation of these lectures, we frequently turn to Being and Time (1927). The latter is also the main text under consideration in Chapter 4. Heidegger’s 1933 Rectoral Address, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität, is treated at length in Chapter 3. In addition, the following lectures and speeches figure prominently in this study: ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ (1929), ‘Einführung in das akademische Studium’(1929), ‘Deutsche Studenten!’ (1933) and ‘Gedenkworte zu Schlageter’ (1933). In the elaboration of our topic, we have occasion to turn to two other lecture courses: Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935) and Grundfragen der Philosophie (1936/37). The 1945 essay, Die seingeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus, is drawn upon in Chapter 3.

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This phrase is employed in a 1929 lecture on Hegel. Heidegger focuses upon the difficulty that inheres in Hegel’s system of ‘beginning’ with the absolute (G28 223–30). This discussion suggests at once correspondences with the problem of beginning the questioning of Being, as well as Heidegger’s understanding of the difficulties in Hegel on this issue. According to Heidegger, Hegel overlooks the necessarily finite, existentiell character of questioning and the beginning of questioning in the resoluteness of Dasein. Against Hegelian absolute science, Heidegger contrasts his own questioning as the ‘finite position’ and suggests that the difference between them hinges on the extent to which the problem of the beginning is recognized as such. ‘The problem of the beginning . . . has a greater sharpness for the finite position than it does for Hegel. For us the problem of the beginning is a problem of existence’ (G28 343–45). See SZ 228: ‘The most primordial “presupposing” lies in the constitution-of-Being of Dasein as Care, in being-ahead-of-itself. Because this self-presupposing belongs to the Being of the Dasein, “we” must also presupposes “ourselves”, as determined through disclosedness’. See here G9 40. Heidegger makes this clear in his introductory statement on the necessity that the question of the meaning of Being first thematizes the Being of man. The inquiry into Being needs to be ‘transparent’ to itself and this requires clarity about all the comportments (such as understanding and questioning) involved here. But these are evidently ‘modes of a Being’ of a being – i.e., the questioner, the being that we ourselves are (see SZ 7). Of course, significant parts of Being and Time were presented in lectures prior to its publication and a large part of the planned but unpublished portions were likewise delivered in Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1927). But the lecture courses prior to Being and Time do not evince the pedagogical intent and method that are characteristic of later works (or, more cautiously, at least not to the same extent). Yet important aspects of the method itself remain unclarified in Being and Time, particularly the understanding of philosophic concepts as ‘formal-indicative’ which is first laid out in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929/1930). We shall examine two such lectures, Einleitung in die Philosophie (G27) and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (G29/30) at length below. Yet one must here be on guard against drawing conclusions from this initial impression. That the immediate intention and method of the existentialontological interpretation of the historicality of Dasein’s Being do not permit a concrete exposition of the factic situation of the inquiry as a whole in no way forecloses the probability that Heidegger already here understands the interpretation to be rooted in the unique historical destiny of the Germans and of the West. For already in the Introduction of Being and Time, Heidegger says that if a view for the essential historicality of Dasein is opened in philosophic questioning, an insight into the historicality of the questioning after Being is ‘unavoidable’ (SZ 20). ‘Das Seiende im Ganzen’, the designation of the new theme, is a phrase that is inherently ambiguous as regards whether ‘das Seiende’ is singular, plural or neutral in this respect, and whether ‘im Ganzen’ signifies ‘in’ or ‘as’, ‘a’ or ‘the’, whole. English translators seem to have generally settled on the translation

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‘beings as a whole’. Here, I employ various translations as fit the context: ‘beings as a whole’, ‘the whole of beings’, ‘the being as a whole’ or occasionally simply ‘the whole’. In all cases the translation is simply an index for ‘das Seiende im Ganzen’, one that unavoidably obscures part of the manifold sense of the German. For example, the convention of translating ‘im Ganzen’ with ‘as a whole’ tends to conceal the fact that ‘das Seiende’ at issue here refers to, along with all other kinds of beings, ‘man’ as a being which is ‘comprehensively included’ in (inbegriffen) this whole in a way that is distinct from other beings (G29/30 513; cf. here also Heidegger’s interpretation of the word ‘in’ at SZ 54). To explain what the concept means is a task that would require entry into the new problematic itself as it unfolds in the works that follow. To avoid misunderstanding from the outset, however, a brief remark about the sense of ‘im Ganzen’ may suffice. In addressing ‘beings as a whole’, the ‘as a whole’ does not mean the total aggregate of beings but intends the way in which they are manifest prior to articulation and predication. Heidegger clarifies this distinction by calling attention to the fact that, in every comportment of Dasein towards beings, beings are always already manifest ‘in a unity of the “whole”, if only in a shadowy way’ (G9 7); however, as a finite being, Dasein can never comprehend all beings in themselves (a capacity attributed to the divine intellect in traditional metaphysics). For a very helpful discussion of this distinction between the whole as something manifest to finite Dasein (Heidegger’s position) and the ‘whole’ as knowable by divine intellect (a guiding idea of theoretical metaphysics), see F. A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) 28–32. Heidegger’s most direct treatment of the sense of the ‘im Ganzen’ (with a view to the concept of ‘world’) is presented in G29/30 410–413, 501, 498–528. While the problematic of wholeness initially appears in Being and Time as a question of ‘ontological’ possibility, i.e., of how it is possible to ‘conceive’ an ‘open-ended’ being like Dasein in its totality, it eventually becomes clear that this is more than a theoretical difficulty, ‘arising from the endeavor to have the whole of Dasein completely “given”. The question of Dasein’s wholeness . . . has its justification, but only because the ground for that justification goes back to an ontic possibility of Dasein’ (SZ 309; BT 357). In Being and Time Heidegger moves from the demonstration of the capacityfor-being-whole (Ganzseinkönnen) to seek its possibility in the ‘temporality of Dasein’. Heidegger here opposes the common identification of what it means ‘to be’ with ‘to be (temporally) present’. According to this common conception, anything that is not present ‘now’ – anything that ‘has been’ and anything merely possible – has an inferior status and cannot be said to ‘be’ truly. For Heidegger this traditional conception of Being in relation to time is completely inadequate to a being like Dasein, the very Being of which implies that it at once ‘has been’ and is directed towards a possibility that ‘will be’. The ‘synthesis’ that is implicit in Dasein’s capacity-for-being-whole lies in the process of temporalization through which the temporal ecstaces of having-been, present and future originate. The explication of the temporality of Dasein intends not only to ground the possibility of Dasein to exist as a ‘whole’, but also to demonstrate the existentialontological unity of Dasein’s Being as one that evinces an articulation of structural characteristics such as: being-already-in-the world and being-ahead-of-itself, thrownness and existentiality.

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See also EM 32: ‘For the initial questioning of the fundamental question everything depends upon our being able to draw the decisive fundamental position [Grundstellung] and gain and secure the disposition [Haltung] essential here for its preparatory question [Vor-Frage, the question of Being]. For that reason we bring the question after Being into connection with the fate of Europe, in which the fate of the earth will be decided, whereas for Europe our own historical Dasein proves itself to be the center.’ It is not merely in the introductory chapter of Introduction to Metaphysics that the question of the historical-political situation of Europe is raised in the context of the pedagogical problem of ‘bringing philosophy underway in our Dasein’. In the Rectoral Address, the self-assertion of the German university requires the subordination of the work of the sciences and the mission of the university to the common will to science ‘in the sense of the questioning, unsheltered standing firm in the midst of the uncertainty of the being as a whole’ (SU 14). At the very least, it thus becomes clear that Heidegger’s discourse on the historical-political situation of this introduction cannot be taken out of this context. At stake in such discourse, Heidegger insists, is not an interest in ‘taking positions on current political affairs’ [keine tagespolitische Stellungnahme]’, but rather the ‘awakening of a primordial knowing’ (G38 122). Nietzsche, e.g., asserted that ‘authentic [eigentliche] philosophers are commanders and lawgivers’ for ‘they first determine the whereto and whither of man’ (Jenseits Gut und Böse #211 (Nietzsche, Werke in Zwei Bänden, Bd. II, München, Hanser Verlag: 1967), 211). Kant understood his enterprise to consist not only in the apprehension of the transcendental conditions for the consistent fulfilment of reason’s striving for totality in theory and practice, but also in the ‘legislation’ of these conditions and their supreme ordering principle as the foundation for a rational culture of humanity (see R. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), especially pp. 17–43, 145–63). Velkley’s work is particularly important for our topic because it investigates modern philosophy’s assumption of leadership in human affairs. In this respect it shows how the projects of Rousseau and Kant emerge through a reflection upon problems perceived to inhere in the earlier modern philosophic-political foundations. Secondly, through a reading of Kant and Rousseau, Velkley’s study uncovers the sources for German Idealism’s claim to possess a ‘comprehensive responsibility for human welfare’(xiv). Fichte’s claim that the philosopher (scholar) is the ‘educator of mankind’ is presented with a forthrightness unrivalled in the tradition in the Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (Fichte, Gesammtausgabe VI, especially pp. 323–332). Here a few remarks on Fichte’s departure from Kant may be appropriate. For Kant, the finitude of human reason entails that the philosophic legislation is essentially a self-limitation of the striving for human perfection and mastery over nature (a striving that in absence of a law and end is inclined to dialectical selfsubversion). For Fichte, on the other hand, the essentially in-finite character of reason’s striving for mastery and totality, and the very capacity (discovered by Kant) for autonomous self-legislation and self-determination, attest to the infinite power of reason to overcome all natural constraints and to actualize self-posited ideals of perfection in the world. With Fichte, the idea of philosophic rule is, accordingly, taken to an extreme. The philosopher is the being in whom the striving and capacity for realizing the ideal of freedom attains self-consciousness.

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He understands himself and his work to consist in the awakening of others to an understanding of their own striving for freedom, a form of philosophic pedagogy which is in principle ‘unlimited’ and much more direct than the Kantian method. While Heidegger’s philosophic leadership is, in contrast to his ancient and modern predecessors, no ‘legislation’, it is yet also something claimed and executed only within (and, indeed made possible and necessary by) certain limits that have their source in Dasein’s essential finitude and the finite essence of Being. Indeed, speaking formally and generally, philosophic leadership in Heidegger is not only limited by the finite essence of Dasein’s Being, but rather, in a way that has a formal similarity to the pedagogy of Rousseau and Kant, could be said to have as its aim the ‘self-limitation’ of humanity as a whole. Yet with Heidegger, self-limitation here involves the recognition and acceptance of Dasein’s essential ‘powerlessness’ in the whole – something which is by no means overcome through, but rather only attested to by – the conquest of nature through a ‘technology which rages in the “world” today like an unshackled beast’ (G26 279; MFL 215). Thus self-limitation here means the recognition of the impossibility of the kind of autonomy implied in Kantian legislation, an autonomy of reason viewed by the German Idealists as the productive capacity of absolute will. Heidegger has often been criticized as a proponent of a destructive ‘immoderation’ in political life. It is true that in recalling the Volk to its proper finitude and primordial exposure to the ‘powers of Being’, Heidegger affirms the necessity and fruitfulness of the strife and distress (on different levels) proper to this condition. However, from Heidegger’s point of view, it is precisely tendencies hidden in the normal ‘everydayness’ of man that mount an ‘immoderate’ assault upon the proper condition of Dasein in the whole, one that threatens to destroy not only the conditions for greatness in peoples, but the very ‘essence’ of man. As Heidegger says regarding this tendency, ‘We call this “movement” of Dasein in its own Being its crash [Absturz]. Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness. But this crash remains concealed to it through the public interpretation, so indeed, that it is interpreted as “ascending” and “concrete life”’ (SZ 178; BT 223). For a later elaboration of the threat inherent in this movement and its ‘crash’, see VA 30: ‘If destiny rules in the way of Ge-stell, then it is the highest danger. . . . As soon as the unconcealed no longer concerns man as object, but rather exclusively as standing-reserve, and man stands within the domain of objectlessness only as the orderer of standing reserve – there man goes to the uttermost brink of the crash [Absturzes], namely there where he himself should be taken only as standing reserve’. ‘In once again asking the fundamental question of Western philosophy out of a more primordial inception, we stand only in the service [Dienst] of the task, which we designate the salvation of the West [die Rettung des Abendlandes]. It can be fulfilled only as the regaining of the primordial relations to beings themselves and as a new grounding of every essential action of peoples upon these relations’ (EdP 41). L. Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 61, emphasis added. To be sure, one must take into consideration the fact that this statement was made in late 1934 and is intended as a rejection of the assumption that the

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spiritual greatness of a historical people can be accomplished through political institutions and policies In the Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger argues that access to Dasein lies in how Dasein ‘shows itself in itself and from itself’; Dasein ‘is to be shown as it is proximally and for the most part – in its average everydayness’ (SZ 15). From the standpoint of political philosophy, one might argue that such a requirement can and must be fulfilled precisely through a description and clarification of prephilosophic moral-political life precisely as it understands and interprets itself. However, it is important to recognize here that Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein as it ‘is’ proximally and for the most part – as it is in its ‘average everydayness’ – does not intend to reveal Dasein as it interprets itself in prephilosophic life. This methodical distinction between ‘everydayness’ as a mode of Being (Seinsart) and the possible self-interpretations that ‘everyday’ Dasein carries out is maintained consistently within Being and Time. The very decision to show Dasein as it is in its average everydayness, follows from a prior awareness that any other way in which Dasein interprets itself falls prey to a ‘tendency’ that misleads one away from and conceals an essential understanding of Dasein (see SZ 15–16). Heidegger thus appeals to a ‘secret Germany’ that ‘lived’ throughout the political impotence and fragmentation that followed the Napoleanic victories (G16 290). For, as Heidegger argues, ‘neither the political, nor the economic, neither the sociological nor the technical and scientific, and not even the metaphysical and religious perspectives, suffice for thinking what happens in this age’ (Hw 261).

Chapter 1: Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ 1

Although Heidegger poses the task of ‘introduction’ as one that implies a ‘leading-in’ (ein-leiten), he maintains that, with respect to philosophy (in contrast to the sciences), this cannot mean a ‘leading-in’ from a place ‘outside’. In a much later text, Heidegger discusses this very same problem as it arises with respect to Hegel’s work, arguing that the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was for good reason not originally intended to be titled the ‘Introduction’. ‘It cannot be anything of the kind because there is no such thing as an introduction to phenomenology. The phenomenology of Spirit is the parousia of the Absolute. The parousia is the Being of beings. There is for man no introduction [Einleitung] to the Being of beings because the essence of man is led by Being, is itself this being-led [weil das Wesen des Menschen im Geleit des Seins dieses Geleit selbst ist]. Insofar as the “beingwith-us” of the Absolute prevails, we are already in the parousia. It is not possible to be led, introduced to it from some place outside’. (Hw 150–51; emphasis added). In Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heidegger does not call into question the appropriateness of the term ‘Einleitung’ altogether (or, later, its synonym, ‘Einführung’) and he clearly does not repudiate the possibility and necessity of the ‘introduction’ to philosophy. As we shall see, Heidegger frequently draws on the word’s connotation of ‘being-led’, and ‘leadership’ to describe both man’s relation to Being and the philosophic-pedagogical explication and fulfilment of that relation. However, as the passage from the interpretation of Hegel shows, Heidegger must ward off the common sense of ‘einleiten’ insofar as it suggests

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movement from ‘outside’ to ‘inside’. The movement at issue here is in different ways shown to be ‘internal’; e.g., Dasein does not need to be ‘led into’ an understanding-of-Being, for ‘we always already move within an understanding-of-Being’ (SZ 5). Generally speaking, Heidegger calls into question the tendency to conceive all traits of human existence according to the relation of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, whether this be in man’s relation to the world, the relation of subject and object, the essence of ‘knowledge’, man’s relation to ‘truth’ or the way in which Dasein relates to its possibilities. In the analysis of existence, Dasein is shown to ‘be-(already)-in-the-world’ and to exist already ‘in truth’ (and ‘untruth’). Here, the essence of understanding lies not in grasping something outside, but rather in a projection upon possibilities that are already latently ‘there’ (in Da-sein). Heidegger names ‘fundamental’ ways which are usually juxtaposed to philosophy: myth, religion, poetry and science. Heidegger expresses his reservations about conventional introductions in Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik. Like Einleitung, this lecture also, though by a different approach, seeks ‘an intro-duction [Ein-führung] to philosophy which does not stand outside of philosophy and tell stories about what one has thought about philosophy or might think, but rather leads into it itself’. Heidegger attributes the impoverishment of philosophy in the university to the lack of a pedagogy (introduction) appropriate to what the matter itself demands. ‘One should learn to swim, but only wanders on the banks of the river, conversing about the murmuring of the stream and telling of the cities and towns, which it flows past. That hereby the sparks never leap over to the individual listener and let a light emerge in him, which can no longer be extinguished, is certain’ (G26 8). Heidegger here illustrates a distinction between discourse ‘about’ philosophy and discourse ‘from out of’ philosophizing that is elaborated upon in later lectures (see G29/30 86). Here one can discern an anticipation of the teaching in the Rectoral Address, where ‘service of knowledge’ [Wissensdienst] is one of the three Bindungen (along with labour service and military service); it is that which forms a bind between the students and the ‘spiritual mission’ of the Volk. The knowledge that students pursue becomes incorporated in the Volk insofar as the students will come to occupy leading occupations in the community (doctor, lawyer, teacher, architect etc.). ‘Knowing’, is here understood in terms of an exposure to the ‘most extreme questionability of one’s own Dasein’ and this coincides with an engagement with the ‘world-forming powers’ (SU 15–16). See G27 398. These ways of speaking about the being or essence of Dasein presuppose a questioning of the ancient distinction between Being (essence) and becoming. ‘That our Being itself is happening [Geschehen], is, understood in terms of the primal opposition of Being and Becoming, nonsense. And yet the question remains, whether the reigning concept of Being – constant remaining – is, despite its venerability and familiarity, actually true’ (G38 112). At least until 1928 (Einleitung in die Philosophie), Heidegger seems to follow Plato’s interpretation of the first philosophers. Heidegger appeals to Plato’s Sophist in order to clarify what the question of Being does not seek. ‘The Being of beings “is” not itself an being. If we are to understand the problem of Being, our

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first philosophical step consists in . . . not “telling a story” – that is to say, in not defining beings as beings by tracing them back in their origin to some other beings, as if Being had the character of some possible being’ (SZ 6). In 1929 (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik), a much different account of what the first philosophers were after begins to emerge. Their thinking is here more radically distinguished from mythological cosmogony. The first philosophers confront and ‘bring to word’ the ‘prevailing’ (Walten) manifestness of the whole of beings. It is thus suggested that the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides arose out of an experience of the difference between Being and beings, even if this difference was never grasped conceptually. After 1928 Heidegger thus develops an ontological reading of the pre-Socratics. A work that one suspects is necessary for understanding this development, the 1932 lecture course titled Der Anfang der abendländische Philosophie, has not yet been published at this time. See G26 250–51: ‘The being (present-at-hand) could never be encountered, if it did not have the opportunity to enter into a world. We speak therefore of possible and occasional world-entry [Welt-eingang] of the being. When and how is this possibility actualized? World-entry is not a process in the present-at-hand, in the sense that the being itself thereby changes . . . . World-entry of the present-at-hand is ‘something’ which happens [geschieht] to it. World-entry has the character of happening [Geschehen]. World-entry happens when and if transcendence happens, i.e., when and if historical Dasein exists; only then is a being-in-the-world of Dasein existent. And only if this is existent, are beings present-at-hand already entering into world, i.e., becoming innerworldly. And only Dasein as existing gives the opportunity of world-entry. Innerworldliness is accordingly not a present-at-hand property of the present-at-hand in itself. The present-at-hand remains the being which it is and what it is even if it does not become innerworldly, i.e., even if world-entry does not happen with the being and even if there is no opportunity for worldentry’ (G26 250–51; emphasis added). The comparative significance of the Greek beginning and the inception which Heidegger prepares is often alluded to, in various ways, especially in the works of the 1930s, but rarely stated outright. An unusually direct statement is made in a 1934 lecture: ‘If a complete change [Wandel] of the current representation of time emerges [aufgedrängt] and our position towards time undergoes a revolution [Umwälzung] (time not as mere sequence, a frame for the succession of givens [Begebenheiten]), then within this change, the understanding and conception of our position to Being changes [wandeln]. This change, towards which we steer, can be compared only with the change at the inception [Anfang] of the spiritual history of Western man in general’ (G39 132; emphasis added).

Chapter 2: Heidegger’s Students 1

Although we may provisionally describe the tone (Stimmung) of Heidegger’s introductions as ‘imperative’, it should be recognized that the lecturer does not himself give direct ‘authoritative pronouncements’ (cf. SZ 312). Whether the possibility is ‘seized’ or not is entirely a matter of freedom; indeed, not in the sense of an arbitrary choice among others, but rather as a radical awakening of

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an essential freedom that hitherto remained ‘asleep’ in everyday life and the tradition. At the same time however, it is remarkable that the ‘freedom’ of existence is here conceived in such a way that philosophical guidance is needed and exercised so as to awaken and guide the freedom of others. Guidance or leadership is not only compatible with the freedom of others, but may be required by it. On this point Heidegger’s philosophical pedagogy shares a common problem with the teachings on (or practice of) education in Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx. Education as liberation, ‘teaching’ or guiding others to be free, is itself perhaps paradoxical. Reflection on this problem in Heidegger’s thought is fruitful insofar as it may provide some insight into the necessity of philosophical (‘spiritual’) leadership in human affairs and the internal limit to philosophical pedagogy itself, i.e., the always uncertain boundary between, on the one hand, ‘leaping ahead’ and truly liberating others and, on the other hand, ‘leaping in’ and dominating them (SZ 122). See here Heidegger’s address, ‘Deutsche Studenten!’ (1934), in which he sets forth the essential character of the German student and at once exhorts such students to assume this character. ‘Your will to know seeks to experience the essential, simple and great. You long [verlangt] to be exposed to that which compels most directly and to that which imposes upon you the broadest obligations [dem Nächstbedrängenden und Weitestverpflichtenden]’ (G16 184; emphasis added). However, given that the question of what ‘Being’ means remains the fundamental problem (and therefore the meaning of any difference between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, Sein and Sollen), one must here be on guard against reading this distinction in terms of its traditional metaphysical and moral signification as an essential ‘opposition’ between Sein and Sollen. See here EM 149–52. The analysis of conscience is especially instructive here for two additional reasons: first, because at its most fundamental level it lays out the existentiell conditions of authentic existence and therefore of the possibility of philosophy as a way of existence, the very conditions that Heidegger’s introductions to philosophy in the lecture courses must attempt to realize; second, because it suggests how one Dasein can ‘act as the conscience’ of another Dasein, so as to shed some light on the character, intention and (exhortative) tone of philosophic pedagogy as practised in the lectures. Heidegger notes that this experience of conscience has been the point of departure for traditional explanations of conscience ‘as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated’. This suggests (and the chapter on conscience as a whole bears it out) that what are commonly experienced as obligations to ‘powers’ which ‘dominate’ Dasein are in fact fallen misinterpretations of the primordial experience of the call of conscience. If Heidegger’s discourse on philosophizing and the ‘Dasein in man’ seems to have a moral character and appeal to a moral disposition, this is due neither to traditional morality nor to thoughtless reliance on moral prejudice, but is grounded in the constitution of Dasein’s Being as the primordial, phenomenal basis of the fallen common moral understanding of the ‘ought’, conscience and obligation. The relation between authentic solicitude and philosophic leadership is explored in Chapter 4. See here the treatment of selfhood in G38 35–56.

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In the Rectoral Address, Heidegger says that the ‘essence’ of the university (in which teachers and students are essentially rooted) can be brought to clarity and power only when the ‘leaders themselves are led – led by the inexorability of that spiritual mission which compels the fate of the German people into the stamp of its essence’ (SU 9). This statement reveals more clearly a presupposition of what in Being and Time is described as solicitude: authentic Dasein can ‘help’ the other to become free in his ‘care’ for his Being, not simply because the former in some way knows this care, but that he shares it as a common destiny. We shall return to this question of what it means for one Dasein to act as the ‘conscience of others’ and how this illuminates the distinctive character of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy and leadership in Chapter 4 below. In contrast to traditional modes of understanding authority, like kingship, dictatorship, tyranny or the formal impersonal rule of law or constitution, ‘leadership’ is explicitly based upon the Being or destiny that leaders and followers share in common – without grounding in any higher permanent authority of god, natural law or law of reason. It is striking in this respect that the notion of ‘leadership’ becomes the predominant way in which political authority (to use this term neutrally) is understood at roughly the same time in Europe, America and Soviet Russia. It is difficult to decide to what extent and in what manner Heidegger’s conception of leadership may be influenced by and adapted to the context of contemporary politics and modern political theory. ‘If Dasein has seized upon its latent possibility not only of making its own existence transparent to itself but also of inquiring into the meaning of existentiality itself (i.e., to say, of previously inquiring into the meaning of Being in general), and if by such inquiry its eyes have been opened to its own essential historicality, then one cannot fail to see that the inquiry into Being . . . is itself characterized by historicality’ (SZ 20; BT 42). See, e.g., Überwindung der Metaphysik, thesis III in VA 68–69; EM 34–39; and Hw 193–247. What it means that Heidegger’s inquiry is essentially ‘historical’ emerges with special clarity in the exchange of letters between Leo Strauss and Hans Georg Gadamer. Strauss, reacting to Gadamer’s Truth and Method, says that although the hermeneutic teaching is to a large extent a working through of implications of Heidegger’s inquiry, Gadamer does not bring out the ‘catastrophic context’ out of which Heidegger’s thought – and therefore the ‘hermeneutics’ that Gadamer bases upon it – arises. Strauss calls attention to the distinctiveness of this context by likening it to a Hegelian ‘absolute moment’: ‘The historical situation to which the universal hermeneutics or the hermeneutic ontology belongs is not a situation like other situations; it is “the absolute moment” – similar to the belonging of Hegel’s system to the absolute moment in the historical process. I say similar and not identical. I would speak of a negatively absolute situation: the awakening from Seinsvergessenheit belongs to the Erschütterung alles Seienden, and what one awakens to is not the final truth in the form of a system but rather a question which can never be fully answered’ (‘Correspondence concerning Wahrheit und Methode,’ Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 [1978]: 7). Strauss goes further to explain how, on its own terms, the problem which Heidegger raises is historically distinctive in that it is a thematic questioning of Being, a questioning of that which in every previous situation or historical world has always been implicitly and non-thematically ‘understood’ in a self-evident

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manner. In the contemporary situation, the ‘evidence’ of the given understanding of the world (Being) ‘decays’. With this loss of evidence the problem of ‘worldhood as such’ first emerges. Strauss thus responds to Gadamer: As you stated, existence is in itself verstehend; this understanding is of course ‘also’ understanding of to kalon kai to dikaion, and hence it is essentially ‘evaluating’. This means that existence is necessarily existence within or through a specific Sitte-Sittlichkeit which is binding, not as merely imposed, but as understood, as evident; the evidence of the specific Sitte-Sittlichkeit is part and parcel of the evidence of the specific understanding of the world. . . . Now the hermeneutic ontology or however it may be called is itself historical in the sense that it is rooted in a specific ‘historical world’ and hence in a specific SitteSittlichkeit which is bound to partake of the final character of the hermeneutic ontology. One could perhaps say more precisely that the thematic ontology belongs to a world in its decay when the Sitte-Sittlichkeit peculiar to it has lost its evidence or binding power and that therefore the hermeneutic ontology must – of course not dream of fabricating a new Sitte-Sittlichkeit but – prepare men for its possible coming or make men receptive to its possible occurrence. (Ibid. 7) Strauss sees the coincidence of the question of Being and the moment of decline to be essential for Heidegger’s inquiry as a whole. In his response to Strauss, Gadamer makes clear that precisely on this point he rejects the ‘catastrophic grounding of “hermeneutic ontology”’ and does not follow Heidegger: ‘My point of departure is not the completed forgetfulness of Being, the “night of Being”’ (Ibid. 8). Strauss’ suggestive linkage of Heidegger’s assertion that the fundamental question belongs to a unique historical moment with the Hegelian teaching about the coincidence of the resolution of the traditional philosophic problems and the ‘end of history’ is borne out in Michel Haar’s treatment of ‘The History of Being and its Hegelian Model’ (Song of the Earth. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 67–91). Strauss’ formulation is especially illuminating as regards the special problem of understanding the point of departure for the ‘thematic ontology’, the question of Being. For, on the one hand, it suggests that, for Heidegger, philosophizing (not in general but ‘here and now’, and ‘for us’) is, like all past thought (especially Greek philosophy) ‘rooted in’ and emergent ‘out of and against’ a world defined by a self-evident Sitte-Sittlichkeit (customary morality). From here one can begin to understand Heidegger’s insistence that ‘the inner belonging [innere Zugehörigkeit] of my own work to the Black Forest and its men comes out of a centuries-long, irreplaceable Alemannich-Schwabian Bodenständigkeit’ (G13 10). On the other hand, Heidegger also speaks of how his questioning of the Seinsfrage, as historical, ‘has an inner belonging [innere Zugehörigkeit] to the world history of the earth’ – i.e., an earth on which there ‘happens’ [geschieht] the darkening of the world (which comprises the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, the pre-eminence of the mediocre). The question arises as to how the thinker is ‘rooted’ at once in German and Western (abendländische) destiny. Perhaps the latter, more comprehensive mode of ‘belonging’ to world-history on earth in some way implies or contains the specific

Notes to Pages 46–53

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‘Schwabian Bodenständigkeit’ – so that world-darkening is a process of uprooting this very same Bodenständigkeit. In any case, it is the perplexities concerning the condition and source of Being or the question of Being – and not simply ordinary moral-political attachments – that underlie Heidegger’s preoccupation with the problem of the uprootedness of the Germans and of Western man. This by no means implies that the crisis issues from this contemporary state of affairs. The crisis, as the decline of the tradition, unfolds from out of its very inception, and thus demands not merely a continuation of the tradition but a ‘transformation of Dasein’ which can only happen out of a ‘confrontation with the whole of prior history – its essential figures [Gestalten] and ages’ (EdP 32). On the Idealist conception of the purpose and structure of the university see, especially, F. Schelling, On University Studies, (Ohio University Press, 1966). Heidegger writes: ‘Certainly the factic, concrete relation to a definite science must be decided in each instance by the individual, but that can only be carried out within the context of possibilities, which determine how in general the playspace appears, inside of which the individual can genuinely decide in this way or that’ (G27 30). The first part of this address closes with the suggestion that the crisis of science is misunderstood by contemporaries (i.e., those who take the contemporary form of science as authoritative and seek alternatives to science) in part due to a misunderstanding of the essential meaning of ‘theoretical’ comportment. In order to clarify the latter, Heidegger turns, in the second part of this address, to an interpretation of the cave allegory from Plato’s Republic. Heidegger emphasizes that the cave allegory considers the essence of man in relation to paideia, education. Thus this interpretation of the cave allegory fits into the overall theme of the address, ‘An Introduction to Academic Studies’. Heidegger describes the experience of the prisoner who has been unfettered and forced to turn towards the light in the same terms in which, in the first part of the address, he described the contemporary experience of students in their own education. ‘Now when the prisoner is released he stands up and turns around in the cave and can also look over the situation of the prisoners. But the release is at first in no way experienced as liberation [Befreiung], but rather as pain, because it breaks through what was previously grasped as the natural condition. Its first consequence is an aporia, a helplessness [Ratlosigkeit], the ones released want to return to the earlier condition’ (G28 352). The correlation between the released prisoners and the distressed students of the university, suggests that Heidegger’s pedagogy assumes as its point of departure not an initial unchaining of prisoners or releasing of students from a state of radically pre-scientific existence (Heidegger here describes the situation of the fettered prisoners as those of ‘mythical Dasein’ in terms drawn from the interpretation of mythical Dasein in G27 357–390). Rather the point of departure is the historically given distress suffered by those who have been unchained, but as yet unaccustomed to the ‘light’. In this respect, authority here is like the predominance of the public (as interpreted in SZ): it ‘rules’ on the grounds of a ‘not going into the matter’. The ‘ambiguity’ characteristic of philosophizing is discussed at length here by Heidegger without any explicit reference to Being and Time, where ambiguity, along with the phenomena of common discourse (Gerede) and curiosity,

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characterize the way in which Being-in-the-world is disclosed in the everyday manner, evincing ‘fallenness’ as the movement of Dasein. If we turn back to Being and Time from this discussion of ambiguity in Grundbegriffe, we gain the impression that the existential analysis of ambiguity concerns, in an implicit manner, the public, everyday, fallen existence of philosophy itself. ‘When, in our everyday Being-with-one-another, we encounter the sort of thing which is accessible to everyone, and about which anyone can say anything, it soon becomes impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not. This ambiguity extends not only to the world, but just as much to beingwith-one-another as such, and even to Dasein’s Being towards itself’ (SZ 173; BT 217)). Below (in Chapter 4) we shall consider how the conception of philosophic pedagogy as ‘non-authoritative’ is in no way contradicted by, but is rather identical with, the claim to spiritual-historical leadership asserted in the Rectoral Address. Here too the leaders do not prescribe, legislate or dictate to the others, but somehow facilitate the awakening and clarification of their ‘own’ determination [Bestimmung]. Heidegger says, ‘The German students are on the march. And whom they seek are those leaders, through whom they raise their own determination to grounded, knowing truth and place it into the clarity of clarifying-effective word and work’ (SU 15; emphasis added). One must distinguish between the concept of authority that Heidegger discusses in Grundbegriffe and the form of ‘leadership’ that constitutes Heidegger’s pedagogical practice. Recent scholarship evinces the tendency to assume that Heidegger abandons an earlier, critical posture towards traditional forms of philosophic rule, legislation, authority or the like, at the time of his participation in the national revolution. That stance is expressed in Being and Time’s assertion that, ‘The existential interpretation will never seek to make any authoritarian pronouncement [Machtspruch] over existentiell possibilities and obligations’ (SZ 312). There is indeed a critique of traditional (Platonic, Kantian and Nietzschean) forms of philosophic rule visible throughout the whole of Heidegger’s thought. But this critique of the tradition by no means forecloses the possibility or necessity of a new form of rule, leadership or pedagogy that grows out of the understanding of philosophy as the questioning of Being. To work out this conception of philosophic and political pedagogy with respect to its grounds (its possibility), why it is ‘necessary’ – i.e., why, in the statement cited above, some men not only ‘can’, but ‘must’ be the impetus to awaken others to their own determination – is one of the aims of this book. This requires that we hold as suspect the dubious assumption that all claims regarding the rank of philosophy and its possibility of guiding human affairs can be dismissed from the outset as a ‘Platonic bias’ and ‘prejudice’, without a prior explication of the problem of leadership as Heidegger understands it (see J. Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 132–37, 210. Further on in Chapter 3, we shall consider Heidegger’s fuller exposition of the ‘danger’ confronted by philosophizing, and the necessity of a kind of courage that serves as the ‘innermost motive’ of questioning. See here the later formulation of this requirement: ‘. . . in order to be able to develop such a comprehensive questioning it was first necessary to awaken a

Notes to Pages 60–67

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fundamental attunement and create the possibility of an Ergriffenheit’ (G29/30 268). See here the treatment of attunement in Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’ (1934). ‘In attunement there happens the disclosive exposedness [eröffnende Ausgesetzheit] to beings. Hence Dasein is already displaced into the Dasein of others, i.e., it only is, as it is in being-with the other. Dasein is essentially being-with, for, and against others. The world is opened in the currently predominant fundamental attunement, . . . This being-with-one-another is, according to the fundamental character of Dasein, in itself historical and therewith bound to the powers of history and joined through them’ (G39 143). On attunement and being-with (the ‘Grundstimmung eines Volkes’) see also G38 130. For Heidegger, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the ‘first systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of being with one another’ and shows how ‘being-with’, the ‘publicness’ of Dasein, is determined by a shared attunement. See also SZ 169: ‘The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having an attunement – i.e., for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world “matter” to it. Das Man prescribes one’s attunement and determines what and how one “sees.”’ Here, Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy does indeed manifest characteristics of oratory as understood by Aristotle. Yet to hold that ‘guidance’ of human beings moves through the awakening of attunement does not entail that the questions about the basic aim and kind of this guidance have been decided. As is clear from Heidegger’s comments, the ‘guidance’ of Aristotle’s orator is not philosophic education but the rousing of ‘public’ moods and the forming of common opinion regarding matters of everyday concern (hence the Rhetoric is described as an interpretation of ‘everydayness’). In his lectures on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger takes up the relations between philosophy, dialectics and sophistry in Aristotle and Plato. It is argued here that, over and against Plato’s identification of rhetoric and sophistry, Aristotle attains a ‘positive’ understanding of rhetoric based upon the insight that ‘this kind of speaking [rhetoric] makes sense in everyday life, insofar as everyday discussions and deliberations are not so much a matter of disclosing the actual and strict truth but simply of forming a doxa, a pistis, a conviction’ (PS 151). In a 1934 lecture, (Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit) in which the question ‘who we ourselves are’ is again posed, Heidegger further clarifies the intention behind reflection on the contemporary situation. He denies that these consideration are merely practical ‘positions’ on current affairs. Rather, ‘the highest task is to make ways of thinking effective within us which put us into the position to place into question and conceive the essential things’ (G38 122). Rather than bringing boredom before one as an observable object, Heidegger emphasizes that ‘It is rather a matter of seeing boredom as it bores us, and of grasping it as it occupies us. It always shows itself in such a way that we immediately turn against it’ (G29/30 143). Of course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik does present substantial historical reflections: Part One contains an interpretation of the beginning of philosophy out of the experience of phusis and gives an overview of the development of metaphysics; Part Two contains a lengthy reflection on apophansis in Aristotle. However, remarks made in Part One qualify the status of these preparatory

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historical considerations. Here Heidegger calls attention to the problematic character of his expressed ‘conviction’ that the traditional conception of ‘metaphysics’ (as knowledge of the suprasensuous) is in fact not based on a primordial understanding of what Aristotle means by ‘first philosophy’. The grounding of such a conviction, Heidegger says, would require that one first gain such a primordial understanding of ancient philosophy. But this is possible, Heidegger says, ‘only if we ourselves have already developed a more radical problematic of philosophy proper. Only then do we have the torch with which to illuminate the concealed and unexcavated foundations of prote philosophia and thus of ancient philosophy, so that we may decide what is fundamentally happening there. Yet, we ought to first enter such philosophizing proper via these lectures’ (G29/30 62). In Die Grundfragen der Metaphysik (1936/37), the text to which we have turned for its treatment of wonder and the first inception, Heidegger presents dread (Erschreckens) as the attunement of the ‘other inception’ and juxtaposes this directly to wonder. ‘In wonder, the fundamental attunement of the first inception, beings first come to stand in their form. Dread, the fundamental attunement of the other beginning, reveals behind all progress and all domination over beings a dark emptiness of irrelevance and a shrinking back in the face of the first and last decisions’ (G45 197). The relation between boredom and dread in Beiträge – in which dread involves a deepened awareness of what is experienced in boredom – is already anticipated in Grundbegriffe: the emptiness in the whole manifest in boredom makes known ‘the lack of the mystery [Geheimnis], such that the inner terror [Schreckens] which every mystery carries with it . . . stays away’ (G29/30 244, 255). For a later treatment of boredom, which takes up the relation between boredom and homesickness only alluded to in Grundbegriffe (cf. G29/30 10, 120), see the 1961 address ‘700 Jahre Messkirch’ (G16 574–82). It is curious that although in his various interpretations of attunements, Heidegger’s analyses are extremely thorough in articulating the differences between the fundamental and prevailing forms – e.g., the careful elaboration of the difference between angst and fear in SZ or the exhaustive treatment of the superficial forms of boredom and profound boredom in Grundbegriffe – the relations between the various fundamental attunements of this situation are not so clear. That is, obscurity remains regarding the identity or difference between angst, deep boredom, dread or terror (Erschreckens), melancholy (G29/30 271), ‘holy mourning’ (elucidated in the 1934 Hoelderlin lectures), and ‘restraint’ (Verhaltenheit) (in Grundfragen and the Beiträge). The difficulty is compounded with Heidegger’s suggestion that particular attunements carry within themselves what, from an ordinary perspective, one would presume to be their opposites: in Being and Time, angst is allied with joy (SZ 310). In Grundfragen, Heidegger qualifies the juxtaposition of wonder and terror: ‘Just as wonder bears in itself its own sort of terror, so does terror involve its own mode of self-composure, calm steadfastness and new wonder’ (G45 169). ‘The whole connection between authentic and inauthentic existence, moment and momentlessness, is not something present-at-hand, which merely takes place in man, but one which belongs to Dasein. The concepts that break-open are only to be understood if they are not taken as significations of properties and characteristics of something present-at-hand, but rather as indications for the

Notes to Pages 72–75

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understanding which must first free itself from the common concepts of beings and must transform itself into the Da-sein in it. In each of these concepts – for example death, resoluteness, history, existence – there lies the summons [Anspruch] to this transformation, and indeed not subsequently as a so called ethical application of what is conceived, but rather as the prior unlocking of the dimension of the conceivable’ (G29/30 428–29). Similarly, in Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of the peculiar ‘power’ exercised on Dasein in the attunement of angst, which he characterizes as ‘Benommenheit’, a being ‘taken’, ‘fascinated’ or ‘benumbed’ by something. ‘In angst Dasein is taken all the way back to its naked uncanniness, and becomes fascinated by it. This fascination [Benommenheit] not only takes Dasein back from its “worldly” possibilities, but at the same time gives it the possibility of an authentic can-be’ (SZ 344). Even after the provisional conclusion of the interpretation of deep boredom, Heidegger emphasizes that the ‘as a whole’ which the attunement makes manifest remains enigmatic because ‘it is so close to us that we have no distance from it that would allow us to catch sight of it’ (G29/30 411). From here on, the translation of the German, ‘Not’ as ‘Need’ will usually be capitalized in order to preserve the way in which it is distinguished by Heidegger from ‘needs’ (Nöte). It should be kept in mind that ‘Not’ also carries the sense of ‘distress’. This task of bringing to word what is made manifest in the attunement is however not completed with the interpretation of boredom. Rather, this concluding passage of Part One prescribes the task of the whole of Part Two as well: the development of the question ‘what is world?’ as a questioning of what is manifest in the fundamental attunement. It is worthwhile to note how this formulation recalls the characterization of existential-ontological interpretation as that which ‘lets what is to be interpreted come to word itself’ (G29/30 314–15). In this respect, Heidegger’s treatment here recalls the interpretation of the call of conscience in Being and Time – there also described as a ‘demand’ (Forderung) (SZ 266) – where the call is described as something that enigmatically comes ‘from out of me and yet from over me’ (SZ 275). In the lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology (1930/31), Heidegger again turns to the question of how the manifestation of beings as a whole (now expressly understood in terms of the ‘history’ of such a manifestation) is the fundamental presupposition of philosophy. This manifestness is something that must again be ‘taken seriously’ if philosophizing is to be possible. Here the ‘decision’ to do so coincides with the experience of a Need of Dasein ‘which is simultaneously given with the manifestation of beings’ (G32 54). In Heidegger’s thought of the late 1930s, the Need of historical Dasein is thought through more profoundly as the Need (Not) of Being itself. As in Grundbegriffe, the Need which bestows to questioning its peculiar necessity comes out of an attuned experience of the whole of beings in its historical manifestation. As Heidegger says, ‘the essential Need, which as a fundamental attunement compelled the primordial questioning, sprang forth from beings themselves as a whole insofar as beings had to be acknowledged in their beingness [Seiendheit] and had to be preserved in their truth. If, for us, nothing less is at stake than the preparation for a transition from the end of the first beginning into another beginning, then the Need which

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compels us to this necessity must again and only come out of beings as a whole insofar as they become questionable with regard to their Being’ (G45 184). The articulation of the three metaphysical questions corresponds with the structural characteristics of boredom: (1) left-empty and distressed by the absence of distress ‘as a whole’ Dasein is placed (gestellt) before the manifestness of the being as a whole; (2) in explicitly asking after what is ‘announced’ and made manifest with the self-refusal of beings in deep boredom, there arises the question about what happens in the moment of vision: ‘what is the individuation of Dasein to itself?’ and (3) in the ‘oscillation’ between these two moments – and thus the rupture that comes to sight in this attunement – there lies an experience of Dasein’s finitude that occasions the question as to what finitude itself means (G29/30 251–52). Near the conclusion of this lecture course, Heidegger recalls that the awakening of attunement serves the one purpose of preparing entry into the ‘occurrence of the prevailing of the world’ (in other words, a ‘being-gripped’ by the whole). Once again identifying this ‘philosophizing entry’ with the ‘return of man into the Dasein in him’, Heidegger explains that philosophic pedagogy can only really ‘prepare’ an awakening insofar as the conditions for this lie in the dispensation of historical destiny. ‘Preparation’ thus intends to foster an attentive openness to such conditions (e.g., the occurrence of the fundamental attunement itself) that Heidegger describes as the capacity and strength to ‘wait’ (G29/30 510, 199; see also EM 157). The question, ‘what does finitude mean?’ along with the question of the world and individuation, is one of the metaphysical questions that becomes possible through the awakening of the fundamental attunement. This lecture course remains incomplete in that it does not move beyond a development of the problem of the world. In a 1929 lecture on Hegel, Heidegger maintains that the Need at issue is ‘not merely’ that of our own Dasein, but that of Being itself (G32 56–57). See G45 151–205 (especially pp. 195–99); Nii 390–398; G65 45–46; G32 56–57; EM 124–25. In Die Grundfragen der Philosophie (1936/37), Heidegger addresses how the necessity that drives all philosophic questioning issues out of the Need of Being itself. After an extensive consideration of how the Need of the ‘first’ (Greek) inception of History was experienced through the attunement of wonder, Heidegger briefly considers how the Need transforms itself towards the end of the history that was initiated in Greek Dasein. There are then two fundamental forms, the ‘first’ Need and the ‘other Need’. The thinking of thinkers near the completion of the history of metaphysics – Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche – is compelled from out of a form of the ‘first Need’. With the growing experience of the loss of the initial Need in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche the ‘immanent irrelevance and meaninglessness of all beings flared.’ Precisely this experience of nihilism harbours the ‘other Need’. And when an attempt was ventured to think anew (Nietzsche), starting from an admission of this irrelevance, i.e., an admission of the former greatness of thought, then it became clear that the beginning had turned into the end and that the Need and its compelling had to become different, assuming that there is still supposed to be another beginning. After Nietzsche, and in a certain way

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through him . . . the other Need comes into play, and this again only, . . . for a few rare men, to whom is meted out the power to question. . . . But the other Need, that is, if we may say so, our Need, has the peculiarity that it is not experienced as a Need. Everything has become calculable, and consequently everything is understandable (G45 196–97; BQ 168).

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The ‘Need’ that compels questioning, but is not proximally experienced ‘as’ a Need or necessity – precisely the contrary – is the Need of ‘Needlessness’ (Notlosigkeit). Heidegger employs the word ‘epoch’ to designate an epoche-, a particular ‘suspension’ or ‘withholding’ of Being determining a particular space of history (Nii 383; Hw 311). Although such fulfilment through technology is in fact impossible, for the drive towards it only heightens the oblivion of the unrecognized emptiness left by the withdrawal of Being itself that impels this drive in the first place. In the German, these words, on the one hand Not and Nöte, on the other hand, Schuld, have a broader range of connotations than their ordinary English translations. The German word, Schuld, signifies not only ‘guilt’ but also ‘debt’. Heidegger emphasizes that the word formally implies a ‘nullity’. In light of this, our suggestion that Grundbegriffe’s treatment of deep boredom (the ‘Need of the absence of distress’) can be construed as a revised and deepened approach to the same phenomena at the centre of the thematic of conscience and guilt in Being and Time may not be so far-fetched as first appears. Nonetheless, this does not entirely resolve the question as to why and how the problematic of ‘guilt’ and ‘conscience’—at least insofar as these concepts are concerned—can seem to drop out of the focus Heidegger’s thinking after 1927, despite the centrality of this problematic to the investigation of Being and Time.

Chapter 3: Student Dasein 1

This identification of the will to know with the demand for ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) recalls the emphasis Heidegger laid (in the introduction to Einleitung in die Philosophie) on the distinction between knowledge (Erkenntnis) about philosophy (its problems, history etc.) and a ‘living philosophizing’. Heidegger’s philosophic analyses and interpretation intend to lead into, to ‘unlock the dimension of’, a fundamental experience of the matters at issue; this holds true even in those discussions which may be viewed as ‘technical’ or ‘systematic’. For example, the interpretation of Dasein’s constitution of Being (Seinsverfassung) in terms of temporality and historicality has the ultimate intention not of introducing a new philosophic teaching about time and history, but a new experience thereof. As Heidegger says: Today one speaks much about the historicality of man, and yet one nevertheless does not experience the essence of this historicality. One does not conceive the inner demand [Forderung] which lies in the essence of historicality. This conceiving is only possible in a transformed relation to time, in a primordial

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It is worth noting that when Heidegger employs the term ‘experience’ or ‘fundamental experience’, this is by no means limited to what is accessible to sense perception in the narrow signification. Rather, as in this citation, the ‘essence’ of historicality and our ‘essence’ (as determination) is something that must be ‘experienced’. So, over against both the empiricist and Kantian tradition, Heidegger asserts that the ‘a priori’ is available to ‘experience’ of a sort. In Being and Time, Heidegger credits Husserl for ‘enabling us to understand once more the meaning of any genuine philosophical empiricism; he has also given us the necessary tools. “Apriorism” is the method of every scientific philosophy which understands itself’ (SZ 51n.). Further on in this appeal, Heidegger indicates what this obligation consists in: ‘You are obligated to mutual knowing and mutual action in the creation of the future high school of the German spirit’ (G16 184). The condensed treatment of the historical beginning in the Rectoral Address is prepared through more extensive discussions in Einleitung in die Philosophie (1928) (G27 357–90), and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (G29/30 38–52). As Heidegger later says: ‘In order to effect a change [Wandel] of science, to recapture the primordial knowing, our Dasein needs a wholly other metaphysical depth. It first needs again a founded and truly built fundamental relation to the Being of beings as a whole’ (EM 82). This theme is implicit in Being and Time and becomes prominent in works of the 1930s. For a fuller elaboration of the difference between the ‘first’ (Greek) and the ‘other’ – i.e., futural – inception, with regard to man’s position towards beings as a whole, see especially Grundfragen der Philosophie (G45 151–223). As Heidegger says in a 1927 lecture course on Kant: ‘We do not reveal nature in its might and power by reflecting on it, but by struggling against it, by protecting ourselves from and dominating it. Thus the myths of nature contain a history of this struggle; that is, they are interpretations of an original comportment toward nature’(PIK 15). In Part Two of Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heidegger develops the interpretation of being-in-the-world that was undertaken in Being and Time and articulates two fundamental modes in which the whole of beings is made manifest (Offenbarmachen). First, Heidegger presents a radically (and historically) pre-philosophic ‘mythical Dasein’ in which beingin the-world is understood as ‘being delivered over to the superior power [Übermacht] of beings, with the basic ways of being supported by it and threatened through it’ (G27 358). Overwhelmed by the superior power (the Being) of beings as a whole, Dasein seeks protection from and understands its ‘self’ within what dominates it, taken not as an object of belief, but as self-evident truth. The second basic possibility of being-in-the-world arises out of the degeneration of the preceding one and in conflict with it. Heidegger describes this event

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as a ‘change in truth as such’ (anticipating the later theme of the epochal transmutation in the essence of truth). In mythical Dasein, the whole of beings is made manifest only with respect to how beings deny or provide ‘security’ (Geborgenheit). Through the change in the essence of truth, the whole now becomes manifest in accordance with the manner in which Dasein conducts (verhalten) itself. Dasein is here no longer entirely absorbed in the superior power of beings. Rather Dasein ‘confronts’ – i.e., ‘sets-itself-apart’ (Auseinandersetzung) – from other beings; it thus determines its own conduct in relation to other beings. The way in which Dasein exists is no longer simply prescribed by what overpowers it, rather, Dasein comes to understand itself in terms of ‘possibilities’ that must be decided (G27 371). Human conduct and ‘ethos’ thus becomes problematic (questionable) for the first time. With this freedom, there also arises the possibility of an active, questioning stance towards beings as a whole. ‘The already manifest being shows itself in and for the Dasein which determines its own comportment as that which ought to be governed, mastered and guided. But this in itself requires, as essentially necessary, that Dasein know itself [Sichauskennen] in relation to what and how beings truly are, regardless of whether beings confer or deny security’ (G27 368; emphasis added). With this new basic position (Grundstellung) towards beings there arises the possibility of Dasein’s explicitly existing in and ‘for the sake of’ the truth as a chosen possibility. This transformation coincides with the historical beginning of, philosophic questioning and scientific investigation. Both ways of being-in-the-world unfold from out of an experience of the insecurity (Halt-losigkeit) of existence in the whole of beings, an experience that attends Dasein’s thrown transcendence among beings; they are two ways in which Dasein maintains or ‘holds’ itself towards Being as ‘superior power’. In the second possibility – weltanschauung as ‘Haltung’ – Dasein confronts the elemental through technical mastery, philosophic questioning and scientific investigation; Dasein sets itself apart from and ‘confronts’ these powers in themselves and ‘as such’. In light of this reconstruction of the historical beginnings of philosophy, the Rectoral Address appears as an attempt to recover an experience of Dasein as ‘beset’ by the superior power of the whole (characteristic of mythical Dasein), along with the confrontational stance in which men ‘question after beings in the whole and for the first time raise arms against the being and its yet dawning Übermächtigkeit’ (G27 383). Heidegger’s interpretation of the choral ode of Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics recalls the list of world-forming powers in Rectoral Address. The first two strophes are read as a disclosure of the ‘overwhelming powers’ (überwältigenden Gewaltigen) of the beings as a whole in their character as ‘deinon’, uncanny (un-heimlich). The first strophe names the ‘natural’ powers of ocean, earth and animals. The second strophe speaks of language, understanding, attunement, passion and building. Heidegger emphasizes that the latter belong no less to the overwhelming powers than the former, though they are distinct in that they ‘pervade’ (durchwaltet) man as such. ‘This pervading force becomes no less overpowering because man takes it into his power, which he uses as such. All this merely conceals the uncanniness of language, of the passions, and of the powers by which man is ordained as a historical being, while it seems that it is he who rules over them’ (EM 119–120).

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This point finds confirmation in the ‘power’ that might, at first, seem to speak against it: technology. The main thrust of Heidegger’s later discourse on technology is the exhibition of how, contrary to the common representation that it is a means to human ends or the application of science in the service of human needs, the essence of technology is a hidden power which commands or challenges (herausfordern) man to reveal the reality of beings in a certain way, i.e., as ‘standing-reserve’. See here VA 21–22. See also ‘Gelassenheit’ (G16 523): ‘The hidden power [verborgene Macht] in modern technology determines the relation of man to that which is. It dominates [beherrscht] the entire earth’. ‘In the end an essential distinction prevails between comprehending the whole of beings in themselves and finding oneself [Sichbefinden] in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our Dasein. . . . Such being-attuned, in which we “are” in one way or another and which determines us through and through, lets us find ourselves among beings as a whole’ (G9 110). Further on in Being and Time, the flight from Unheimlichkeit is shown to be a ‘flight in the face of one’s ownmost being-towards-death’ (SZ 252). As being-towardsdeath, existence is un-heimlich because death is the certain and impending possibility of the ‘failure’ or denial (Versagen) of all the relations that make up being-in-the-world, i.e., the possibility that ‘all being-alongside the things which concern us, and all being-with others will be denied’ (SZ 263; cf. 252). Insofar as Dasein is essentially ‘the possibility of no-longer-being-there’ – and thus of no longer being ‘at home’ in the world – the ‘threat’ mentioned above is shown to issue out of Dasein’s own Being and to be something ‘constant’. Dasein ‘constantly’ flees this threat. But according to Being and Time it can also do otherwise: ‘In anticipating the indefinite certainty of death, Dasein opens itself to a constant threat [Bedrohung] which springs from out of its own “there” [Da]’ (SZ 265). This threat is, here again, ‘held open’ and understood in and through the attunement of angst. The development in question here concerns a turn to the thematic of ‘das Seiende im Ganzen’, and the coincident focus upon the Greek inception as an original disclosure of and confrontation with the whole of beings (as ‘phusis’ in its ‘might’ [Gewalt] and ‘superior power’). The necessity for this shift of focus is first stated in the 1927 lecture course Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik and demanded by the problematic of the question of Being and fundamental ontology (G26 198–202). We considered this issue in our introductory chapter. See also G27 357–76; and G29/30 36–52. ‘Being means appearing [Erscheinen]. This does not mean something subsequent which occurs to Being. Rather Being presences [west] as appearing’ (EM 77). ‘The conflict initially projects and unfolds what is as yet un-heard, un-said and un-thought. This conflict is borne by the creators, the poets, thinkers and statesman. They throw up against the overpowering rule [Walten] the barrier of the work and in this capture [bannen] the world that opens up. With these works the ruling, phusis, is brought to stand in that which presences. The being now becomes first that which is as such. This becoming-world is authentic history’ (EM 47). The interpretation of this pólemos in Introduction to Metaphysics provides the necessary clarification of just how (in the Rectoral Address), the will to the essence of science ‘procures for our Volk its world of the innermost and outer-

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most danger, i.e., its truly spiritual world’ (SU 14). In Heidegger’s post-war explanation of his intentions in assuming the rectorate of Freiburg (Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken in SU 21–43), it is indeed maintained that in the Rectoral Address, the ‘posture [Haltung] of reflection and of questioning is placed in “strife” [Kampf]’ and that this ‘strife’ is to be ‘thought in the sense of Heraclitus’, that is thought and spoken ‘always from out of the “exposedness” [Ausgestzheit]’ (SU 28). Yet one hesitates to draw the conclusion that the account, in Introduction to Metaphysics, of how the primordial conflict gives rise to the world explains the process of spiritual world formation alluded to in the Rectoral Address, for neither the latter nor the writings that precede it call attention to the role of ‘works’ (Werke) – works of thought, of poetry, of art and of state founding – in the formation of a spiritual world. Heidegger begins to address the founding role of works after his stint as rector, from which he learned that science can no longer be determined through attempts at renewal ‘or stopped in its essential transformation into pure technique’ (SU 39). The maintenance of the level and rank of being-there thus requires a constant reassertion of the conflict through ‘creatively transcending’ the level that has already been attained. Heidegger elaborates: ‘Conflict [Kampf] not only lets the being stand-out as such, but it alone also preserves [bewahrt]the being in its constancy [Ständigkeit]. Where the conflict dwindles, there the being indeed does not disappear, but the world turns away’ (EM 48). In Being and Time, Heidegger similarly argued that the ‘maintenance’ of the world opened through Dasein’s resoluteness requires that Dasein ‘not become fixed upon [versteifen] the situation, but rather understand that the resolve – according to its own meaning as dis-closure – must be held open and free for the current factic possibility. The certainty of resolve signifies that one holds oneself free for one’s own withdrawal [Zurücknahme]’ (SZ 308; emphasis added). ‘Where human-being in the midst of the being as a whole manifestly makes up its own Being, the property [Eigenheit] of human-being grows out of the proper manner [Eigenart] of its belonging to Being as the prevailing appearing’ (EM 106–107). ‘Of great danger are the noncommittal plans and slogans that are turning up everywhere; and so, too, is the “new” concept of Wissenschaft, which is nothing more than the old one with a slight anthropological underpinning. All of the talk about “politics” is nonsense as well, for it does nothing to put an end to the old routine [dem alten Schlendrian]’ (G16 762). What it means for something to be a Wagnis, ‘venture’ or ‘risk’, is addressed where Heidegger uses this word to translate tolma in his interpretation of how knowledge, for the pre-Socratics, always involves ‘risk’: to know is ‘to undertake [wagen] the venture of Being, non-being, and appearance all at once, i.e. to take upon oneself being-there as a de-cision between Being, non-being, and appearance’ (EM 86). Also see again the interpretation of the choral ode in Antigone: ‘The powerful actor, the creator, who sets forth into the un-said, who breaks into the un-thought, compels what has not happened to happen and makes the unseen appear – this powerful one stands at all time in Wagnis (tolma). Insofar as he ventures to master Being, he must thereby withstand and let encounter [ankommen lassen] the pressure of non-being, me kalon, he must risk dispersion, in-constancy, dis-order and mischief’ (EM 123).

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See the discussion of the ‘ambiguity’ of all teaching and philosophic discourse (above, pp. 52–57). Also consider Heidegger’s citation of York’s correspondence with Dilthey in Being and Time: ‘But you know my predilection for paradox, which I justify by saying that paradoxicality is a mark of truth’ (SZ 402). The Rectoral Address exhibits the self-reflexive quality that we noticed in the lecture courses: this is, on the one hand, a statement ‘about’ leadership (a kind of definition of what it is and entails), and, on the other hand, an example of the practice of leadership, a fulfilment of the very definition. In ‘interpreting’ the disposition of the students as a seeking of leaders, it is itself a clarification ‘in word and work’ of their determination. Accordingly, in what follows this statement: (1) Heidegger ‘clarifies’ the concept of freedom that is implicit in the students’ self-legislation; (2) he shows how, from out of this concept – i.e., from out of a willingness to accept obligations – the determination of the students is instituted (‘set into effective work’); and thus (3) shows how the inner determination of the students is ordered and ‘bound’ ‘through the Volk, to the destiny of the Volk in the spiritual mission’ (SU 16). The Rectoral Address as a whole is at once both the self-explication of (or ‘reflection upon’) the Dasein of the students, and the ‘actualization’ of their Dasein. The Rectoral Address is then not simply a statement about ‘self-assertion’; it is itself the ‘self-assertion of the German university’ (‘Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Üniversität’, the title of the Rectoral Address). In this way, the discourse of the Rectoral Address resembles the existential-ontological interpretation of Being and Time insofar as this is at once the self-interpretation of existence (genitive subjective and objective) and the ‘interpretive liberation [interpretierenden Befreiung] of Dasein for its most extreme existence possibility’ (SZ 303). In Being and Time, the manner in which authentic being-towards-death is a condition for entering the question of Being, though not directly stated, is nevertheless clearly implied. The insights gained by this experience are manifold: authentic being-towards-death is a directedness ‘towards’ something that is in no way a present-at-hand or ready-to-hand being. The explicit enactment of this ‘transcendence’ of the being brings Dasein before ‘something’ that is ‘not’ a being, but rather a primordial nullity. Through authentic being-towards death the ‘ontological difference’ between Being and beings is given to human experience in a compelling way. Being is here experienced in terms of a ‘not-being’ and thus is a ground upon which the traditional understanding of Being as constant presence is undermined. Also in being-towards-death Dasein can project itself on its own Being as radically finite. When existence orients itself by this most futural of possibilities, the finite ‘temporality’ of all human Being shows itself in a particularly impressive manner. This implies that the ‘clearing’ (the understanding of Being) in which beings show themselves is also finite and temporal. So authentic being-towards death makes possible the question concerning ‘Being’ and ‘Time’. In the Beiträge, Heidegger makes it explicit that authentic being-towards-death is a condition of the question of Being, indeed that the ‘question’ of beingtowards-death ‘stands in an essential relation to the truth of Being and only in this relation’. Heidegger’s ‘teaching’ on death – both in Being and Time and in the Schlageter speech – is intended for the potential students. The ‘duty’ to take over authentic being-towards-death is not an imperative that binds universally. ‘But not everyone needs to fulfill this being towards death and, in this authenticity, to

Notes to Pages 105–112

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take over the self of Da-sein. Rather, this enactment is only necessary in the circle of the task of laying the ground for the question after Being, a task which is nevertheless not limited to philosophy. The enactment of being-towards death is only a duty [Pflicht] for the thinkers of the other inception, but every essential man among those who are futurally creative can know something of this’ (G65 284–85). The final remark suggests a justification for depicting authentic being-towards-death through the example of the soldier, Schlageter, who certainly was not a ‘thinker of the other inception.’ Heidegger here returns to one of the central themes of the Rectoral Address: the self-determination of the students as both men of science and ‘Germans’ in an essential unity (so that each of these ‘equiprimordial’ moments of this determination reciprocally make the other possible). However we do not mean to suggest that the Schlageter speech represents the best example of Heidegger’s concept of authentic Historie. The latter is most fully revealed in Heidegger’s own Destruktion of the history of ontology. In only one significant respect does Schlageter’s impending fate differ from the being-towards-death of the addressees of Heidegger’s speech: for Schlageter, death is not only certain and inescapable, but also the moment, the instance and manner, of death appear fixed and determined. The connection between authentic being-towards-death and a certain ‘clarity’ is touched upon in many passages of Being and Time. See, especially SZ 384, where anticipation allows Dasein to understand itself in its ‘finite’ freedom, i.e., where it is ‘finite’ through the limitation of death and ‘free’ in choosing to let this become ‘powerful’ for itself. This acceptance of finitude or necessity in turn makes possible a ‘clear vision’ for the accidents of the situation. From here one might begin to understand the following enigmatic remark in The Origin of the Work of Art: ‘One other way how truth grounds itself is the essential sacrifice [wesentliche Opfer]’ (Hw 48). This is suggested in a passage from a 1934 lecture course in which Heidegger clarifies what he means by ‘resoluteness’: ‘Resoluteness is nothing like the blind accumulation of a great mass of some so-called willpower, but the openness for the mystery and action that is enraptured by Being [in das Sein entrückte Handeln], to which the possibility of going under, i.e. sacrifice [der Opfer], is implicitly close by’ (G38 160). See the discussion in Being and Time on how resoluteness ‘situates’ Dasein in the ‘spatiality’ and ‘place’ appropriate to Dasein (SZ 299). In an explanation for his decision to reject his appointment to the chair of philosophy in Berlin, titled, ‘Schöpferisches Landschaft: Warum Bleiben wir im Provinz’, Heidegger describes his own experience of the elemental forces of his mountain ‘work-world’ in terms similar to those in which Schlageter’s Heimat is depicted. This essay is particular striking because Heidegger here, unlike the ‘Schlageter’ speech, speaks directly of philosophizing, indeed his own philosophizing (something on which Heidegger is usually reticent). Still, the influence and ‘creativity’ of the landscape are difficult to understand: for, on the one hand, Heidegger stresses the elemental, autonomous and spontaneous nature of the landscape – the ‘gravity’ of the mountains, growth of pines, blooming meadows – and how it ‘imposes’ itself on those who dwell there; on the other hand, Heidegger stresses that the ‘work’ (Arbeit) of Dasein (and here he intends both his own work and

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that of the peasants) ‘first opens the space for this mountain reality’ and describes the Being of the land as a ‘Geschehen’, thus as something historical. ‘The way of the work stays immersed in the happening [Geschehen] of the landscape. When in deep winter night, a wild snowstorm blows and rages against the hut and everything is imposed upon [verdrängt] and veiled, that is the high time of philosophy. Its questioning must then become simple and essential’ (G13 10). In his 1969 address to the residents of his home town, ‘700 Jahre Messkirch’, Heidegger returns to this theme, employing the same language of ‘forces’ within the Heimischen that oppose the technological powers of the Unheimishchen that uproot genuine dwelling. ‘The power of the Unheimischen appears so to overpower man, that he no longer stands a chance against it. How could we defend ourselves against the pressure of the Unheimischen? Only if we awaken continually the favourable and wholesome and preservative forces of the Heimischen, so that we ever again bring the well-springs of the Heimischen to flow and procure for their stream and influence the right course. Such a thing remains most likely possible and lastingly effective, where the forces of surrounding nature and the echo of historical tradition remain together, where the original [das Herkommen] and the cherished old customs [Sitte] determine human Dasein’ (G16 575–76; emphasis added). From Being and Time on, Heidegger teaches that Dasein is always removed from what is most near, most familiar, most essential and proper to it: ‘Dasein is indeed ontically not only near or even the nearest – we ourselves are it. Nevertheless, or even precisely because of this, it is ontologically the most distant’ (SZ 15). This theme recurs in Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin with respect the problematic of the distance in which a historical people stands before what is its ‘own’. Because of this remove, such a people is ‘not at home’ and confronts the difficulty of appropriation and ‘becoming homely’ (see especially G53 153–179). Also, recall here the passage from the lecture, ‘Introduction to Academic Studies’, (discussed above in Chapter 2): ‘Can academic studies yet be seized [ergriffen] as a whole, holding itself in the world-nearness, which it should have? The singular existence in the whole of the world, which academic study was and should still be, ought again be awakened [erweckt]’ (G28 349). The focus of our discussion in this and the preceding chapter lies on Heidegger’s concern with identifying and ‘awakening’ the ‘Haltung’ (disposition, posture, comportment) of philosophic questioning within the students. In each of the texts to which we have turned for clarification as to the character and source of this Haltung, one finds that it is never treated in isolation as a human, subjective capacity or character, but always in conjunction with the ‘world’ as ‘whole’, more simply as a way of ‘being in the world’ and thus in relation to a community of Dasein, other beings, natural forces, ‘world-forming powers’.

Chapter 4: Philosophic Pedagogy and Historical Community 1

The concluding remarks of Einleitung return to this theme. Heidegger here distinguishes the true ‘effectiveness’ of philosophy from the kind of effect that is

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publicly expected from philosophy. ‘With philosophizing there begins the wandering to the heights of the high peaks of the great. And if some of us from time to time wonder why this does not have an effect [wirken], then we thereby forget, that greatness only has an effect on greatness. But if we understand that, then we remember that it is not essential whether or not we prevail over our contemporaries, but rather that we must procure for ourselves an inner greatness, through which we conquer our own dispositions [Grillen]’ (G27 401). We have seen how Heidegger’s pedagogy assumes that the students have a latent will to experience the ‘simple, the essential, the great’ (G16 184). To attribute ‘greatness’ itself (as opposed to the capacity therefore) to the students would surely degrade any meaning to the term. But note that in redefining greatness as an ‘inner greatness’ and by conceiving this as something which ‘we must’ – and by implication can – procure for ‘ourselves’, Heidegger seems to move away from traditional notions of nobility (or the capacity for true nobility) as a rare natural gift. Heidegger’s presentation of the possibility of philosophy as something that belongs to the ‘essence’ of man (as a latent capacity of the students in general) also evinces this movement away from the classical understanding. On these matters, Heidegger appears closer to Kant. The latter conceives the concerns with nobility, honour and the beautiful as moral concerns of all human beings. Nobility is redefined as ‘dignity’ (Würde) and ‘honour’ is conceived as ‘respect’ (Achtung). In any case, Kant surely presents a more egalitarian account of the noble. Dignity and respect have their ground and support in the moral law of reason. Every human being can master his sensible nature and act in accord with the moral law out of pure respect for the law. In fulfilling his duty, man makes himself worthy of ‘respect’ in his own eyes, and the eyes of others. Heidegger was attentive to this aspect of Kantian morality, i.e., the manner in which Kant establishes the possibility of a kind nobility on the essence of the finite human being. This is evident from the fact that, in both of his expositions of the Kantian analysis of the moral feeling of ‘respect’ Heidegger saw fit to quote a remark from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: ‘respect’ is a way of being of the self, on the grounds of which it does ‘not throw away the hero in its soul’ (KPM 153–54; see also BP 135). Accordingly, Heidegger can be said to follow Kant. (1) Greatness is ‘internalized’ in that it arises out of self-conquest and the fulfilment of an inner capacity. It is thus ‘non-public’, i.e., it does not depend on the ‘recognition’ of others. (2) The capacity for greatness is, in a certain sense, more ‘common’ for Heidegger than it is for the classics: it depends not on peculiar natural gifts, but is latent in Dasein as such (or, at least, the Dasein of the German students). (3) Greatness is not simply attractive, but a ‘duty’ that is binding upon Dasein. As Heidegger says: ‘Philosophy ought to become a necessity of our own essence’ (G27 4). Yet, for Heidegger the ‘internality’ is that of Dasein, not of the soul or moral subject. Moreover, Heidegger does not ground the capacity for spiritual nobility on a universal principle or law. Accordingly, in his treatment of the phenomenon of respect, Heidegger treats the moral law as something derivative that does not become manifest ‘objectively’, but rather in a ‘more original, non-objective, and unthematic way as duty and action’ (KPM 110). Though the possession of the capacity for greatness – e.g., philosophizing – may belong to human beings as such, the conditions for the awakening and fulfilment of this capacity are matters of historical destiny of peoples and individuals who belong to historical peoples.

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Nobility is thus profoundly ‘accidental’ such that man is given ‘only very few glimpses of the pinnacle of his own possibility, but otherwise moves in the midst of his beings’ (KPM 262). Thus for Heidegger the higher ‘duties’ are never universal. Heidegger’s exhortations must be considered with a view to his intended auditors. This point is made in the Beiträge (a book addressed ‘for the few’ who question and for the ‘rare’ of the ‘highest courage’): ‘But not everyone needs to fulfil this Being towards death and in this to take over the self of Da-sein in this authenticity, but rather this fulfilment is only necessary in the sphere of the task of the ground-laying of the question of Being, a task, which in any case is not limited to philosophy. The fulfilment [Vollzug] of Being-towards death is only a duty [Pflicht] for the thinkers of the other beginning, but every essential man among those who are futurally creative can know something of that’ (G65 285, 11). (4) For Kant, moral education is problematic because duty consists in a free, internal submission to the moral imperative. Education by example, exhortation and precept are questionable not only on the grounds of their effectiveness, but primarily because they involve an appeal to vanity, fear and one’s own advantage – all of which are impure incentives that impugn the spirit of morality. Such means are helpful merely in the education of the ‘degraded minds’ and the simply uneducated (Kants Werke Vol. V, [de Gruyter: Berlin, 1968] 151–161). Like the German Idealists, Heidegger disputes Kant’s insistence on the radical disjunction between freedom and nature in the human being and seeks to understand the unifying ‘root’ of the ‘wholeness’ of human existence (see D. Henrich, The Unity of Reason, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994) 18–54). This may help us to understand a fourth way in which Heidegger, in his philosophic pedagogy, departs from Kant. In a manner reminiscent of Fichte, Heidegger appears to have less reservation than Kant concerning the employment of exhortation and ‘example’ in the education of youth. While the exemplariness (Vorbildlichkeit) of nobility is understood to be for the most part ‘hidden’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘non-public’, it is not necessarily totally hidden, but manifests itself in human conduct. Thus for example, as Rector of Freiburg, Heidegger exhorted the students in the following manner: ‘Remain aware that the primary work of education, which rests in the exemplariness [Vorbildlichkeit] of measuregiving deeds [massgebenden Wirkens], manifests spiritual rank and nobility [geistigen Rang und Vornehmheit] in all actions’ (G16 100). The Kantian formulation of the problem of moral education may not be so far removed from Heidegger’s thinking as may first appear. Scholars have shown that Heidegger’s ‘formal-indicative’ understanding of philosophic discourse (conceptuality) was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard’s method of ‘indirect communication’ (cf. J. van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 324–37). This is a way of conceiving, comprehending and ‘communicating’ to others what is in some sense ‘incomprehensible’ (as for Kant moral freedom is). For an exposition of how Kierkegaard is here responding to the problem of moral education and the ‘communicability’ of freedom in Kant, see P. Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 145–170. This view of what happens in science and philosophy, the establishment of an epochal metaphysical position of man within the whole, is first articulated in Einleitung and contemporaneous lectures in formulations that remain relatively

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constant throughout the whole course of Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger later (in a 1955 speech) describes modern technology as a ‘centuries old alteration of all measure-giving representation. Through this man becomes displaced into a different actuality. This radical revolution in the aspect of the world fulfils itself in the philosophy of modernity [Philosophie der Neuzeit]. Out of that grows a completely new position [Stellung] of man in the world and to the world. Now the world appears as an object on which calculative thinking sets its attack, which nothing should be able to resist’ (Gelassenheit, in G16 523). In What is Metaphysics? Heidegger says that, in scientific existence, ‘all comportment [Haltung] takes its guidance [Führung] from the being itself’ (G9 105). Here see the discussion of Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Chapter 3 above. At the same time, however, it ought to be pointed out that in the midst of thematic discussions on philosophy, Heidegger frequently calls attention to the danger that the task of ‘bringing philosophizing underway’ in existence – i.e., the intention of the lectures – may degenerate into unnecessary ‘talk about philosophy’. For example, after the remark cited in the following footnote, Heidegger comments: ‘Having said that, a little too much has been said about [über] philosophy, yet a reference is not to be avoided’ (G27 226; cf. G29/30 232). The danger here seems to lie in the tendency to mistake an external familiarity with the history or systematics of philosophy for philosophizing itself: ‘The possession of knowledge [Kenntnissen] about philosophy is the main cause of the deception that one would thereby be prepared for philosophizing’ (G27 5). The conventional academic ‘introduction to philosophy’ was, one will recall, criticized precisely for this inconspicuous substitution of knowledge about philosophy for a ‘living philosophizing’. In the introduction to Being and Time, it is with the same intention stressed that: ‘Our comments on the preliminary conception of phenomenology have shown that what is essential in it does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical “direction”. Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility’ (SZ 38). This inconspicuous ontological distinction between philosophy as actuality (as a field that can be known through a historical overview) and as an essential possibility of the existence of Dasein, manifestly underlies the distinction drawn between ‘talking about philosophy’ and ‘bringing philosophy underway’. The awareness of this difference surely must bear upon the contexts, intention, approach and content of Heidegger’s discourse ‘on’ philosophy. It therefore also may help one understand why, despite a constant concern with unfolding the essence of philosophy, Heidegger avoids certain topics – or at least a direct, thematic discussion of topics – that may appear very pertinent to the matter at hand. Thus despite the existentiell rootedness of philosophy in the existence of Dasein and the emphatic necessity of ‘self-reflection’ in philosophic existence, Heidegger never presents a general overview of, e.g., the ‘relation between’ philosophy and politics, philosophy and morality, philosophy and art, and so on. (Although, of course, the relation between philosophy and science is thematized, as is, in a very different manner, the relation between thinking and poetry.) Perhaps the reason why such themes are not treated in any conventional and expected manner lies not in ignorance of, or indifference to, the phenomena described in these terms, but rather a heightened awareness – not necessarily available to the reader – of how the manner of approaching and discoursing upon topics like ‘philosophy’,

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‘politics’ and ‘morality’ may harbour hidden assumptions about the Being of the phenomena that obstruct the kind of access that they in truth offer. Thus in Grundbegriffe (1929), the caution against discourse ‘about’ philosophy is tied to an explicit rejection of determining philosophy or metaphysics through comparison with art, religion and science. Philosophy as a possibility is something that ‘is’ only in its enactment. So the task is not to speak ‘about’ philosophy, but ‘from out of it’ (G29/30 86). Heidegger expands upon this distinction between philosophic and scientific education in Einleitung in die Philosophie (G27 225–26). The difference between philosophic and scientific education is here addressed with a view to the kind of knowledge that each involves and the mode of ‘communication’ proper to each kind of knowledge. The kind of knowledge, however, is in each case determined with a view to its ‘object’. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger returns to the question of the special demands placed upon students in a philosophic lecture over and against ordinary scientific instruction. Heidegger emphasizes the necessity that his students carefully follow the ‘steps’ of the lecture because these are crucial for the disclosure of the subject matter under discussion. Philosophic education is thus distinguished from scientific education in terms of the Being of the subject matter and its characteristic mode of truth (disclosure). Philosophy here differs from science in that in the former there is, strictly speaking, no ‘object’. Rather, it is a process of the disclosure of Being that must ‘each time’ achieve this manifestness ‘anew’ (EM 64–65). Accordingly, the student must participate in each successive step of the lecturer’s presentation because the ‘appropriate manifestness’ is an ‘occurrence’ which is correlated to the comportment of those who participate in the questioning. Here one sees an important implication of Heidegger’s conception of ‘Being’ as temporal and historical, rather than as a domain of permanent intelligibility that ‘is’ in itself – independent of any relation to the human being. The lecture itself – through the participation of teacher and student – ‘achieves’ the disclosure of the truth of Being. In the chapter of Introduction to Metaphysics in which this statement is made, the pursuit of the question, ‘how does it stand with Being for us?’ leads to the disclosure of Being in the form of a question or decision: it is either an ‘empty’ word or it is ‘what is most worth questioning’ (EM 66). In a 1934 lecture, Heidegger expresses (but unfortunately does not elaborate upon) the difficulty at issue here in a statement about what it means to understand thinking to be essentially ‘historical’: ‘Genuine and indeed essential questioning is borne by that obscure behest [Geheiss], out of which a question arises. The individual, who for the first time poses the question, has no power over this. In this the individual is only the passageway [Durchgang] for the history of a Volk, led by that radiant unrest, which in order to subsist demands rigor of comportment and genuineness of sensibility’ (G38 18; emphasis added). Heidegger’s own philosophic self-understanding is addressed here in an unusually direct, but still elusive, manner. In dealing with the origin of questioning, Heidegger lays the utmost importance on ‘that obscure behest’. This reminds one of other statements where Heidegger speaks of thinking and the pedagogical tasks of preparing others for thinking as something like obedience to moral duty; e.g., the Need (Not) of Being (see Chapter 3, above); the demand (Forderung) made by the call of conscience (SZ 266); and the ‘duty’ to spiritual leadership

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(SU 9, 14). Such statements suggest that if one is to participate in Heidegger’s inquiry it is necessary above all to experience or be receptive to such ‘behests’. Yet the ‘obscurity’ – here attributed to the behest itself (and not to Heidegger’s treatment) – would seem to be a significant obstacle. Such a reading is presented by C. Fynsk in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). Fynsk’s argument takes its departure from the strangeness of the voice of conscience, on the one hand, and the fact that hearing the call – a primordial (though silent) mode of discourse – is a form of openness to other Dasein. Fynsk turns from the chapter on conscience to the earlier discussion of discourse and ‘hearing’ which does indeed suggest, in an enigmatic way, that Dasein’s hearing and understanding of its ‘ownmost can-be’ is conveyed through the (silent) voice of another Dasein – what Heidegger calls (without further clarification) the ‘friend’ (SZ 163). Such considerations lead Fynsk to argue that the ‘voice of the friend’ is ultimately indistinguishable from the ‘call of conscience’ itself: ‘Dasein’s friend, then appears in a position parallel to that of Dasein’s conscience, and we may well wonder whether it is not in the position of Dasein’s conscience, thereby supplanting Dasein itself as the caller of “Guilty!”’ (Fynsk, p. 44). However, in the passage referred to by Fynsk, Heidegger says that through listening Dasein is ‘in thrall’ to Mitdasein (the ‘friend’) and ‘to itself’. While one can agree with Fynsk that the ‘friend’ can be ‘in a position parallel of Dasein’s conscience’, it is in no way evident from Heidegger’s interpretation that another Dasein can truly stand ‘in the position of’ and ‘supplant’ Dasein itself as caller. Indeed, inauthentic solicitude is described as an action in which a Dasein ‘puts itself in the position’ of the other Dasein [setzen an seine Stelle] such that the latter is ‘thrown out of its position’ [aus seiner Stelle geworfen] (SZ 121). Although ‘position’ here clearly refers to a matter of ‘concern’ (so that to take over the position of the other means to attempt to appropriate another’s worldly ‘place’ or position in a kind of rivalry), Fynsk’s way of formulating the role of another Dasein – as supplanting the call of conscience – still seems to blur the already difficult distinction between inauthentic and authentic solicitude. One can also agree with Fynsk that where Heidegger says that Dasein’s openness to its can-be at once opens Dasein to another Dasein, ‘as in hearing the voice of the friend that every Dasein carries with it’ – it is indicated that being-towards the ‘ownmost can-be’ is not a form of solipsism. For Heidegger’s remarks on friendship, which bear this point out, see G38 58–59. This does not mean, however, that being-with is constituted in and through communication, but rather in a prior existing in the same world. See BP 297: ‘Only because the Dasein is antecedently constituted as being-in-the-world can one Dasein communicate something factically to another in an existentiell manner; but this factic existentiell communication does not first constitute the possibility that one Dasein has a single world with another Dasein.’ Note that in the German, the words, ‘belonging’ (Gehören), ‘in thrall’ (hörig), and ‘hearing’ or listening (Hören) all have the same root. ‘Listening’ is an openness that is at once a ‘belonging’ and is fulfilled in relations of speaking and listening. Indeed, one can go much further and say that the possibility of death is not only the distinctive possibility that individuates, isolates and separates Dasein but at the same time the possibility in which Dasein can be most authentically united with other Dasein. In Hölderlins Hymnen, Heidegger articulates the way in which

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‘primordial community’ becomes possible in the nearness of death through the example of the camaraderie of soldiers at the front: Ability-to-hear does not first procure the relation of the one to the others, the community [Gemeinschaft], but rather presupposes it. This primordial community arises not first through the taking up of a reciprocal relationship – from this there arises mere society [Gesellschaft] – rather community is through the prior binding of every individual to that which superlatively binds and determines every individual. . . . The nearness of death as a sacrifice places each into the same nullity [Nichtigkeit], so that this becomes the source of unconditional belonging to one another. Precisely death, which each individual man must die for himself, which individuates each individual to the most extreme, precisely death and the readiness for its sacrifice first of all procures the space of the community, out of which comradeship arises. (G39 72–73) 12

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Communication at once presupposes a shared, factic being-in a world and ‘explicates’ or ‘awakens’ this ‘for the first time’. Authentic solicitude thus evinces a circular structure. This circularity also belongs to the procedure of Heidegger’s pedagogy and philosophizing generally: Heidegger attempts to ‘awaken’ latent capacities for questioning in the students (see Chapter 2); philosophic questioning and interpretation take as their point of departure what is ‘already’ understood. An understanding of this circular character requires that attention be paid to the manner in which the ‘communication’ effected through the work, Being and Time, and lecture courses, enacts and exemplifies the phenomenon of communication as it is analysed in these passages. In the German, werfen, ‘to throw’ means also ‘to give birth’, though the word is usually employed in this sense with respect to animals, as for a cat to ‘throw a litter’. Heidegger says, ‘When a dog dies or cat throws [eine Katze wirft], that is not history’ (G38 85). ‘In every instance, the particular existence of a Dasein is expressed through thrownness with respect to its facticity. That means: No Dasein comes to existence on the ground of its own decision [Beschlusses] and resolve [Entschlusses]’ (G27 331). An underlying problem here concerns the ontological difference between Existenz and ‘life’. While the categories of causality – derived from the experiences of the production of artefacts – may be appropriate for natural beings (although this remains questionable), they cannot comprehend the essence of Dasein. Being itself cannot be comprehended in terms of natural or divine causes, ontic conditions or creation. ‘As existent, Dasein never comes back behind its thrownness in such a way that it might first release this “that-it-is-andhas-to-be” from its being-its-self and lead it into the “there”’ (SZ 284). To go ‘behind’ thrownness would mean to understand it in terms of a prior cause (e.g., its self, god, nature). The paradigm would here be that of technical causality. ‘Even if Dasein is “assured” in its belief about its “whither”, or if, in rational enlightenment, it supposes itself to know about its “whence”, all this counts for nothing as against the phenomenal facts of the case: for the mood brings Dasein before the “that-it-is” of its “there”, which, as such, stares it in the face with the inexorability of an enigma’ (SZ 136).

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‘The hour of Dürer’s birth and the hour of Friederich the Great’s death are not history, because they have (post festum) subsequently become significant, but rather the birth of a man is in itself already history’ (G38 85). At stake here, with the phenomenon of ‘thrownness’, is not a question of what causes or is responsible for that which is, but the problem with the very category of causality, the questionability of the very tendency to seek ‘causes’. This does not, however, necessarily mean that all factic relations of being-withothers are simply and incomprehensibly ‘thrown’ in the same manner and, as it were, to the same extent. This is indicated in a passage where Heidegger distinguishes belonging to a Volk from belonging to a state and suggests that the latter, unlike the former, might be construed as arising from choice: ‘We say that the we is a “we” constituted according to decision [ein entscheidungsmässiges Wir]. But whether we belong to the Volk or not is never placed within the scope of our will; it cannot be decided through our resolution [Beschlussfassung]. This is because belonging to the Volk is always already, without our willing, determined on the ground of our descent [Abstammung], over which we ourselves have not decided. One can perhaps will belonging to the state, but never belonging to the Volk’ (G38 60; emphasis added). See G27 334, where Heidegger explains that Nichtigkeit pervades all ‘understanding action’ insofar as Dasein’s relations to others, things and self are determined and limited through thrownness: ‘Being-with others is limited to a determinate circle; being-with the present-at-hand is limited to a determinate accessibility, manner and scope of the manifestness of beings; and Dasein’s relation to itself is limited to determinate possibilities of self-understanding and confrontation with itself’. The thesis that Dasein is, from its ground up, indebted to the rule of the public and the tradition has far reaching implications for the philosophic interpretation of such phenomena as Being, truth, beings and world. If the world is essentially a ‘space of possibilities’, and if such possibilities are implicitly drawn from the interpretedness of the public and tradition, then the ‘world’ out of which beings are encountered is itself beholden to the way in which ‘others’ have disclosed the world and uncovered beings. Disclosure and uncovering are then never individual or spontaneous. Rather, every disclosure and uncovering occurs from out of what has already been disclosed and uncovered in the tradition. Even if something appears to have been uncovered for the first time, a rare plant e.g., such a discovery happens out of a prior understanding of plants and the region in which it is found. The new and unusual is thus encountered from out of an understanding of the familiar – the understanding through which one can orient oneself in the world. This ‘prior’ understanding is always public and traditional and the world is always ‘historical’. The difference between the ‘prior’, implicit existence of a people and the ‘explicitly shared’, future ‘determination’ of a people – along with the problem as to how the latter arises out of the former – are the focus of virtually all Heidegger’s statements about the German Volk. The distinction is expressed in an unusually accessible form in a 1934 lecture on the history of the German university. Heidegger describes the condition of the German people after the Napoleonic conquests: ‘But – in all this political impotence and fragmentation, in this misery of the Volk, there yet still lived a secret Germany [ein geheimes Deutschland]’ (G16 290). The same distinction between a ‘secret’ and an emergent ‘life’ of a people

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seems to made also in a 1945 letter. Heidegger writes: ‘Everyone now thinks about the decline [den Untergang]. But we Germans cannot go under, because we have not yet risen [aufgegangen], and must still pass through the night’ (G16 371). Despite the scholarly attention paid to Heidegger’s ‘politics’ in recent years, this fundamental issue – the question of Heidegger’s understanding of the Being of peoples and human community – has not been adequately treated. (Though one must acknowledge J. Ward’s great contribution in laying out the importance of Heidegger’s ‘völkische nationalism’ for his self-understanding of the question of Being.) We can here only broach the problem as it comes to sight in Being and Time and in the perspective of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. Conscience ‘calls Dasein back to its thrownness so as to understand this thrownness as the null basis which it has to take up into existence’ (SZ 287). See SZ 325: ‘Anticipatory resoluteness understands Dasein in its own essential being-guilty; this understanding means being the thrown ground of nullity. But taking-over of thrownness signifies that Dasein be authentic as it in each case already was’. Heidegger subsequently (1934) maintains that ‘determination’ [Bestimmung] means the ‘task of our Being’, which ‘is predetermined [vorbestimmt] from out of a dispensation [Sendung]: from out of that which from earlier presences [west] in and as our essence [Wesen], even if it also was from earlier on disguised and misinterpreted’. Determination in this sense then defines ‘the basic constitution of our historical Being’ (G38 127). In a 1934 lecture course, Heidegger speaks directly to such a misinterpretation. ‘We are authentically a “we” only in the decision, and indeed, each as individualized. It may appear as though the individuals must now be pressed together into the plurality [Mehrzahl]. But it is not that. The decision takes the individual not back to the I, but rather expands it to the self-Dasein in education’ (G38 58). (The reference to ‘education’ here refers back to a preceding elaboration of the question ‘who are we’, which takes as its point of departure the immediate ‘belonging’ of students, in their education, to the university and moves towards the facticity of their belonging to the Volk and its state. Dasein is ‘individuated’ in the question and decision as to who it is, but in this questioning finds its self – which is never a subject – as being-with in the world.) Two possibilities of misinterpretation of the relation between individual and communal Dasein have arisen from these sections of the analysis of Dasein: (1) that existentiell modification is a movement by which the self of Dasein, having lost itself in the public discourse of das Man, finds its authentic self in a solipsistic separation from others and the world; (2) That if resolute Dasein is ‘pushed into’ being-with others, this means that it first enters a plurality as an individual subject, such that being-with is something formed out of the agreement or collection of beings that are essentially individuals. In this way, a being which is essentially individual enters into a social existence and thereby becomes, as it were, collectivized. Heidegger treats both misinterpretations as based upon the failure to see how the conception of human as being-in-the-world shatters the modern understanding of man as individual subject. In addition, one could say that these misinterpretations harbour a failure to grasp the (paradoxical) circularity of the movement through which Dasein becomes who it already is. The communal whole to which Dasein belongs is indeed something prior, but it is experienced as the future (see G38 156).

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Although ‘handed down’ seems to be the most sensible translation for überkommene, it should be pointed out that Heidegger employs another term, überliefern, which is also often translated as ‘handed down’ in the sense of a transmission from out of what has been. Indeed, comparison of the different contexts in which ‘überkommen’ and ‘überliefern’ are employed suggests an important distinction between two different ways in which possibilities are given through tradition that is in accord with a strict reading of the words. That which is überkommen at once ‘comes over’ from Dasein that has been and does so in the manner of ‘overcoming’ one, such that this happens without any awareness or intention of derivation on the part of any particular Dasein. On the other hand, what is ‘überliefern’, as a ‘handing down’ or ‘delivering over’ is an action that Dasein explicitly carries out – it is synonymous with a ‘seizing’ (Ergreifen) of possibilities understood as a relation to what has been. Thus if Dasein is authentically historical, it not only ‘hands down’ possibilities to itself, but moreover, since it is thereby that possibility, it hands ‘itself’ down – for the ‘past’ has been taken over as its own and is no longer foreign. Überliefern is thereby a movement in which a given, public (here in the sense of not being ‘owned’ by anyone in particular), and ‘accidental’ inheritance of überkommene possibilities are appropriated as Dasein’s ownmost, thrown destiny. Hence possibilities are determined as the possibilities of one that exists in a determinate situation, people, language and character (all traits of thrownness which Dasein evades in subjection to the public interpretedness). It is then through überliefern that Dasein ‘becomes who it is’. This ‘handing down’ – which involves the transmutation of what has merely implicitly ‘come over’ into what is explicitly ‘handed down’– is the essential movement of ‘historical happening’ (Geschehen). As Heidegger says, ‘The resolute coming back to thrownness harbors a Sichüberliefern of überkommener possibilities in itself, although not necessarily as überkommener’ (SZ 383). The final qualification in this statement suggests that in authentic being-historical – in the act of ‘handing down’ – there is not necessarily an explicit regard for the fact that the possibilities are drawn from tradition as such. An attentive reading of section 74 suggests the need to distinguish further between ‘Überlieferung’ and ‘Wiederholung’, retrieval, in which the latter is a handing down that explicitly understands itself as the re-enactment of the origin of a tradition (see SZ 385). Heidegger maintains that the roots of liberalism lie in the modern, metaphysical conception of man as the subject. Liberalism brings about the ‘detachment of men from the community, from the primordial orders’ (G38 143, 148–9). For Heidegger’s critique of the naturalistic understanding of a Volk as ‘body’ and race see G38 65–70. Compare here the interpretation of the call of conscience in which Heidegger disputes the view that the call comes from something other than the self of Dasein. Just as Dasein is at once the one that ‘hands down’ an inheritance and the one to whom it is handed down, similarly, ‘Dasein is the caller and called at once.’ As Heidegger explains, ‘The call is indeed neither ever planned or prepared by us, yet voluntarily enacted. “It” calls, against expectation and even against one’s will. On the other hand the call comes without doubt not from someone else, who is with me in the world. The call comes from out of me and yet over me. This phenomenal finding is not to be interpreted away. It was also then taken as the impetus for the interpretation of the voice as one of a dominating, alien power in Dasein. In this direction of interpretation, one supplies a possessor

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for the power thus posited, or one takes the power itself as a self-manifesting person (God)’ (SZ 275). Heidegger’s reading of Kant, exemplifies this approach to works in the philosophic tradition. Philosophic works do not ‘imitate’ the whole of being but ‘unveil’ (and veil) it directly. Heidegger here asserts: ‘We only come closer to Kant’s authentic philosophizing if we ask . . . not about what Kant says, but instead about what happens [geschehen] in his ground-laying [of metaphysics]. The more original interpretation of the Critique carried out above aims only at exhibiting this happening’ (KPM 207). Heidegger argues that a ‘grounding’ happens in Kant’s work as the ‘unveiling of transcendence’, an unveiling from which Kant in fact ‘recoils’ (does not exploit in its possibility). The grounding is an unveiling of transcendence through a finite human being. To conceive philosophy as a historical occurrence (Geschehen) is to grasp it as a way of being-in-truth that is at the same time being-in-untruth – every disclosure involves concealing. Heidegger’s conception of philosophic works as vehicles through which ‘revealing’ and ‘concealing’ of the whole ‘happens’ entails that philosophy always involves ‘retrieval’ or repetition. What has been revealed, and subsequently submerged, can be ‘retrieved’. (Thus, in the introduction to Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger maintains that philosophy itself can be characterized only through ‘recollection’ of its history.) The remarks on philosophy as a Geschehen are made in Part Four of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, titled: ‘The Ground-laying of Metaphysics in a Retrieval’. In Being and Time’s analysis of historicality, retrieval concerns ‘possibilities of existence’, but not philosophic ‘problems’. Now, however, he clarifies the relation between such ‘possibilities’ and ‘problems’: ‘By the retrieval of a fundamental problem, we understand the opening-up of original, long-concealed possibilities, through the working-out of which it is transformed [verwandeln]. In this way, the problem first comes to be preserved in its capacity to be a problem. To preserve a problem means to liberate and keep watch over those inner forces which make it possible, . . . as a problem’ (KPM 139). Heidegger here discusses the relation between authentic Dasein and its ‘predecessors’: ‘Repetition understands the Dasein that has-been-there in its authentic possibility that has-been. . . . The primary thematization of the object of historiography projects the Dasein that has-been-there upon its most proper possibility of existence’ (SZ 394). This reflection has significant bearing on the question of how to understand what Heidegger means by ‘leadership’. For, to recall the discussion of Einleitung, leadership consists in the hidden Vorbildlichkeit, exemplification, of possibilities. The relation between follower and leader is in many respects the same as that between Dasein and its predecessors. For they are both ways of ‘being- with’ others, and both imply an understanding of the other ‘in its authentic possibility’, which means, to begin with, in its finite being-towards death. For a particularly vivid example of a ‘projection’ of the Dasein that has-been-there upon its most proper possibility, see Heidegger’s ‘Schlageter’ speech. We here return to a problem that was raised earlier in this chapter: the interpretation of authentic solicitude clearly indicates that the intervention of one solicitous Dasein (‘leaping ahead’ and ‘being the conscience of another’) helps make possible authentic existence for the other, helps him to become open to his thrown being-towards death and the situation in which he exists. But is such

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solicitude necessary for all Dasein? Or is there implied a distinction of rank between leaders and followers in which leading Dasein attain self-transparency as it were, on their own, that is to say, not through the direct solicitude of others per se, but through confrontation with the ‘example’ of predecessors, i.e., another mode of being-with others? The suggestion is plausible, but must first be qualified. Heidegger maintains that ‘following’ the example of predecessors is subsequent to and grounded in anticipatory resoluteness, but does not itself initiate existentiell modification. This reveals a difference between authentic Dasein’s relation to its predecessors, and the follower’s relation to the Dasein who acts in the mode of authentic solicitude. In the latter, solicitous Dasein intervenes in the existence of another so as to make authenticity possible. Nevertheless, the relation between authentic Dasein and its historical predecessor does indeed involve a relation of follower and leader–leaders are ‘led’ by exemplary predecessors. This is one way in which we can begin to understand how individual fates are ‘led in advance’ by communal destiny (SZ 384). For the Dasein that have-been also belong to the destiny of community, of a Volk. As Heidegger says, ‘The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been – the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero – is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness; for it is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of following-after [Nachfolge] and loyalty to what can be repeated’ (SZ 385; BT 437). The ‘following’ made possible in the repetition of possibilities cannot be imitation, and especially not imitation of something as ‘past’. Possibilities were possessed by predecessors as something possible, as forward-reaching and finite. Possibilities were possessed without knowledge of what would accrue from thought and action. To ‘repeat’ such a possibility is to re-enact precisely this forward-reaching, historical mode of possession that is hidden, ‘apparently thrust aside, overcome, and refuted by what they themselves begin and what follows them’ (G45 38). Heidegger maintains that this original dimension of the ‘possible’, the fundamental experiences of the whole, remains accessible beneath the traditions which cover them up. Accordingly, Heidegger’s forays back into the history of philosophy always aim to reawaken the original experiences of perplexity. On the level of authentic historizing – being-historical – it is then emphasized that the choosing of heroes and the loyal repetition of possibilities presupposes ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ so that what has been returns in its ‘possibility’ and is understood from out of the disclosures of angst, being-towards-death and conscience. Thereby, the existence of historical figures is projected upon their own being-towards-death. For example, Parmenides, or the ‘original opposition of Being and becoming’ that announced itself through Parmenides is said to have ‘once been set up and expressed, not as an arbitrary incidence, but rather on the ground of an initial and free resoluteness of man’ (G38 113). On the level of ontological interpretation, the philosophic comprehension of the history of thought, its beginning in particular, presupposes the insight into the temporality of existence and of the understanding of Being. This insight must itself arise out of anticipatory resoluteness. The relation between Dasein and its exemplary predecessors, i.e., the manner in which Dasein that have-been are to be understood, is illustrated in Heidegger’s peculiar manner of depicting such figures, one could say perhaps, those ‘heroes’ that he has chosen. Heidegger displays utter indifference to the biographical

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‘facts’ about the lives of the philosophers and focuses entirely on the dispensation of Being that manifests itself in the ‘work’ of the thinker (the way in which Being is ‘ins-Werk-setzen’ through the word). Thus with respect to Nietzsche, e.g., the ‘man’ is projected as a ‘Dasein that has-been-there’ in terms of ‘its most proper possibility of existence’ (SZ 394). In Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation everything that accrues to the man (which Nietzsche himself presents so vividly in Ecce Homo) – even the ‘name’ – becomes indifferent. ‘“Nietzsche” – the name of the thinker stands as the title for the matter [Sache] of his thinking’ (Ni 9; cf. Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, p. 58). The ‘matter’ of his thinking is the ‘being as such and as a whole’; the thinking of which is the recapitulation and completion of the fated possibility of the ancient question, ‘what is the being as such and as whole’. (The answer to this question defines Nietzsche’s ‘metaphysical position’: will to power and eternal return of the same.) As Heidegger says: ‘Concepts like “Volk” and “state” cannot in general be defined, but rather must be conceived as historical [geschichtliche], to which a particular historical Being belongs. On the other hand, we cannot dispense with a determinate-unified concept of the Volk. Everything depends on responding to the question after the essence of the Volk in the same style in which we asked it . . . Thus here we may not ask: “what is a Volk?” in order to come to a universal definition [Allerweltsdefinition], rather: “Who is this Volk, that we ourselves are?”’ (G38 68–69). Heidegger always conjoins, in a paradoxical manner, the resolute determination of Dasein’s self and Volk (i.e., its Wesen) with the existentiell-historical question ‘who are we?’ This only makes sense if ‘resoluteness’ is understood, as Heidegger defines it, as openness to the self-concealment of Being that is closedoff through the dictatorship of the public. Regarding this conjunction of ‘questioning’ and ‘determination’ see Introduction to Metaphysics: ‘For philosophy, what man “is”, is not written somewhere in heaven. We must rather say: 1. the determination of the essence of man is never an answer but essentially a question. 2. The asking of this question and the decision in this question are historical, and not merely in a general sense; no this question is the very essence of history. 3. The question of what man is must always be taken in its essential bond with the question of how it stands with Being. The question of man is not an anthropological question but a historically meta-physical question’ (EM 109). The resolute determination of the destiny and essence of a people coincides with an act of calling this essence into question. Because this questioning is philosophical (metaphysical), philosophy carries out the essential determination a people. Thereby, philosophy for Heidegger holds a position of ‘sovereignty’ in human affairs. Heidegger describes resoluteness as the ‘choosing finding [wählende Finden] of the possibility of its existence’ (SZ 384). ‘Finding’ here implies ‘inheriting’, as can be gleaned from the corresponding coupling of ‘inheriting’ and ‘choosing’ in the comment that ‘Dasein . . . hands itself down into an inherited, but yet chosen, possibility [in einer ererbten, aber gleichwohl gewälhten Möglichkeit]’ (SZ 384). The word ‘finding’ here is especially illuminating in that it of itself points to the manner in which Dasein’s thrownness (and thrown possibilities) are disclosed, the ‘Befindlichkeiten’, dispositions (‘states-of-mind’) through which Dasein ‘finds itself’ as Being-in-the-world. In the chapter on historicality this disposition is determined as ‘reverence’ (Ehrfurcht) for retrievable possibilities (itself grounded

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in angst). Resoluteness, as this articulated unity of ‘finding’ and ‘choosing’, thus indicates how authentic being-historical enacts a unity of the twofold structures of Being-in-the-world implied in the following dualities: Befindlichkeit and understanding; thrownness and projection; facticity and existentiality; being-guilty and being-towards death; resoluteness and anticipation; having-been and beingfutural. While temporality is adduced as the ontological source of this unity, the exposition of historicality is simply a ‘more concrete working out of temporality’, i.e., it is the concrete, ontic, and one might say experiential fulfilment of the wholeness and unity of Being-in-the-world (SZ 382). In addition it should be noted that this lecture, What is Metaphysics? was delivered on the formal occasion of Heidegger’s self-introduction to Freiburg University when he assumed his position on the faculty; it was Heidegger’s ‘commencement lecture’ [Antrittsvorlesung]. In our discussion of Einleitung in die Philosophie it was been pointed out how Heidegger took advantage of customary academic expectations for an ‘introductory’ discussion at the outset of a course in order to execute a genuine ‘introduction’ to the possibility of a philosophic questioning, i.e., to awaken a ‘living philosophizing’. Similarly it seems that in What is Metaphysics? Heidegger employs the formal social event of his ‘introduction’ to the academic community to enact a historical founding of that community. He explicitly retrieves the ‘essence’ of this community – its essential possibility – through the awakening of common self-questioning. In this respect it is remarkable that in subsequent comments, stretching from Introduction to Metaphysics to the Der Spiegel interview, the project of the Rectoral Address is explained by reference to the problem of the university as it is posed in What is Metaphysics?. The statement on the idea of science at the beginning of What is Metaphysics? is intentionally incomplete. While Heidegger initially maintains that the most proper intention of science is submission to the manifestation of the ‘being itself’, he eventually takes science back into its metaphysical, philosophic essence. The metaphysical essence of science is not entirely concealed in present-day science. Heidegger begins with an aspect of the metaphysical essence of science that would be acknowledged by the scientists themselves: the commitment to objectivity as an inquiry into the ‘beings themselves’. As the lecture unfolds, the scientific pursuit of the ‘the being itself, and nothing else’ is gradually called into question. This pursuit is shown to involve a neglect of the Nothing. Such an omission is tantamount to the neglect of the ‘being as a whole’ and thus of the Being of beings. The full essence of metaphysics, the idea of science, lies in the question not only about the ‘beings themselves’, but of das Seiende als solche im Ganzen, the being as such as (or in) the whole. Therefore, the one-sided, neglectful commitment to the being itself, in fact falls prey to what, in On the Essence of Truth, is called ‘errancy’, a mode of dwelling in the manifestness of manifest beings which conceals the ‘whole’ (which becomes manifest as the Nothing, i.e., what is not a being). ‘The disclosure of beings as such is simultaneously and intrinsically the concealing of beings as a whole’ (G9 198). It is therefore significant that Heidegger’s attempt to reveal science’s one-sided commitment to the ‘being itself’ corresponds with the interpretation of the fundamental attunement of angst. For the ‘being as a whole’ is precisely what attunements disclose.

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Notes to Pages 144–153

There is in Being and Time a fuller elaboration of how science can ‘assume leadership [die Führung übernehmen] for being-in-the-world’ on the basis of the ‘new standing-of-Being’ towards the world that it attains (SZ 62). This is possible even as the scientific comportment remains a ‘founded’ mode of being-in-the-world. See SZ 226: ‘“There is” truth only so far and so long as Dasein is. Beings are only uncovered when and disclosed only so long as Dasein is in general’. Compare here the statement that ‘science helps [verhilft] in its ways the beings to themselves for the first time’, with the description of authentic solicitude in Being and Time: ‘This solicitude . . . helps [verhilft] the other to become transparent [durchsichtig] in their care and become free for it’ (SZ 122; emphasis added). It is important to see that these are not simply formally similar statements about inherently different matters. For, as the passage cited says, ‘man’ is a being among others. ‘Helping’ beings enter the world – the ‘service’ of science to the being – includes helping the human being to ‘show itself’ in its Being: care. Thus here again ‘leadership’ is not domination of the other, but ‘service to’ the other. The possibility of leadership implies a kind of submission. Compare here Heidegger’s interpretation of the phenomenon of ‘command’ (Befehlen) in the Nietzsche lectures. ‘Authentic commanding is obedience [Gehörchen] towards what is taken over in free responsibility’ (Ni 611; emphasis added). In Vom Wesen des Grundes, Heidegger responds to misunderstandings about the ‘centrality’ of Dasein in a way that points out how we are to conceive the historical ‘centrality’ of philosophizing, the university and the German Volk. The ‘essence of Dasein’ indeed stands ‘in the center’ (im Zentrum), but in its transcendence – the movement of ‘stepping beyond’, existing in the midst of and understanding all beings in Being – it is ‘exzentrisch’, a ‘center’ that reaches out beyond itself (G9 162). In a similar manner, it seems, Heidegger describes his work as arising out of – as ‘centred’ within – ‘allemanic-Schwabian Bodenständigkeit’, but from this centre it ‘ex-centrically’ reaches out to encompasses the German university, the German Volk, Europe and the destiny of the West.

Epilogue 1

This ‘essential matter’, Heidegger goes on to say, is that ‘we stand in the midst of the completion of nihilism’. Throughout this study, we have called attention to the ‘circular’ procedure of Heidegger’s philosophic pedagogy. The latter always involves an explication of possibilities that are ‘already’, implicitly present in historical Dasein. Accordingly, Heidegger adds here that the possibility of ‘twisting-free’ [Verwindung] from nihilism is already ‘announced in the poetic thinking and singing of the Germans’. At the same time however, the Germans, least of all, have perceived this, ‘because they strive to adapt themselves to the standards of the nihilism that surrounds them’ (SU 39).

Index

Aristotle 61, 169 attunements (Stimmungen) 23, 58–79, 169–73 Bildung 46–8, 50–1, 118 boredom 65–79, 170–2

Kant, Immanuel 46, 48, 92, 159, 181–2, 190 leadership 8, 17–20, 24, 33–4, 44, 78–9, 103, 114–23, 127, 140, 143–5, 156, 159–60, 165, 168, 169, 190–1, 194

communication (Mitteilung) 118, 125, 127–8, 140, 146, 186 community 130–4, 136–7, 141, 143–6 conscience 43–4, 123–32, 129, 132, 156, 164, 185, 188

Nietzsche, Friedrich 27–8, 159, 181 nihilism 27–8, 45, 67–9, 80–6, 92, 111, 150, 154, 168, 172–3, 194 Novalis 57

death 106–12, 125, 178–9, 139, 182 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 159, 182 freedom 10, 107–8, 164, 178, 179

people (Volk) 17, 22, 24, 25–6, 103, 140–1, 146–7, 187–8, 191–2, 194 Plato 162–3, 167 poetry 23, 62–3

Gadamer, Hans Georg 165

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 92, 160

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 157, 161, 165 historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) 9, 107, 134–43 of philosophy 11–12, 17–20, 22, 24, 38–40, 190–3 Hölderlin, Friedrich 25, 62, 180 Husserl, Edmund 174

Schlageter, Albert Leo 104–13

inheritance 137–9

Velkley, Richard 159

Jaspers, Karl 120–1

York von Wartenburg, Paul Graf 1

oratory 61, 169

technology 160, 176, 180, 183 temporality 13, 70–2, 158, 163, 178 tradition (Überlieferung) 9, 134–41, 189 university 32–4, 43–50, 92, 99–100, 115, 149–50, 167, 193