Heidegger’s Style: On Philosophical Anthropology and Aesthetics 9781350083394, 9781350083424, 9781350083400

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Heidegger’s Style

Also available from Bloomsbury The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger The Ethical Imagination in Shakespeare and Heidegger, Andy Amato Errant Affirmations, David J. Kangas Poetry and Revelation, Kevin Hart Heidegger and Authenticity, Mahon O'Brien A Philosophy of the Essay: Scepticism, Experience and Style, Erin Plunkett The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling, Christopher Yates

Heidegger’s Style On Philosophical Anthropology and Aesthetics Markus Weidler

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Markus Weidler, 2018 Markus Weidler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez-Costa Cover image: Singing Man, 1928 (bronze), Ernst Barlach, (1870-1938) © Cleveland Museum of Art, USA / Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection / Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8339-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8340-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-8341-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To my parents, Armin and Karin Weidler, and to the memory of my uncle, Dieter Vollrath

Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: The Decisive Decade from 1936 to 1946

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Part One  Back to the 1780s 1 Philosophical Anthropology: Herder’s Pantheism as a Subtext for Heidegger’s First Schelling Lecture 19 2 Revelation: Heidegger’s Second Schelling Lecture vis-à-vis Scheler and Simmel 43 3 “The Origin of the Work of Art”: A Critique of Schiller Incognito and the Beginning of Artisan Thinking 70 Part Two  Battleground Nietzsche 4 Heidegger’s Nietzsche Volumes: Nihilism, Physiological Aesthetics, and Volitional Metaphysics 89 5 Hegel and Nietzsche in Holzwege: Religious Skepticism, Witnessing, and “Subjectity” 107 Part Three  Poetics at the “Zero Hour” 6 “Why Poets?”: Cultural Rebirth and the Poetic Inception of Piety 133 7 The Letter on Humanism: Modulations of the German Poet in a Demonic Text 155 CODA  Being and Time as an “Old-Fashioned” Book? 8 Freedom for Death and Prussian Resolve 179 Conclusion: Faith and Fanaticism after Heidegger

201

Notes Selected Bibliography Index

211 243 255

Acknowledgments My greatest debt is to Katherine Arens, who has been a wonderful mentor and friend to me over the years. She opened my eyes to the importance of intellectual history for philosophical inquiry, and my interest in Heidegger was kindled by a conference course I took with her during my graduate student years at the University of Texas at Austin. Our conversation continues to this day, and she has been exceptionally generous in sharing her expert knowledge and providing critical feedback. I cannot be sure that she likes every single part of this book, but without her it would never have been written. Kathleen Higgins and the late Robert Solomon guided me with care and patience through the ever-expanding maze of Nietzsche scholarship, and they showed me how philosophy can be a way of life. Their passion for teaching remains an inspiration for my own efforts to promote student-centered learning. During a two-year stint at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, I had the privilege to meet Julian Young, one of the foremost contributors to contemporary Heidegger studies. I have fond memories of our conversations, and Young remains my role model for clear writing and for resisting the tendency to explain Heidegger in terms of Heidegger. Also among my former Auckland colleagues, John Bishop, Robert Wicks, and Imran Aijaz broadened my horizon in discussing religion, aesthetics, and anything in between. The same can be said of Aaron Simmons, whom I met during several conferences over the last few years and whose intellectual verve is contagious in the best possible way. My colleagues at my home institution, David Wisdo and Daniel Van Kley, have helped me to stay versatile in my philosophical interests and not get preoccupied with one era too much. Dr. Walter-Christian Krügerke both deepened and expanded my thinking about Paul Tillich. Further down memory lane, Dr. Hans Scholl turned an “early switch,” when I took my very first philosophy class with him at high-school level. Much later, at the university, I was lucky again, when I met Thomas Miles, a Kierkegaard specialist and one of the wittiest members of my philosophy cohort. Everybody needs a fellow traveler in those formative years, and Tom was mine. As for the present work, I would also like to thank Marcus Bullock and Sabine Gross, who offered valuable advice during the later stages of this project. Marcus

Acknowledgments 

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read several advanced drafts and helped me iron out some uneven passages (especially in the sixth and seventh chapters). He is a fountain of wisdom and I learned a lot from him in the process. J. Aaron Sanders, Nuria Anne Chaparro, Fritz Madjid Oesman, and Matthias Raible lifted my spirits whenever I thought this book would never get finished, and Patrick Jackson helped me push it over the edge with some last adjustments in the concluding section. Any remaining shortcomings are my sole responsibility. Another big thank you is due to my editors at Bloomsbury, Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace, who were supportive every step along the way and so made the publication process a very rewarding experience. In more ways than I can express, I am indebted to my two families in Germany and Japan. My parents gave me the courage to go with my passions, and I know that they would always have my back. My brother, Mischa Weidler, remains my best buddy and my soul mate. My parents-in-law, Kenji and Shizuko Izumi, welcomed me into their home in Kumamoto, Japan. During each visit, my mother-in-law continues to spoil us with her amazing cooking, and my fatherin-law refrains from crushing me on the tennis court (though he easily could). Above all, I am grateful for my wife Mariko Izumi and my son Fabian. They helped me stay on task, but also reminded me that there is life outside of books. This work is their achievement, too.

Abbreviations Note: The complete reference information for each title can be found in the Selected Bibliography.

Works by Heidegger BT Heidegger, Being and Time FCM Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics H Heidegger, Holzwege NI

Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band

NII

Heidegger, Nietzsche: Zweiter Band

N1

Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume One [in the English compilation]

N2

Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volume Two

N3 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume Three N4 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume Four OBT Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track P Heidegger, Pathmarks ST Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom SZ Heidegger, Sein und Zeit VA Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze W Heidegger, Wegmarken

Abbreviations

Works by Other Authors EM Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen F Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit [aka “Freiheitsschrift”] GKJ Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment KHA Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology PO Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung VL Simmel, The View of Life

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Introduction: The Decisive Decade from 1936 to 1946

In Vorträge und Aufsätze (Public Lectures and Essays) Heidegger declares: “Once it has become anthropology, philosophy perishes from metaphysics.” Similarly, in The Metaphysics of German Idealism, published as volume 49 of the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works), Heidegger points the reader to § 10 of his magnum opus, Being and Time, next to §§ 36–38 of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, in order to unequivocally set his project apart from “any kind of philosophical anthropology” (GA49 33). Remarks like this can be found all across Heidegger’s writings. The last time he had anything positive or neutral to say about “philosophical anthropology” is in his 1922 lecture “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle.”1 From that time forward, whenever Heidegger uses this phrase, he vests it with decidedly negative connotations. Prompted by this textual situation, the present study seeks to answer two related questions, which I take to be central for understanding the significance of Heidegger’s work overall. First, what are we to make of Heidegger’s frequent but elusive dismissals of philosophical anthropology? Who are the actual targets of this critique, and why does Heidegger not engage two of the most likely candidates in this context, Max Scheler and Georg Simmel? Second, what are the philosophical as well as stylistic aspects of his writing that allowed him to attract a growing audience before, during, and after the Second World War? Differently put, what is the secret to Heidegger’s persistent popularity—his rhetorical “hook”—which seems to render his renown as a thinker impervious to any detailed exposure of his various personal and political lapses? As I demonstrate in the course of my inquiry, confronting the puzzle over Heidegger’s peculiar relation to philosophical anthropology is one of the most expedient ways to elucidate his die-hard popularity. Specifically, I aim to show how Heidegger’s prickly charm springs from his great stylistic ingenuity in crafting a novel genre of philosophical writing. Such writing is placed in the service of an alternative mode of inquiry, which may be dubbed artisan thinking. The appeal of this new writing style

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pertains to its interventionist qualities, for it is tailored to subvert the public image of university philosophy, particularly in the then-dominant versions of neo-Kantianism. The perpetual task Heidegger assigns to artisan thinking is staying on the lookout for an unprecedented artistic conduit through which the Spirit (in the ecumenical sense of Geist) might reenter our destitute times. As a feature that remains integral to the rhetorical efficacy of Heidegger’s hook, this challenge gives an adventurous flair to philosophy by converting it into a quest for hidden vessels ready to receive the history-shattering power of revelation, which could strike at any moment. Both of the aforesaid issues, Heidegger’s intricate relation to philosophical anthropology and the rhetorical complexity of his writing style, still await thorough treatment in contemporary Heidegger scholarship. As for the first puzzle, it is a common observation that Heidegger retained a positive attitude toward Scheler, especially after Scheler’s premature death in 1928, which cast a shadow over the famous encounter between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos the following year.2 In fact, examining Scheler’s posthumous presence as an implicit reference point during that encounter makes for a good segue into this complex interwar constellation. However, what is routinely glossed over in most comments on Heidegger’s relation to Scheler is the fact that some of Heidegger’s most trenchant criticisms of Dilthey, for example in “Augustine and Neo-Platonism” (1921) and even more harshly in “The Time of the World Image” (1938), would seem to apply mutatis mutandis to Scheler as well. Delivered on the occasion of Scheler’s unexpected passing, one of Heidegger’s most suggestive comments on his “fraternal rival”3 is contained in the 1928 lecture course Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic), to which I will turn at the beginning of my second chapter. Yet, there are three other texts worth mentioning at the outset, even though Heidegger confines himself to rather terse dismissals of Scheler in these places: the 1925 lecture course Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (translated as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena), which, in part, harks back to his previous criticism of Scheler, contained in a 1923 lecture titled Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity; and, finally, the 1929/30 lecture The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, which stands out, because here Heidegger puts his finger on Scheler’s “fundamental error,” as he sees it (FCM 192) (GA29/30 283). Upon scrutiny, however, these critical statements generate more questions than they answer, thus leaving the

Introduction

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section “In memoriam Max Scheler,” inserted in Heidegger’s aforementioned lecture on The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, as the most promising starting point for further inquiry. The plausibility of this heuristic claim can be gleaned from the following. In Prolegomena, Heidegger puts forth a provisional commentary on Scheler’s work viewed in conjunction with select writings by Husserl (GA20 124–29). He acknowledges these authors as “today’s leading researchers in phenomenology” (GA20 124). In a later segment (GA20 174–82), Heidegger’s comments on Scheler become increasingly critical. Thus, he begins his subsequent observations with the disclaimer that he is going to offer “only some characteristic determinations,” without “attending to Scheler’s theory of the person more closely, since this would not yield anything new for our [Heidegger’s] critical questions” (GA20 175). As a first hint at Scheler’s presumed limitations, Heidegger notes that Scheler, to his credit, emphasizes the “idiosyncrasy of being-a-person” (die Eigentümlichkeit des Personseins), but in the end his account of the person as a “performer of acts” (Aktvollzieher) retains the “tendency to delineate acts as something non-psychic over against anything psychic.” For that reason, Scheler’s conception of the person, Heidegger implies, still remains tied to the domain with which it is contrasted. Thus, “as a matter of principle,” Scheler’s “account of the intentional, of acts, the person, and the human being does not lead us anywhere,” because he “continues to take his bearings from the traditional definition of the human being as animal rationale” (GA20 174–75). In fact, a few pages down, Heidegger returns to the same criticism and adds the following: “What we can discern in Scheler, at least occasionally, is the adoption of traditionally interpreted AugustinianNeoplatonic and Pascalian motifs of thought” (GA20 180). For Heidegger, this means that “Scheler explicitly includes the specifically Christian definition of man into his version of the idea of person [Person-Idee],” which “renders his position even more dogmatic by several degrees” (ibid.). On the next page, Heidegger offers a poignant formulation in summarizing this connection. For our purposes, this is the most interesting passage on Scheler, in Prolegomena. According to Scheler, Heidegger submits, “[t]he human being is an eternal out-towards [ein ewiges Hinaus-zu], just like Pascal calls the human being a God-seeker [Gottsucher]. The only meaningful idea of the human being (Scheler) is a theomorphism through and through, the idea of an X which is a finite and living image [Abbild] of God, a parable [Gleichnis] of God, one of His infinite shadow figures on the wall of being” (GA20 181).4

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Heidegger’s Style

Previously, Heidegger had leveled a similar criticism against Scheler in a 1923 lecture titled Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity (GA63 25–7), to which Judith Wolfe has drawn attention.5 Yet here, in Prolegomena, one would have expected Heidegger to engage with Scheler’s most pertinent work on this topic, namely, On the Eternal in Man, which was available in print since 1921. Charging Scheler with Christian “dogmatism” without considering his most extensive comments on the subject appears hasty. As far as Heidegger’s text in Prolegomena is concerned, he will return to Scheler’s work one more time (GA20 302–6). In this place, Heidegger’s main concern is to distinguish his phenomenological account of “care” (Sorge) from Scheler’s phenomenological account of “resistance” (Widerstand) and to underscore that the former is more fundamental than the latter. Yet, the way Heidegger spells out this contrast appears inconclusive for two reasons. First, he argues that the original relation between human existence and world cannot plausibly be explicated in terms of “will and resistance” (Wille und Widerstand) as Scheler would have it. Instead, the worldness (Weltlichkeit) of world is a matter of “care and signification” (Sorge und Bedeutsamkeit) (GA20 304). Resistance, Heidegger argues, cannot hold the key to understanding the fundamental phenomenon of world, since any resistance can only be encountered as such, if there is a “wanting-to-getthrough” (Durchkommen-wollen), that is, a “being intent on something” (Aussein auf etwas), to begin with; and being intent on something implies a care structure. However, in resorting to the expression “wanting-to-get-through,” Heidegger seems to confirm rather than disconfirm the primary status that Scheler assigns to “will and resistance.” Second, Heidegger charges Scheler with a wrongheaded “biological orientation,” which prompts him to pursue an equally misguided comparative inquiry between the way animals (including primitive life forms and one-cell organisms) may be said to a have a world and the way humans can. To be sure, Scheler does not simply approximate, much less equate, the way humans and animals encounter their world. In fact, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929/30) Heidegger himself is going to carry out precisely such a comparative inquiry, which will lead him to conclude that, unlike humans, animals are “world-poor” (weltarm) (GA29/30 284, 389). So the question is not whether such a philosophical inquiry should be conducted, but how. In the later pages of his discussion Heidegger concedes as much, when he emphasizes the general usefulness of the “interpretation of animalness” (Interpretation der Tierheit) (GA29/30 400). Hence, Heidegger’s present dismissal, in Prolegomena, of Scheler’s “biological orientation” proves a loose end.

Introduction

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In Fundamental Concepts, Heidegger provides a brief introductory remark about Scheler (GA29/30 105–6), while his main objections will not be made explicit until much later in this volume, when he comments on what he takes to be Scheler’s “fundamental error”: [W]e can see that the conception of life in terms of its intermediate position between material nature and human existence often forms the core of a general view that interprets man and everything else from the perspective of life: the biological worldview. Max Scheler recently attempted to treat this hierarchical sequence of material beings, life, and spirit in a unified manner within the context of an anthropology. He did so in the conviction that man is the being who unites within himself all the levels of beings—physical being, the being of plants and animals, and the being specific to spirit. I believe this thesis to be the fundamental error [Grundirrtum] in Scheler’s position, one that must inevitably deny him any access to metaphysics. (FCM 192) (GA29/30 283)

Subsequently, Heidegger repeats this objection and, in doing so, he rejects both the notion of “living substance” (FCM 212) (GA29/30 311) and the notion of “dead matter” (FCM 236) (GA29/30 343). However, Heidegger’s remarks in these passages are rather cursory and so tend to eschew the stakes of a seminal controversy about the idea of hylozoism (intelligent substance or thinking matter), which gained momentum around the middle of the eighteenth century. This widespread debate had important philosophical repercussions in the second half of the nineteenth century, specifically in the context of “monist” philosophy which, in turn, marked an important reference point for Nietzsche and, by extension, for Scheler. In this respect, Heidegger’s gloss over the nineteenth century calls for scrutiny. Thus, he states in somewhat circuitous language that his own discussion is meant to provide a “concrete sketch [konkrete Auszeichnung] of that fundamental conception regarding the essence of life within which every consideration [Besinnung] of the essence of life moves” (italics in the original), and then he adds: “It [such concrete sketch] is one which was long neglected precisely in the nineteenth century, for all the energies devoted to research, and less because this fundamental conception of life was unknown than because it was suppressed by the prevailing mechanistic and physicalist approach to nature” (FCM 260) (GA29/30 378) [translation slightly modified]. Following John Zammito’s lead, I will attend to the hylozoism debate in my opening chapter. Heidegger’s relation to Simmel is equally involved. Simmel is not treated in any detail in Heidegger’s magnum opus or, for that matter, in any of his subsequent major publications.6 Thus, Heidegger never revisited his early and rather glib

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dismissal of Simmel in a brief commentary inserted in the opening pages of one of his 1920/1 Freiburg lectures, in a section titled “The Battle of Life Against the Historical.” This is surprising in light of some remarks by Hans-Georg Gadamer concerning the formative influence Simmel’s thought is supposed to have had on Heidegger’s philosophical development: “As early as 1923, Heidegger spoke to me with admiration of the late writings of Georg Simmel. This was not just a general acknowledgment of Simmel as a philosophical personality. The specific stimulus that Heidegger had received from his work will be apparent to anyone who today reads . . . the four ‘Metaphysical Chapters’ gathered together under the title Lebensanschauung [The View of Life].”7 Accordingly, Simmel’s conspicuous absence from Heidegger’s writings is just as baffling as Scheler’s truncated presence. In terms of its thematic organization and the sequence of chapters, the present study is based on the assumption that the period from 1936 to 1946 marks the decisive decade in Heidegger’s intellectual as well as stylistic development. For it is only in the course of his more pronounced engagement with F. W. J. Schelling and with art, from 1936 forward, that Heidegger will cash in his tantalizing remark in Being and Time about the positive ontological meaning of “performance” (Vollzug; lit. enactment or carrying out) with faint connotations of participating in natural revelation, though overtly religious language is avoided in this passage (BT 73). Natural revelation here refers to a broadly religious (noninstitutional, nondogmatic) experience of the appellative character of the surrounding world, which confronts any human agenda with a form of spiritual resistance associated with the notion of the holy, in Rudolf Otto’s sense. Already in 1918, Heidegger had sketched a review of Otto’s influential book on this subject. He agreed with Otto to the effect that the holy designated a sphere, the “objectity” (Objektität) of which was toto genere different from anything that could be integrated into universal-historical accounts of cultural development (GA60 333). Prior to 1936, Heidegger rests content with exposing the philosophical weaknesses in the prevalent theologies of his day. In other words, up until then Heidegger’s agenda is one of dismantling. He is more concerned to explain how sacred truth cannot be shared than to tell a constructive story of his own about the role human agency may play in the dynamics of revelation. This deconstructive posture is especially apparent in Heidegger’s course on “Augustine and Neo-Platonism,” for it contains Heidegger’s early critique of the most prominent liberal Protestant theologians of his time, Ernst Troeltsch and Adolf von Harnack, next to the most influential hermeneutic theorist of

Introduction

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his day, Wilhelm Dilthey. After his turn to art, Heidegger will begin to speak in a more constructive voice. However, one of the main obstacles standing in the way of an evenhanded evaluation of Heidegger’s achievements is that he provides his readers with an intellectual-historical compass, which frequently proves unreliable. Thus, in those segments of the present volume, which are concerned with the way Heidegger puts up idiosyncratic signposts in the history of philosophy, the delivery of my findings may sound quite critical. An early example of such unfiltered criticism can be found in Chapter 1, where I take issue with Heidegger’s reference to “Romantic nature philosophy” in the context of his 1936 lecture on Schelling; and there are similar instances in other chapters. Yet in unmasking these historical occlusions, the proposed reading of Heidegger is not meant to be deflationary. On the contrary, I believe Heidegger’s thought becomes even more engaging, once we break the spell of “hermetic Heidegger,” that is, once we refuse to accept the (self)portrait of Heidegger as a thinker, who distanced himself from nearly all the major contributors in his intellectual environment and so had no constructive ties to anyone among his immediate contemporaries. The working relationship with Rudolf Bultmann at Marburg for a limited period of time constitutes an important exception to this rule, but it is not enough to bring out Heidegger’s pervasive debt to the religious-philosophical discourses of the 1910s and 1920s, which point back to the pantheism controversy of the 1780s. By paying close attention to these constellations, the present study sets out to demonstrate that there is nothing paradoxical in claiming that the less cometlike we take Heidegger to be, the more interesting he becomes. In laying out the decisive decade in Heidegger’s development from 1936 to 1946, with special emphasis on its roots in the 1780s pantheism controversy, the following sequence of chapters provides the reader with a more comprehensive historical road map than is offered by comparable studies. Chapter 1 presents a close examination of Heidegger’s 1936 lecture on Schelling’s Freedom essay. (“Freedom essay” or “Freiheitsschrift” are commonly used abbreviations for Schelling’s lengthy title Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, published in 1809.) Upon scrutiny, Heidegger’s discussion shows how he treads very cautiously regarding the ties between Schelling’s philosophy of revelation and the first anthropological turn in continental philosophy, which prompted the aforesaid pantheism controversy during the 1780s.8 In his lecture Heidegger explicitly mentions this controversy,

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but in doing so he circumvents one of its most important antagonisms, namely the clash between Kant and Herder over the question whether a newly emerging, anthropology-inspired aesthetics would render the traditional (Aristotelian) notion of first philosophy obsolete. Chapter 2 treats Heidegger’s second-round critique of Schelling contained in his 1941 lecture on “The Metaphysics of German Idealism,” which can be interpreted most effectively, if considered in tandem with Scheler’s On the Eternal in Man and Simmel’s The View of Life. Chronologically, this might create the impression that the proposed course of inquiry is skipping ahead, because the following chapter will return the reader to Heidegger’s influential essay on art from the mid-1930s. Thematically, however, engaging Heidegger’s texts in this order is appropriate, according to my working hypothesis that Schelling’s work deserves special attention as one of the most important points of reference in Heidegger’s development. Above all, in 1941, Heidegger charges Schelling with “anthropomorphy” (Anthropomorphie) in ways he did not do five years earlier (GA49 73, 103). In resorting to this low-frequency term, Heidegger signals that he does not mean to present Schelling as the proponent of a simplistic anthropomorphism, which would interpret all nonhuman phenomena according to some human standard and thus render man the measure of all things. Instead, Heidegger aims to expose Schelling’s approach as resting on a flawed analogy between the divine and the human. Chapter 3 attends to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger’s second key text from the year 1936, which contains his alternative model for revelation as mediated by artworks. (In the following I will also refer to this text as “Origin essay.”) Based on a string of lectures that began in 1935, one of the widely neglected oddities pertaining to this essay is the conspicuous absence of Friedrich Schiller’s name. This omission is peculiar indeed, since Heidegger’s text is full of language that is strongly reminiscent of Schiller’s famous drive theory familiar from On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Heidegger gave a seminar on these Letters in the winter semester of 1936, that is, roughly during the same period when he revised what was to become the final version of his Origin essay.9 Furthermore, in 1934, the celebration of Schiller’s 175th birthday marked a public spectacle that was, in large part, co-opted by the Nazi movement.10 Since Schiller was clearly on Heidegger’s mind during that time, the noninclusion of Schiller in the Origin essay appears to be deliberate. What might explain this bypass is the contrast between Schiller’s egalitarian approach to aesthetic education and Heidegger’s exclusivism with respect to art’s potential

Introduction

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for reshaping historical self-understanding. For Schiller, it can be shown that artistic sensibility marked the “beginning of humanity” according to the “ideal of equality.”11 For Heidegger, what makes great artworks great is their capacity for imparting a new world-historical vision to a people. That is to say, Heidegger explicates the revelatory power of great works of art in terms of their missionsponsoring quality, which assigns different historical destinies to different peoples. Equally relevant for the purposes of this study is the observation that, like Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, Schiller’s aesthetics received crucial impulses from the pantheism controversy, in general, and from the aforementioned clash between Kant and Herder, in particular. Once we resituate Schelling and Schiller in this 1780s context, it becomes clear that there is an important trajectory of philosophical influence leading from these pioneering thinkers to the later versions of philosophical anthropology proffered by Scheler and Simmel. In Part Two, starting with Chapter 4, I set out to demonstrate how Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche shows similar symptoms of dislocating an author by detaching his claims from the historical context of their origin. In Schelling’s case, it became clear that Heidegger effectively veils this thinker’s roots in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the anthropological revolution in continental philosophy took place. In the present case, Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s “physiological aesthetics”12 circumvents important developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, most notably the monist movement led by Ernst Haeckel. This additional historical bypass is effected, in large part, by Heidegger’s claim that the creative phase of German idealism dies with Hegel in 1831, and what follows in the decades after his passing is but an affair of epigones. The elevation of Hegel as the last creative representative of German idealism has become something of a pet peeve for Frederick Beiser, whose extensive work on the issue is particularly instructive.13 Heidegger, for his part, is very outspoken about Hegel’s stature as a threshold figure. In his Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38), for example, he issues the harsh verdict that, philosophically, the development after Hegel constitutes an “Abfall,” that is, some kind of “downfall” (lit. “falling off ” or “falling away”) with connotations of “garbage” (GA65 213–4; cf. GA32 190). Similarly, in section VI of “Overcoming Metaphysics” included in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Heidegger asserts: “Since Hegel’s death (1831) everything is but reactionary movement [Gegenbewegung], not only in Germany but in Europe.”

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Heidegger’s Style

To put this featuring of Hegel in perspective and to deepen our understanding of Heidegger’s two-volume commentary on Nietzsche, I proceed in Chapter 5 to examine Heidegger’s juxtaposition of Nietzsche and Hegel in his influential anthology Holzwege (lit. Paths in the Woods, translated as Off the Beaten Track). In this carefully arranged essay collection, Heidegger places his 1942/3 discussion of Hegel’s notion of “experience” (Erfahrung) right before his 1943 commentary on Nietzsche’s pronouncement “God is dead.” These two texts are particularly relevant for my account of how Heidegger keeps sidestepping philosophical anthropology, while honing his own account of artisan thinking, the rhetorical complexity of which will be investigated in the third part of this study. Getting clear about the strengths and weaknesses of Heidegger’s extensive Nietzsche commentary is crucial, because Nietzsche’s name was one of the most powerful intellectual currencies in German academia during the First World War, long before the Nazis began to co-opt his legacy. Thus, Martin Kusch relates how Scheler in a widely received 1915 article recognized Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson as “three central prophets of the new philosophy of life.” As one of the leading spokespersons for his philosophical generation, Scheler placed great emphasis on Nietzsche’s special contribution, namely an interpretation of life as “an action which flows on infinitely and which constantly increases its own value,” a concept of life “which is flexible enough to incorporate both ‘God and the dead world’.”14 This characterization aptly underscores that there was an important strand of spiritual materialism in Scheler’s intellectual background, which was based on the idea that matter is neither dead nor dumb, but is inherently active and creative. Approaching Nietzsche in the context of spiritual materialism will cast a different light on some of Heidegger’s interpretive moves, through which he sought to achieve a “progressive demarcation of Hölderlin’s poetry from Nietzsche’s thought.”15 In Part Three, I argue that this demarcation is pivotal for understanding the potency of Heidegger’s style, which reached its rhetorical climax in 1946. This year marked the so-called zero hour (Stunde Null) of Germany’s political catastrophe, followed by the “rubble years” (Trümmerjahre or years amidst debris), a tense transitional period when Germans struggled to regain their bearings after the nightmare of Nazism, but before signs of political and economic reconstruction became clearly discernable.16 These historical as well as social circumstances cannot be ignored by any comprehensive analysis of the stylistic and rhetorical means Heidegger deployed in the two most influential philosophical statements he wrote at this threshold moment, when Germany was compelled to do some

Introduction

11

painful soul-searching: the essay “Why Poets?” treated in Chapter 6 and his controversial Letter on Humanism examined in Chapter 7. Given the delicate timing of their inception, these two zero-hour texts stand out as Heidegger’s most sustained effort to relaunch his philosophical project for a postwar audience, at a time when Germany’s political prospects and his own professional future were anything but certain. However, to gauge the philosophical depth and the rhetorical finesse of these writings, it is equally important to remember the elements, which had become prominent in Heidegger’s thinking over the last ten years leading up to that moment. In 1936, we noted, Heidegger started to engage Schelling (and Schiller incognito) more seriously, in keeping with his budding interest in the philosophy of art. In the period following this watershed year, Nietzsche becomes an indispensable reference point for Heidegger. As Miguel de Beistegui helpfully puts it, “Nietzsche remains the figure to whom Heidegger will have devoted the largest number of pages, the figure over whom he will have poured the largest amount of sweat, with results that often raise suspicion and controversy amongst interpreters.”17 Yet, we must not approach the situation anachronistically by interpreting Heidegger’s Nietzsche either in direct opposition or in uneasy proximity to the Nazified Nietzsche fashioned by ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Härtle. Politically, Heidegger could not ignore these commentators at the time, but philosophically he never considered them serious competition. The real challenge for Heidegger was to demarcate his own position vis-à-vis the interwar Nietzsche, whose pedigree retained important links to the anthropological revolution of the 1780s via Schiller’s aesthetics and the late Schelling’s philosophy of revelation.18 Demonstrated through my close reading of “Why Poets?” and the Letter on Humanism, the hallmark of Heidegger’s style is that it absorbs the traditional idioms of philosophy, theology, and aesthetics, and then refashions them into a new discursive practice of indicating revelatory events such as the epochshaking arrival of Hölderlin’s poetry, while insisting that such indications can only be received and appreciated outside the confines of academic disciplines.19 Comparable to Karl Barth in this regard, Heidegger’s account is guided by the assumption that authentic revelation can only happen in a flash, where divine meaning strikes like lightning and so burns a “hole” into the fabric of history, with the power to unhinge the preconceived notions and spiritual complacencies of the present age.20 Two nuanced recent commentaries on the complex relation between Heidegger and Barth are provided by Judith Wolfe and Timothy Stanley, whose respective works have opened new vistas in this research area.21 Unlike

12

Heidegger’s Style

Barth, however, the Heidegger of the mid-1930s begins to assign a special role to artworks, the greatest among which could serve as “lightning rods” for divine revelation, so to speak. By the mid-1940s, Heidegger was confident that he had identified in the writings of Rilke and Hölderlin some select candidates, which appeared powerful enough to function as such revelatory conductors. The way Heidegger stylizes philosophy into artisan thinking remains ominous, though. Heidegger’s model of revelation as funneled through singular conduits implies that—in terms of both initial reception and initial enunciation—the “luminous opening” (Lichtung) of divine meaning can only happen as an event of solitary appropriation. Accordingly, the authoritative status of particular artworks as “original” (ursprünglich) carriers of revelation cannot cooperatively be tested or criticized by the members of a given faith community. As a matter of principle, Spirit (Geist) designates for Heidegger a power that is not community born, though it can be community founding. This axiomatic conviction lends a disconcertingly apodictic tone to many of Heidegger’s pronouncements, in tension with those more inviting passages that seem to promote artisan thinking as a joint quest for spiritual discovery. Such tension runs like a fault line through “Why Poets?” and the Letter on Humanism, even though Heidegger shows himself very skillful in mitigating this tension. The Letter on Humanism, in particular, deserves to be called a rhetorical masterpiece, which provides what is arguably the most impressive testimony to the double-edged quality of Heidegger’s hook. To the surprise of some readers, perhaps, treatment of Heidegger’s magnum opus is postponed until Chapter 8, where it is presented as a coda to the preceding discussion. In fact, in a lesser known letter sent to Julius Stenzel in 1928, Heidegger himself suggests that “Being and Time is the most oldfashioned book that has been written nowadays.”22 It is hard to estimate just how much (self-)critical weight Heidegger meant to assign to this remark. Yet characterizing Being and Time as very “old-fashioned” is not implausible in light of Heidegger’s subsequent philosophical advances during the decisive decade from 1936 to 1946, even if one is careful not to conflate old-fashioned with outdated. The textual focus in this last chapter is overtly selective. One of the most widely discussed segments in Being and Time, which keeps attracting readers to this work, comprises Heidegger’s analysis of “running ahead into death.” A close examination of this theme will show how Heidegger’s rhetorical hook worked somewhat differently in his magnum opus compared to the zerohour texts that were scrutinized in the preceding two chapters. The difference can be elucidated by drawing on the work of Dolf Sternberger, Karl Löwith,

Introduction

13

and Isabel Hull.23 This approach to Heidegger’s analytic of human existence or Dasein is innovative, for it brings out a crucial connection which has not received sufficient attention in the extant literature. What comes to the fore is an elective affinity between Heidegger’s conception of “freedom for death” and the figure of the Prussian military officer construed as a conceptual persona, an expression I adopt in somewhat modified form from Deleuze and Guattari.24 Such persona is not reducible to any particular historical individual, but belongs within a cultural horizon of expectations organized around a certain archetype of military leadership as its guiding ideal. In terms of producing a special reading experience, one can witness how Heidegger’s hook carves out something other than traditional hero worship. At the same time, his philosophical rhetoric steers clear of the German or French versions of existentialism associated with the works of Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre. For better or worse, in the 1927 text under consideration Heidegger’s “old-fashioned” philosophical mannerism emerges as distinctly Prussian. Based on close textual analysis, my diagnosis resists recent proposals for reading Being and Time in liberal ways which, if compelling, would put Heidegger in the vicinity of “asecular” process thinkers like William Connolly.25 To show the implausibility of casting Heidegger as an asecular liberal, this last chapter offers a detailed criticism of Iain Thomson’s interpretation of Heidegger’s phenomenology of death in Being and Time.26 Contrary to efforts at domesticating Heidegger, it can be shown that he keeps flirting with more or less subtle forms of fanaticism. According to the conclusion of this study, such fanaticism survived in a volatile societal constellation, the cultural currents of which connect Heidegger’s thought not only to authors like Ernst Jünger, whose name is often mentioned in this regard, but also to the kind of excessive literary violence that informs the writings of Heinrich von Kleist. As critical observers among Heidegger’s contemporaries like the author Stefan Zweig would have noticed, Heidegger’s 1920s discussion of death is far from tame.27 Considered jointly, the observations about how Heidegger keeps philosophical anthropology at arm’s length—underway to his own form of artisan thinking— offer a resourceful alternative to contemporary readings, which celebrate Heidegger’s twentieth-century innovations without noticing how much his anti-subjectivist plea for a new “piety of thinking” remains implicated in a long-standing controversy over the enabling conditions and limits of natural revelation. (The memorable phrase “the piety of thinking” occurs in the last line of Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” originally delivered

14

Heidegger’s Style

as a public lecture in Munich on November 18, 1953.) Benjamin Crowe, for example, writes in his introduction to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion: The “today,” of which neo-Kantianism is the most prominent philosophical expression, is the ultimate target of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion. Rather than making a contribution to what he called the “business” of philosophy, his only real aspiration was to shake up the dominant cultural paradigms of the twentieth century. For Heidegger, these paradigms, as they are instantiated in different domains of culture, are all expressions of one fundamental perspective: subjectivism.28

To the last sentence Crowe appends a footnote, which states: “One could just as well label the basic principle of modernity ‘anthropomorphism,’ as Heidegger does on occasion.”29 Such generic formula for modernity in tandem with a quick equation of subjectivism and anthropomorphism tends to reinforce rather than critically examine Heidegger’s recurrent tendency to skip over the second half of the eighteenth century as well as over the second half of the nineteenth century. If we trace the lineage proposed here, from Schelling and Schiller over Nietzsche to Simmel and Scheler, it becomes clear that over time philosophical anthropology had explored a variety of ways in which one could be an antisubjectivist. Compared to prominent studies like Crowe’s, the advantage of taking such an alternate route is that it avoids historical simplification in a sustained effort to give due credit to both Heidegger’s own project and its philosophical rivals. In keeping with this approach, the present volume constructively extends and invites future discussion with the recent works by Frederick Beiser, Sean McGrath, Christopher Yates, Judith Wolfe, and Jason Wirth.30 Following the arc of Heidegger’s writings from the mid-1930s up to the zero hour also goes to show why engaging his thought affords us more than a welcome exercise in intellectual history. The critical assessment of Heidegger’s rewrite of philosophy into artisan thinking constitutes a challenge that is as formidable as it is urgent, at a time when global communication, regional violence, and religiously framed terrorism are meshed to the point where it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between faith and ideology. This observation does not amount to the old saw about questionable alliances between vast religious institutions (like, for example, the Catholic or the Mormon Church) and secular state agencies. What is at stake is a growing inability to even imagine alternate forms of unchurched faith, which are not always already governed by clerical hierarchy and partisan politics. In this regard, Heidegger’s philosophical sketch for a radically different kind of piety as informed by the revelatory power of

Introduction

15

art holds out the promise that we can move past polarizing calls for spiritual warfare amidst the “clash of civilizations” (in Samuel Huntington’s controversial phrase).31 At the same time, we will see (especially in Chapter 3 and thereafter) how Heidegger’s brand of unchurched piety suspends not just ecclesiastical authority but also the core meaning of “church” as the communicative body for joint, worshipful comportment. Such radical suspension harbors risks of its own. True to the Heideggerian motif of winding paths through the woods, which can guide the wanderer to a clearing or lead her even deeper into the thicket, artisan thinking is not designed like a rule book or manual for a ritual procedure. Instead, it is meant as a technique for spiritual discipline, which each apprentice has to absorb over time, through a long-term response to a revelatory event which is itself mediated by great art. Committing oneself to artisan thinking remains a wager, and not every reader will feel inclined to make such commitment. Yet scrutinizing Heidegger’s nuanced plea for artisan thinking will aid all readers in addressing the question whether initiating a keener sense of the holy vis-à-vis the human is both feasible and desirable under the conflict-laden conditions of contemporary sociality.

Part One

Back to the 1780s

1

Philosophical Anthropology: Herder’s Pantheism as a Subtext for Heidegger’s First Schelling Lecture

One of the most interesting as well as tantalizing segments in Peter Gordon’s influential study on the Continental Divide in twentieth-century thought engages philosophical anthropology as an intellectual movement that underwent curious permutations during the “transitional years between 1929 and 1933.”1 As a subdivision of the interwar years, this interval stretches from Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s famous encounter at Davos up to Hitler’s taking power the same year that Cassirer would be removed from his chair position in philosophy at the University of Hamburg. What is more, 1929 saw the publication of Heidegger’s controversial book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, a volume which he dedicated to the memory of Max Scheler and into which Heidegger incorporated several of his central statements from the Davos disputations, often nearly verbatim. In this intellectual-historical context, the date of Scheler’s death in 1928 right before the “Davos moment,” as we might call it, is pregnant with meaning. As Gordon relates, Scheler’s name was at the center of multifarious debates over the contested territory of philosophical anthropology. Though hard to pin down in its exact orientation, this brand of anthropology was broached as a new paradigm of inquiry that stood in complex relation to the philosophical legacy of Immanuel Kant. While it would be misleading to reduce Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s exchange at Davos to their respective reactions to Scheler’s work, the latter remains an indispensable reference point for gauging the philosophical and political stakes of their seminal meeting in the waning days of the Weimar Republic. [M]uch of the disagreement between Heidegger and Cassirer turned on the question as to whose philosophy best captured the essential character of human being. Although Heidegger and Cassirer remained critical of key principles in

20

Heidegger’s Style philosophical anthropology, they nonetheless considered it a crucial factor in their own debate. Scheler in particular stood at the crossroads of many of the various pathways of Weimar thought.2

What is fascinating about the clashes over philosophical anthropology associated with Scheler’s name—in uneasy proximity to Georg Simmel and Ludwig Klages—is how the label of such anthropology was variously used as a badge of honor and as a term of abuse, while the pattern of these shifts is hard to make out. At first glance, one can gain the impression that both Heidegger and Cassirer appreciated the significance of Scheler’s objection to the formalism implied by Kant’s transcendental method, but “parted ways” when it came to working out viable extensions or alternatives to Scheler’s initiative.3 In this regard, the main point of reference was Scheler’s study Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, published in two volumes in 1913 and 1916, in which he set out to replace Kant’s approach with a more material ethics centered on a priori emotions such as love, hate, and sympathy broadly conceived. As for Heidegger, we can see the imprint Scheler’s nonformal ethics left on his breakthrough work Being and Time (1927), particularly in those passages where Heidegger stressed the mood-like quality of world disclosure in terms of Befindlichkeit. That is, one point of contact between Scheler and Heidegger, pace Kant, was that humans’ experience of their worldly environment is not primarily organized by value-neutral, epistemic categories such as substance and causality. Rather, we always find ourselves thrown into a worldly context of lived experience or “lifeworld” for short (“Lebenswelt,” a term Scheler and Heidegger adopted in modified form from Edmund Husserl). In worlds of this sort things do not reveal themselves to the scientific gaze of some disinterested phenomenological observer. In the action context of people’s practical involvement with things in the sense of Dinge (as opposed to the formal objects of abstract theory building), whatever we encounter matters to us immediately. This was the point of Heidegger’s analysis of Sorge spelled out as the implicit “care” structure of Dasein (SZ § 41). In Heidegger’s dictionary, “Dasein” is a rather elastic term of art which he uses to describe how human existence, individually and collectively, is exposed to historically situated, evaluative currents. (Hereafter, the term “Dasein” will not be italicized anymore, given its frequency in Heidegger’s texts.) Insofar as these currents or trends are largely unpredictable and beyond our control, the human condition emerges as inherently dynamic and unstable. Humans “ek-sist” or stand out into fluctuating historical circumstances that are not of their own

Philosophical Anthropology

21

making. Viewed from this Heideggerian angle, human agency is driven by impersonal or perhaps supra-personal “moods” that are more fundamental than the superficial episodes of personal decision-making, the investigation of which should be left to individual psychology, not philosophy.4 Depending on how one interprets the life of these moods, which unfold and converge differently in distinct epochs of thinking, Heidegger’s way of placing a serious historical limit on the choices we make does not necessarily entail a mechanistic model of determinism where human action is reduced to physical clockwork. At least, the credibility of charging Heidegger with determinism would depend on how humans can meaningfully participate in these larger historical trends and whether humanity is granted any partial or co-constitutive power to change the course of history. Should human agency prove to be an epiphenomenon or a mere afterimage of impersonal historical forces, then it seems indeed impossible to ward off the specter of determinism or fatalism.5 This points straight to the heart of Heidegger’s overarching project, namely tackling the twin question about the relation between the historical and the personal, and, by the same token, about the relation between fate and freedom. In this regard, one of Heidegger’s most intriguing suggestions can be found in a 1930 seminar titled “The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy.”6 On this occasion Heidegger hinted at a noncausal conception of human freedom as the much needed alternative to the conventional “absolutely bourgeois” notion of freedom.7 The latter, Heidegger implied in religiously charged language, was the product of people’s misguided aspiration to intercede into the flow of history in ways traditionally associated with an allpowerful creator god. Irrespective of the theological merits or shortcomings of such a god notion, for Heidegger it certainly could not be applied to humans, short of idolatry.8 But then, what exactly was Heidegger’s intended remedy for this gesture at bourgeois self-aggrandizement? Arguably, the present seminar failed to deliver a full-fledged answer. Still, Heidegger made it clear that whatever else human freedom amounts to, it cannot be conceived in terms of making a completely fresh start in history. Any such pretense of ex nihilo action should be dismissed as an idolatrous fantasy that was gainsaid by human finitude. Even more tantalizingly, Heidegger hinted in the same breath that “the greatness of finitude has been downgraded,” though it was not immediately clear whether the recovery of Dasein’s genuine greatness was a thoroughly this-worldly affair or whether it had to be envisioned in an alternative religious frame.9

22

Heidegger’s Style

Situating Heidegger’s first Schelling commentary While the topic of freedom tends to recede into the background in Heidegger’s writings during the next few years, he will return to this issue with renewed philosophical passion in 1936, when he selects Schelling’s Freedom treatise of 1809 as a starting point for further exploration. Due to its express focus on the theme of freedom, Heidegger’s first extensive discussion of Schelling (followed by a second one in 1941) can be viewed as more expedient a textual anchor than his 1929 volume on Kant, when it comes to illuminating Heidegger’s complicated relationship to philosophical anthropology. There are two reasons for this. For one thing, the 1929 book belongs to a period when Heidegger was flirting with a controversial conception of interpretation as destruction. For another, the 1929 volume is concerned mostly with Kant’s First Critique, while the 1936 Schelling lecture attends to Kant’s Third Critique, which Heidegger now recognizes as the most important source for assessing the lasting significance of Kant’s philosophical legacy (GA42 69, 73). These two considerations can be explicated as follows. Astute commentators like Peter Gordon and Judith Wolfe have drawn attention to the notion of interpretation as destruction, which recurs in Heidegger’s writings in the period stretching from Being and Time and the 1927 lecture “Phenomenology and Theology” through the Davos disputation up to the aforementioned 1930 seminar on the essence of human freedom. The 1929 book on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics falls right within this interval and so it seems only logical to assume that Heidegger’s Kant-exposition is also carried out under the auspices of such “hermeneutic violence” where interpreting Kant means destroying Kant.10 Viewed from this angle, some of Heidegger’s most provocative formulations offered in Davos would seem to cast a doubtful light on Heidegger’s subsequent book-length treatment of Kant. After all, in the exchange with Cassirer he endorsed a model for interpretation that seemed guided by the idea that we engage philosophical giants like Kant most fruitfully, if we throw off the yoke of textual accuracy.11 It would be misleading, however, to approach Heidegger’s 1929 volume on Kant merely as a rogue interpretation in the course of which he would (ab)use Kant’s name as a weighty, but ultimately random signpost for replacing Kantian thought with an independent Heideggerian alternative. A more charitable and more plausible reading would suggest that during and after Davos Heidegger really meant to work with and beyond Kant. It is worth noting how the motif of hermeneutic

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23

violence persists well into the 1930s in Heidegger’s writings, most notably in a telling passage in § 134 in Contributions (1936–1938). Here Heidegger comments, retrospectively, on how his Kant book was “doing violence to Kant in the sense of working out a more original version of precisely the transcendental project in its unity, through an exposition of the transcendental imagination. This interpretation of Kant is, of course, incorrect ‘historiologically,’ but it is essential historically, i.e. as related to the preparation for future thinking and only as so related.”12 In this regard Heidegger’s interpretive stance, radical though it may be, is generally comparable to the German Idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel, who also sought to unleash the radical “metaphysical potential” that was already inherent in Kant’s philosophy. A letter Schelling wrote to Hegel in 1795 is indicative of this agenda.13 Still, Heidegger’s Kant book focused primarily on Kant’s First Critique (with an express preference for this work’s A-edition over the B-edition) while the philosophical stakes of German Idealism’s effort at unleashing Kant can be introduced more effectively with reference to Kant’s Third Critique. Heidegger himself made this point subsequently. In his 1936 lecture on Schelling he, too, emphasizes that Kant’s respondents construed the Third Critique as the site where “the battle over systematicity” (der Kampf um das System) is to be fought (GA42 69). This is because only in the Third Critique—though preceded by some poignant private Reflections from his silent decade—did Kant sketch a provocative account of Spirit (Geist) as the animating principle of the mind working through matter.14 Geist is notoriously difficult to translate. There is no single English equivalent that makes for a perfect fit, since the German term carries connotations of both spirit and mind. To make the wording less clunky and to preserve its potentially religious overtones I translate Geist with “Spirit.” Here the capitalization in English is not merely for emphasis, but also to mark a difference between the two senses of Geist that occupied Kant in § 43 of the Third Critique where he considered Spirit in the context of artistic activity. Specifically, he distinguished between cases where Spirit in art was properly “free” and cases where spirit had abandoned any kind of restraint and thus become too free, as it were.15 “Spirit” with a capital “S,” then, refers to a philosophical conception of Geist that is sensitive to Kant’s worry. To this one might add that Schelling, too, would agree that Geist must not be understood in terms of an anything-goes spirituality. Yet, as we shall see later on, Schelling aimed to develop the personal element within Spirit in explicitly theistic terms, from which Kant shied away.

24

Heidegger’s Style

Kant, Herder, and pantheism As John Zammito has shown in instructive detail, the Third Critique bears witness to Kant’s struggle to situate himself in the so-called pantheism controversy which “arose in August 1785, when Friedrich Jacobi published a slender volume intended to create a scandal over Lessing’s alleged Spinozism and atheism.” With an approving nod to Frederick Beiser’s pioneering account of the historical significance of this public debate, Zammito adds: “The resulting controversy proved to be one of the most important events in German intellectual life.”16 But what was so significant about it, and how did Spinoza’s work become so contested in this context? In Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Zammito addresses this question by discerning a “curious moment” that brought about a “paradigm shift” in the middle of the eighteenth century, which revolved around the controversial idea of intelligent substance or “thinking matter” (KHA 230). Emphasizing the interdisciplinary scope of this major intellectual reorientation, he elaborates: All the impasses of eighteenth-century discourse in the linked spheres of metaphysics, physical theory, biology, and anthropology came to be bound up in the problem of hylozoism. That is: What properties could intelligibly be ascribed to matter, and how could this explain such issues as the causal relations of distinct substances, the principles of action at a distance, chemical attraction, electricity and heat, the mysteries of biological generation, and the mind-body relation? . . . “Thinking matter”—hylozoism—became the physical-metaphysical possibility of the day. This was the positive sense of the term Spinozism, especially after the middle of the eighteenth century. (KHA 231)

Precisely this positive strand in Spinozism became a formative influence on Herder’s anthropological style of thought (KHA 8). Herder sought to integrate anthropology into the broader compass of a comprehensive philosophy of nature. Above all, nature was to be construed not only as dynamic but as inherently creative. This central insight also informed Herder’s programmatic proposal put forth in 1765: “What fruitful new developments would not arise if only our whole philosophy would become anthropology.” This line is taken from Herder’s essay “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People.” About twenty years later, the same anthropological theme finds even more provocative expression in Herder’s God: Some Conversations (1787), which was intended as the author’s contribution to the ongoing pantheism controversy. It was this text by Herder, in particular, which

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aggravated Kant and put him on his guard. There were several reasons for that. In the God volume, Herder was pursuing a threefold agenda: defend Spinoza against Jacobi’s misinterpretation as Herder saw it; hone his own reading of Spinoza in more religious language; and, finally, “attack Kantian philosophy and its inroads into theology.”17 Kant was not amused. Though he had been trying hard not to get drawn into the polemical exchanges that animated the pantheism controversy, he was wary of this new philosophy of nature and its enthusiastic idiom which tended to contaminate philosophical sobriety with the fanatical tendencies characteristic of the so-called Sturm und Drang period in German culture. The stigma attached to such potentially fanatical enthusiasm was that of “Schwärmerei”: a rather innocent-looking term with connotations of eccentric commitment and emotional self-indulgence, which assumed an increasingly political charge in the last decades of the eighteenth century and was often used as a term of abuse against the Romantics well into the nineteenth century.18 In this tense sociocultural climate, Kant eventually opted for an anti-Spinoza stance that he laid out most extensively in the Third Critique. The last thing Kant wished for was that his own critical approach be approximated to Spinoza’s thought or to Herder’s Spinozist anthropology. This multiparty dispute over natural philosophy, anthropology, and atheism forms the background of the Third Critique as one of the most central reference points for the German Idealists’ reaction to Kant. In his lecture course on Schelling, Heidegger acknowledges the overall significance of the Critique of Judgment for Schelling and his philosophical cohorts, most notably Fichte and Hegel (GA42 68). Indeed, much of Heidegger’s discussion zeroes in on a later segment of the Third Critique, namely Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment” delivered in Part Two of this text, which speaks most directly to Kant’s growing discomfort with Herder. What is more, Heidegger shows himself fully aware of the constellation of the pantheism controversy in its various stages, when he points not only to Jacobi’s polemics against Lessing but also to the later, equally polemical exchange between Jacobi and Schelling. Originally, Schelling published his Freedom essay under the lengthy title: Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters (1809). With some delay, more than 100 pages into his discussion, Heidegger turns to the pantheism controversy and in this context he reminds the reader of a text by Jacobi published two years after Schelling’s Freedom treatise, namely Jacobi’s “Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung” (Of Divine Things and their Revelation) (1811). In this volume, Jacobi does not mention Schelling by

26

Heidegger’s Style

name. However, Heidegger asserts, Schelling is clearly intended as the target of Jacobi’s critique of pantheism as a slippery slope leading through Spinozism down to fatalism and atheism (GA42 115). In Heidegger’s assessment, this attack on Schelling reveals a stubborn quality in Jacobi. Although Jacobi deserves at least partial credit for putting pantheism back on the philosophical agenda, he refuses to learn anything from the protracted discussion he helped initiate. In other words, more than two decades after attacking Lessing, Jacobi levels the same accusation against Schelling and so fails to appreciate how much more complex the philosophical quarrel over pantheism has become in the meantime.19 Yet what is even more significant than Heidegger’s jibes at the “sly, cunning baselessness of Jacobi’s attack” on Schelling (ST 67/GA42 116) is how he sidelines the more sophisticated version of Spinozism that was available in Herder’s writings, which would seem to be directly relevant for assessing Schelling’s contributions in this arena of philosophical discourse. Moreover, even if one agreed with Heidegger’s less-than-flattering verdict on Jacobi, the very title of Jacobi’s 1811 text at hand already signals that the ongoing pantheism controversy was fueled by disagreement over revelation (Offenbarung) in two senses: first, in the religious sense of how God may reveal Himself to humanity; and, second, in the natural-philosophical sense of how the purposiveness of nature as a teleological system may reveal itself to human understanding. In the Third Critique, Kant would argue that both God’s revelation of His divine character and nature’s revelation of its purposiveness were intimately connected to the dynamic essence of human freedom, which culminated in the moral selflegislation or autonomy of rational minds guided by the ideal of a “good will” as the ultimate good or summum bonum.20 Yet featuring human freedom as a mediator of sorts between God and nature ran the pantheistic risk of identifying God and nature, next to the anthropocentric risk of reducing God’s plan for His creation to a rule book for human morality. Clearing himself of either of these charges spelled the main challenge for Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In this respect, Herder proved one of Kant’s most important and most vexing interlocutors, but in 1936 Heidegger seems to want to keep his distance from Herder. On the one hand, Heidegger juxtaposes Herder with Goethe, when it comes to exploring viable versions of Spinozism. On the other hand, Heidegger then defers the issue of Herder’s role in this constellation, when a new philosophy of nature or Naturphilosophie was on the rise. Prior to his critical comments on Jacobi’s unwillingness to acknowledge Schelling’s philosophical advances, Heidegger writes the following about Jacobi’s initial challenge to Lessing in “On

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Spinoza’s Doctrine in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn” (1785): “Jacobi wants to show here that pantheism is really Spinozism, Spinozism is fatalism, and fatalism is atheism. In this piece, Jacobi wants at the same time to make Lessing into a consistent atheist in this way, and to show in opposition to Mendelssohn, Herder, and Goethe that something like a ‘purified Spinozism,’ which they were striving for, was not possible” (ST 66/GA42 115). Yet Heidegger then brackets all this in order to let Schelling have his say. To some extent such bracketing of intellectual-historical context may be justifiable on pedagogical grounds. After all, Heidegger was giving a lecture on Schelling and so it seems only fitting that the spotlight would be on this thinker. However, this way of justifying Heidegger’s sidelining of Herder in examining Kant’s legacy has its limitations. This becomes clear, once we take note of the significance of Herder’s God: Some Conversations for the later Schelling’s account of how the personal takes shape in natural formations, based on a supple sense of the natural which would include the cultural. Even more specifically, what we find in Herder’s God volume is a nascent panentheism which emphasizes the plastic power of Geist (Spirit).21 The later Schelling will work out a theologically more fine-tuned version of exactly that type of panentheism.22 Generally speaking, panentheism refers to the view that God is in everything but also more than everything.23 Accordingly, the “en”-aspect signals God’s indwelling and active participation in the material world, without thereby reducing God to physical reality. Vis-à-vis traditional Christian theism, the main change in theological perspective is to view matter as more intelligent and more inspired—not to equate God with the totality of the world’s inert stuff. This is why, in proximity to the Gospel of John (which was Schelling’s favorite) panentheism’s twofold mantra is “God is love” and “God loves matter.” As we will examine later, Heidegger pays close attention to this theme at the end of his first Schelling lecture (GA42 221–3). Of course, the term “panentheism” was not commonly used in Herder’s day, which is why earlier commentators on Herder’s conception of God have resorted to other labels like “dynamic pantheism.”24 However, the panentheistic orientation of Herder’s theological outlook was already noted in philosophical content, if not in name, by some of Heidegger’s contemporaries. As a case in point, Hermann Korff proffered acute observations about this element in Herder’s thought in the second volume (titled Die Klassik) of his influential study Geist der Goethezeit (1927), which was published the same year Heidegger’s Being and Time came out. In the following and also in the title of this chapter, I maintain the original expression “pantheism” in referring

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to Herder’s work, to emphasize its roots in the 1780s pantheism controversy. However, this designation is always to be read as close in meaning to the kind of “panentheism” just outlined. Korff ’s study makes for a telling example for two important reasons. First, along with other commentaries on Herder’s God treatise, his text shows that Herder’s religious writings were much talked about at the previous turn of the century, right up to the point when Heidegger published his magnum opus.25 Second, Korff ’s volume on Die Klassik considers Herder in the context of Weimar classicism, which casts a critical light on Heidegger’s way of contrasting “the classic” (das Klassische, associated with the name of Hölderlin) with “the classical” (die Klassik / der Klassizismus, associated with the names of Goethe and Schiller) in his double volume on Nietzsche.26 Heidegger’s strategic selfpositioning vis-à-vis Weimar classicism appears even more involved, if we remember that it was Herder’s thematic emphasis on the material workings of the Spirit that drew Friedrich Schiller’s attention. For the purpose of discerning the different currents in Heidegger’s thought in 1936, this marks another important connection, namely a complex link between Heidegger’s Schelling lecture and his seminar on Schiller (winter semester 1936/7). These two texts should be read together with Heidegger’s essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” where Schiller is Heidegger’s implicit target, or so I shall argue in Chapter 3. Schiller read Herder’s God volume and was impressed by Herder’s attempt at redeeming Spinoza from the charge that he let God work through dead matter or even turned God Himself into a dead substance, infinite though it may be. At the same time, Schiller was apprehensive about Herder’s attack on “the transcendental philosopher . . . who overreaches himself,” that is, on Kant.27 To be sure, Kant was not mentioned by name in this statement. Yet no active participant in the pantheism debate would have missed the reference.28

God as ground and God as existing To corroborate my case for viewing Herder’s pantheism as a crucial subtext of Heidegger’s 1936 Schelling lecture in overt proximity to Kant’s Third Critique (and in understated proximity to Schiller’s aesthetics as uneasily wedged between Kant and Herder), we can extrapolate the following train of thought from Heidegger’s text at hand. To begin with, Heidegger shows himself fully aware of the constellation laid out so far, when he underscores the relation between

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freedom and nature as the main issue, which has occupied “modern philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism” (ST 59/GA42 103). While Descartes is quickly dismissed due to his mechanical notion of nature, Heidegger points to Leibniz and Kant as making headway in this regard, though he will not grant a solution to them. Thus, he notes critically that “in Kant the question of freedom is still formulated as the opposition [Gegensatzformel] of nature and freedom” (ST 60/GA42 103). Yet he then immediately hints that there might be more to this, since before Kant Leibniz had already sketched an account of nature where the dynamic cannot be reduced to the mechanical. Settling the issue whether Schelling should have acknowledged Leibniz more will have to be reserved for “later” (ST 60/GA42 103–4). In fact, Heidegger had offered a seminar on Leibniz shortly before the one on Schelling, namely during the winter semester 1935/6.29 Some forty pages later though, Heidegger seems to let Schelling off the hook and give him credit for recognizing Leibniz as one of the philosophical pioneers, who worked toward a novel understanding of nature’s systematic character at a clear distance from mechanistic conceptions of nature (cf. ST 82/GA42 141). Still, in both systems, “Leibniz’s as well as Spinoza’s,” the notion of freedom remains underdeveloped and here Schelling has an edge over these thinkers (ST 85/GA42 146). Alongside these remarks about the relation between Leibniz and Schelling, Heidegger returns to the stakes of the pantheism controversy outlined earlier. Thus, he asserts more directly than before: “Pantheism can be interpreted fatalistically, that is, as excluding freedom, but it does not have to” (ST 68/ GA42 118). Similarly, “pantheism can be posited, and freedom is not necessarily denied” (ST 85/GA42 147). But how? The answer, Heidegger submits, can be found in Schelling’s account of the dynamic relation between God as ground and God as existing. What is particularly significant about this segment is that Heidegger examines this Schellingian motif of a God-internal polarity in terms of “Seynsfuge”—the dynamic structure of Being—which figures prominently not only in his Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938) but also in his subsequent writings concerned with poetic thinking, including his seminal essay “Why Poets?” (1946). In fact, even here in his first Schelling lecture Heidegger already hints that the eternal interrelation of God as ground and God as existing can genuinely be grasped only by poetic thinking (ST 113).30 Following Schelling, God as the creative origin of everything must not be construed as a “causa sui” (ST 109/GA42 190), which would remain within a mechanistic paradigm of nature and thus fail to recognize the ongoing creativity in nature imparted to it

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by its Creator. In search for an alternative, Schelling’s Freedom essay anticipates a line of argument that will be developed more fully in his later Philosophy of Revelation, namely the idea that God’s creative activity must be understood as a perpetual unfolding: a somewhat paradoxical process in which God comes into His own only by creating away from Himself, that is, from-out-of-Himself. This has two major implications for Schelling: First, God “is” not fully God independent of His creative activity. Here we are returned to the pantheistic mantra that God loves matter, which can now be explicated such that God can show His love, that is, His loving character, only in the course of ongoing creative activity. Second, this intimate bond between Creator and creation must not be spelled out as a process of chronometric sequence. God’s unfolding relation to His creation is an eternal unfolding that defies our ordinary conceptions of linear time. Heidegger summarizes this complicated thought in an extraordinary passage, which can be seen as an early climax in his text, though there are other important details still to come. This justifies an extensive quotation. Echoing the language of Herder’s pantheism and anticipating the language of contemporary process theology, which Schelling helped initiate, Heidegger writes: Thus a becoming God! Correct. If God is the most existing among all that exists, then the most difficult and greatest becoming must be in Him and this becoming must have the most extreme scope between His whence and His wither. But at the same time, it is true that this whence of God, and also the wither, can again only be in God and as God himself: Being! But the determination of beings in the sense of the presence of something objectively present is no longer adequate at all to conceive this Being. Thus “existence” is understood beforehand as “emergencefrom-self ” [aus sich Heraus-treten], revealing oneself, and in becoming revealed to oneself coming to oneself, and because of this event [Geschehen] “being” with oneself and thus in oneself and oneself. God as existence, that is, the existing god is this god who is in himself historical. . . . God as the existing one is the absolute God, or God as he himself—in brief: God-self [Gott-selbst]. God considered as the ground of his existence “is” not yet God truly as he himSelf.31 . . . Schelling calls this ground “nature” in God. (ST 109–10/GA42 190–1) [translation modified]

Here Heidegger’s profuse use of italics and scare quotes seems to signal not only some philosophical agitation on his part, due to the complicated nature of the subject matter. We may also perceive a semblance to Schelling’s own writing in the Philosophy of Revelation where such emphases (sometimes of single syllables within one word; next to italics, cursive print, and scare quotes)

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abound. Though nothing of my interpretation depends on it, we might take this as another clue that Heidegger was familiar not only with Schelling’s Freedom essay but had already absorbed other substantial portions of Schelling’s later writings, including the Philosophy of Revelation. While it remains to some extent speculative how much or how little of Schelling Heidegger had read in 1936, what matters is the substantial thematic overlap between the Freedom essay and the Philosophy of Revelation—and here the pantheistic theme looms large. An important detail not to be missed is Heidegger’s somewhat abrupt reference to “history” (in the sense of Geschichte, that is, living history; not in the sense of Historie which Heidegger always associates with scientific positivism and the collection of lifeless data).32 In the aforementioned block quote, he thus posits in somewhat circuitous language that “God as existence, that is, the existing god is this god who is in himself historical.” This statement is preceded by a remark on how the God who reveals Himself by creatively going out of Himself has an “inner history,” and He can only count as properly “absolute” in the sense of having “absolved” (absolviert) this inner history (ST 109/GA42 191). The German verb absolvieren, which Heidegger puts in scare quotes, generally refers to carrying out a task, but Heidegger also brings connotations of detachment and absolution into play. While this resonates well with the aforementioned pantheistic claim that God comes into His own only in the course of creative activity, Heidegger’s discussion up to this point leaves the reader (or the audience member of the original lecture) little prepared for the present reference to “inner history.” In what sense is the “existing” God “historical”? How do historical and theological considerations converge here? To tackle these two related questions, we have to take note of an important current in German intellectual history in the later decades of the eighteenth century, which formed the background for Herder’s and then Schelling’s forays into pantheistic thought. At the same time, this will cast a critical light on the lingering question with which we began this chapter, namely why Heidegger seems to feel uneasy about philosophical anthropology during the Davos disputation with Cassirer, even though he had been voicing his reservations toward this approach as early as 1922. The short answer is: pragmatic history. Yet this calls for some elaboration. In terms of philosophical heritage, this nascent discipline tried to combine the insights of Hume’s empiricism with Leibniz’s metaphysical account of a natural dynamism. It was mentioned earlier how this facet of Leibniz’s thought became a crucial reference point for the pantheism controversy of the 1780s. But here one has to wind the clock back a bit further,

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namely to the 1760s when pragmatic history began to spread its academic wings. It was figures like Johann Jacob Schmauβ and Johann Martin Chladenius who pioneered this new approach to historical research at the Royal Institute for History at Göttingen, followed by the work of Johann Christoph Gatterer as one of pragmatic history’s most eloquent advocates. In terms of their new methodology, the pragmatic historians sought to interpret particular events by situating them within a complex system of interacting relations. Accordingly, the rise of pragmatic history marked a new paradigm of thinking through complexity and connectivity.33 This already provides an initial clue for detecting echoes of pragmatic history in Heidegger’s discussion of Schelling’s God conception. For the living God to exist, He has to be construed like an evolving system of interacting relations. This is clunky language, to be sure, but it helps bring out the pantheistic struggle to think of God in ways that would preserve God’s “systematicity” (i.e., His unity of character) but allow for creative development at the same time. Speaking of God’s “inner history,” then, articulates the balancing act of grasping God’s divine nature in developmental terms without sacrificing the unity of God’s character, and without any biologistic reduction of God to an open-ended process of natural evolution.

“Romantic philosophy of nature” and its detractors For German intellectual discourse in the 1760s, the issues broached by pragmatic historians in their attempt to rethink “development” were by no means confined to theological considerations. Rather, the pantheistic initiative represented one important strand among others in a fundamental reorientation about the very meaning of scientific inquiry. The main stimulus (and later buzzword) for this reorientation was the idea of organism. “Organism was the decisive anomaly for the mechanist paradigm,” which had governed the traditional notions of physical causality and, by extension, that of historical causality.34 In tune with the life sciences’ increasing research into the complex nature of organisms, theologians and historians began to explore new understandings of causality as freedom from mechanism. This new occupation with organic organization found its way not only into the pages of Kant’s Third Critique (including his famous tree example in § 64) but also into Schelling’s Freedom essay. However, Heidegger dislocates this connection to the eighteenth century in a peculiar way. Here we have to quote Heidegger at length, again, to see how he erects a double

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straw man, namely a misleading contrast between a “romantic philosophy of nature” and “contemporary physics and chemistry”: Finally, we know that in the last decades of the eighteenth century, in the transition to the nineteenth century the investigation of nature moved to a more primordial ground and new insights were made in which the fundamental appearance of gravity and light played a special role. However, today we no longer have the eyes to reproduce this insight into nature. This questioning of nature is called “romantic philosophy of nature” and is used with the following in mind: all of that is really nonsense. Really, that is, in the light of all the things that contemporary physics and chemistry can do. They can do a great deal and one should avoid minimizing things here. But all the more clearly should the limitations be seen. What today’s physics and chemistry, what modern science, cannot do at all, can never do as such, is to take the perspective, or even provide it, for deciding the question whether that “romantic philosophy of nature” is nonsense or not. That is itself still a question, but we do not want to go into it now. (ST 115/GA42 200)

It is not quite clear what Heidegger means by “romantic philosophy of nature” (romantische Naturphilosphie) in this place. Presumably, Heidegger’s own scare quotes around this phrase indicate a distortion so that the notion of such romantic nature philosophy is turned into a mere caricature by modern science, particularly, by contemporary physics and chemistry, which tend to dismiss the romantic alternative under consideration as mere “nonsense” or some kind of new-age mysticism. But then, who would be the representatives of a genuine philosophy of nature, and should it still be called “romantic”? Rather than providing any author names or titles from the relevant literature of this period, Heidegger adds even more mystique to the kind of nature philosophy that he might find desirable or philosophically promising, when he writes: “It would be just as fatal if one wanted to jump head over heels into an earlier philosophy of nature, for which we lack the existential and conceptual basic positions today, or if one wanted to insist upon the present form of science as being something timeless. A transformation, which is necessary, can only occur when what rules us is transformed of its own accord” (ST 115/GA42 200-1). From this last formulation one gains the impression that the issue is no longer one of disabusing worthwhile instances of nature philosophy from the haughty prejudice of contemporary natural science. For it would be futile to “jump head over heels” into past versions of nature philosophy, since—Heidegger apodictically asserts—we lack the “existential and conceptual basic positions”

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(daseinsmäßige und begriffliche Grundstellungen) to even appreciate what such previous philosophies of nature were about. There is no going back. At the same time, we would be ill-advised to buy into present-day natural science as if it was a timeless ideal. Rhetorically, this neither/nor recommendation makes for good suspense, but it creates a false contrast between unjustly dismissed, yet irretrievably lost “old” philosophies of nature, on the one hand, and overconfident “modern” science as driven by the pretense to proffer the final standard for inquiry, on the other hand. This double straw man of a potentially good, yet inaccessible model of the past and an arrogant, all-too-available model of the present skips over one of the most important scientific reorientations, namely the revolution in organic thinking which took place during the late eighteenth century, the very period that Heidegger uses as a temporal marker here. Upon scrutiny, what Heidegger does in these passages is decontextualize Schelling, that is, isolate him from his sources in late eighteenth-century discourse where the new paradigm of pragmatic history took center stage. Philosophically, this gesture at decontextualizing Schelling is suspect in light of Heidegger’s own way of explicating Schelling’s notion of God’s “inner history” which, we saw, is clearly dependent on that tradition. Furthermore, Heidegger’s frequent remarks about how animals do not display the same kind of freedom as humans do (ST 140/GA42 242; 141–2/245; 144/249) point back to that tradition as well. The related topics of animal soul and the origin of language were staples of late eighteenth-century discourse, and Herder was in the vanguard of these debates, witnessed by his prizewinning Treatise on the Origin of Language (submitted 1771; published 1772) and his volume On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (1778). What motivated engagement with these topics in the context of the organic revolution was the general conception of nature not simply as “thinking matter” but as spiritually organized at different levels of complexity, corresponding to different levels of “soul life” or Seelenleben. Among other things, this entailed the provocative thought that, according to the new paradigm of nature pervaded by Spirit, there was no longer a gulf between irrational animals and rational humanity—a notion that Kant had a hard time accepting in the Third Critique (§ 83)35; and in his Schelling lecture Heidegger, too, is reluctant to embrace this notion. In fact, there are various passages in which he wavers between a more outspoken gradation scheme in terms of various “figurations of life” (Lebensgestalten) and “levels [or rungs] of being in nature” (Seinsstufen der Natur) (ST 139/GA42 240; 150/259–60),36 on the one hand, and a staunch

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insistence on an essential difference between animals and humans (ST 140/ GA42 242; 141–2/245; 144/249), on the other. Some of these complications recur much later in Heidegger’s 1953 essay on Georg Trakl, “Language in the Poem,” to which Andrew Mitchell has drawn attention.37 This essay examines the poetic (and, one might add, expressionist) transformation of a deer into a “blue deer.” Contrary to his previous claims in the 1929/1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, which characterized animals as “world-poor,” Heidegger now rethinks animality and grants it a capacity for memory and mortality (as opposed to mere perishing) that renders the boundary between humans and animals porous, short of effacing it. While Mitchell is aware that he risks overtaxing the textual evidence, he still ventures the claim that the “idea that only humans would die and that this would ground an essential, even ontological, distinction from the animal for Heidegger must be surrendered.”38 In my judgment, Mitchell’s verdict remains problematic, since he does not spend much time commenting on whether Heidegger’s “blue deer” is perhaps better interpreted as a poetic, expressionist image or symbol, and not as an alternative type of experience(r): a distinct specimen of soul life that can interact with, and challenge, human modes of experience in terms of memory and historical self-awareness.39 Similar to the vision Heidegger imparts to the idealized female farmer featured as the purported owner of the peasant shoes in van Gogh’s painting, one wonders whether the “blue deer” refers to an actual living being that could appreciate its own blueness. In each case, critics are more likely to discern a poetic-philosophical projection on Heidegger’s part rather than a sustained effort to let the experiential other speak for herself. (I will have more to say about the peasant shoes in Chapter 3, where I discuss Heidegger’s Origin essay at length.) At this point, we do not have to decide the question whether the Trakl essay from the 1950s constitutes a significant counterweight to Heidegger’s pronouncements, in 1936, on the incapability of animals to have an inner history. My present intent is merely to highlight Heidegger’s express engagement with this topic, which puts him in direct conversation with those late eighteenthcentury discourses that showed a vested interest in different levels of soul life. Yet this pivotal philosophical connection is buried in Heidegger’s elusive remarks about this period’s “romantic philosophy of nature” cited earlier. Another reason why it is so important to bring this veiled connection out into the open is that, in the 1760s, the project of pragmatic history was paralleled by another movement within the broader compass of the newly emerging philosophy of nature, in close proximity to Herder’s brand of philosophical

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anthropology: the so-called medical enlightenment, which had a formative influence on the young Friedrich Schiller. By the same token, it is this novel style of inquiry that helps explain Schiller’s struggles to situate his aesthetics somewhere in between Herder’s neo-Spinozist anthropology sketched in God: Some Conversations and Kant’s teleology of purposive nature presented in the Critique of Judgment.40 Recall that in late eighteenth-century Germany medicine as an academic discipline was much more flexibly defined than it is nowadays. Compared to history, theology, and philosophy proper, its practitioners were less eager to elevate their field to the status of a queen discipline presiding over all other sciences. At the same time, enlightened medicine had a clearly holistic as well as practical bent in its variegated efforts to examine and diagnose the “whole man” in search for therapeutic techniques that would improve the human condition. In this regard, the medical enlightenment “was the decisive breakthrough out of which anthropological thought arose in Germany after the middle of the eighteenth century.”41 Specifically, what animated this unabashedly interdisciplinary discourse was an exciting combination of medical psychology with the theoretical frameworks provided by metaphysical teleology. Such research initiatives were guided by the notion that it made sense to aim for improving human development, even though human evolution writ large remained an open-ended process whose ultimate outcome was shrouded in uncertainty. This gave new meaning to the role and significance of observation and experience in the course of scientific inquiry. The philosophical-medical practitioners of this new science—true to Herder’s anthropological ethos—were quite comfortable with a “contingent, fallible, continuously evolving series of nominal approximations”42; and they could do without the absolute certainty guaranteed by the subjective unity of transcendental apperception, as the centerpiece of Kant’s First Critique. Differently put, for these philosophical doctors the unity of the world was no longer warranted by the unity of the rational mind. Instead, under the programmatic umbrella of thinking matter or spirit-fused nature, they accepted that mind and world coevolved in often unpredictable ways. Eventually, Kant himself would try to work out a more comprehensive understanding of nature’s pervasively teleological character, in the Third Critique. But during the decades leading up to this work he remained rather reserved toward the medical enlightenment and the unrestrained experimentalism he perceived among its main proponents, including Albrecht von Haller and Ernst Platner, next to the young Schiller’s most important mentor, Jakob Friedrich Abel.43

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Heuristic self-examination: Why start with Schelling rather than Hegel? All in all, the 1760s witnessed an intellectually vibrant convergence of medical enlightenment and pragmatic history which, in turn, prompted the kind of theological explorations that would fan the flames of the pantheism controversy of the 1780s. The earlier stage was marked by a growing tension between Kant and Herder. The later phase was animated by the efforts of the next philosophical generation, whose star members (Schiller before the “Tübingen Trio”: Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin) were brilliant eclectics who tried to take the best from both, Kant and Herder. In this chapter and the next two, my focus is mostly on Schelling and Schiller rather than Hegel. Certainly, as Hans Küng and Gary Dorrien have shown, any full-fledged account of the theological repercussions of the organic revolution, which triggered the anthropological turn in philosophy, cannot ignore Hegel.44 Thus, we will take a close look at Heidegger’s Hegel in Part Two. However, in the present segment of our discussion, the works of Schelling and Schiller offer a more promising starting point for tracking the different philosophical influences that Heidegger absorbed in the mid-1930s, and which inadvertently put him in (indirect) conversation with Scheler and Simmel. This holds especially for the extremely productive year of 1936, when Heidegger published “The Origin of the Work of Art” while lecturing on Schelling, preceded by the seminar on Leibniz in 1935/6 and followed by the seminar on Schiller 1936/37. All of these texts point back to the pantheism controversy of the 1780s, in the orbit of which Herder’s anthropology communicated crucial impulses to Schiller and especially Schelling, whose notion of an existing God with an inner history would remain central for Heidegger’s abiding interest in human freedom. In this regard, Schelling’s Freedom essay in tandem with his later Philosophy of Revelation are directly pertinent to Heidegger’s evolving views on the role of art as a disruptive power in history, which may under favorable conditions catalyze human freedom and at the same time bear witness to God reaching His true God-self. An additional heuristic motive for delegating detailed treatment of Hegel to Part Two of my inquiry is that Heidegger often uses Hegel’s name as a license to skip over the second half of the nineteenth century. In this regard, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy are symptomatic. For here we find statements like the following: From a philosophical point of view, what comes after Hegel is entirely deterioration [Abfall] and a relapse [Rückfall] into positivism and life-philosophy

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Heidegger’s Style or scholastic ontology, and from a scientific point of view it is the diffusion and rectification of many cognitions regarding the idea and its history. Even in this learned consideration, however, Hegelian points of view are still always operative, although they are often scarcely recognizable and are unable to make explicit their power to influence metaphysics. It is from these obscure sources that contemporary “philosophy” draws its “concepts” of “idea.”45

In other words, Heidegger enforces the common philosophical prejudice that Hegel’s death marks the end of German Idealism’s innovative period, and whatever comes afterward belongs to epigones and their stuffy “scholastic ontology” which lacks Hegel’s metaphysical depth. This brusque gesture at periodicization has become something of a pet peeve for Frederick Beiser, who frequently takes aim at the notion that German Idealism died with Hegel, most directly in his recent study After Hegel. Against the backdrop of my previous findings, I share Beiser’s concern. To be sure, Beiser does not single out Schelling for reexamining the philosophical resources of pantheism. He does, however, commend Schiller for one of the most valiant philosophical attempts at remedying a crucial problem with Kant’s conception of freedom in the sense of moral autonomy, for which Zammito offers the following poignant formulation: Man’s free will had to try to actualize its purposes in the world of sense, hence this had to be at least possible. Kant’s moral philosophy required not success, but an attempt to actualize the individual’s moral will in the world. That required the translation of a transcendental, rational determination of the will into an actual, efficacious act: free will as a “natural cause.”46

So, clearly, Kant does not require a triumphalist conception of divine providence such that God as the ultimate creator and purpose-giver of the world would guarantee in advance that our efforts at being moral will succeed. Yet Kant felt obliged to explain how the practical laws of moral reason were not only a formal possibility, that is, a regulative ideal of the mind, but an actual possibility. Even if moral failure could not be precluded in any particular instance, it had to be explained how moral action could ever manifest itself in this world at all, and not just remain an abstract theoretical standard hovering over the natural realm. That is, nature had to be rethought as amenable, in principle, to the realization of freedom. Morality had to be more than a formal structure, which was dormant in human experience but could never wake up. In § 65 of the Third Critique, Kant comments suggestively on nature as “self-organizing”47; and thus he got very close to the organic paradigm of spirit-fused (geistig) matter. Yet in the same breath he distances himself from the idea of hylozoism.48 The idea of endowing

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(begaben) mere matter with something like a soul, he insisted, was like mixing oil and water. In other words, Kant could not quite bring himself to accept the idea of an inherently intelligent matter with organizing powers of its own. Thus, the specter of metaphysical dualism had not vanished. Instead of calling nature spirited, Kant kept referring to nature-judged-teleologically as spirited. But then, it seemed, the Critique of Judgment had delivered less than it promised, namely an elucidation of the reality (ontological status) of reason itself.49 Instead, Kant rested content with tantalizing formulations. In § 65, he would thus refer to nature as an “analogy of life” (Analogon des Lebens).50 Later on, in § 78, he would give to the idea of purposive nature as a whole the label of a “permissible hypothesis” (erlaubte Hypothese).51 This was followed by the daring disclaimer, as we might call it, that “the compatibility” (Vereinbarkeit) of mechanical laws and teleological principles was rooted in the “supersensible substratum of nature” (das übersinnliche Substrat der Natur) of which “we can know nothing.”52 Accordingly, we have to admit that we can never think the two orders (mechanical and teleological) together in a single act of cognition. However, Kant concluded timidly, this did not rule out teleology as a perspectival option. To readers like Schiller and Schelling, this was a somewhat disappointing outcome, for it seemed yet again to reduce both self-organizing nature and human freedom to formal possibilities, not actual ones. Rather than proffering a concrete bonding of theoretical and practical reason, it seemed that practical reason had actually won out over theoretical reason, insofar as freedom remained a necessary postulate of morality.53 By the same token, according to Kant’s Vernunftglaube (rational faith), God as the designer of purposive nature appeared reduced to the impersonal guarantor of the moral law which, in the final instance, implied that “God’s will” was just another name for moral autonomy. In § 89, Kant thus offered a terse definition of religion as “morality in relation to God as lawgiver.”54 Curiously, a few pages later he deploys a slightly different formulation, in § 91, where he refers to God as the “moral worldfounder.”55 This may sound as if it carries more ontological weight, but in the end Kant had to concede that the question concerning the possible realization of freedom in nature remained rather mysterious: But what is quite remarkable, there is even one idea of reason (which is in itself incapable of any presentation in intuition, thus incapable of theoretical proof of its possibility) among the facts and that is the idea of freedom, the reality of which, as a particular kind of causality (the concept of which would be excessive from a theoretical point of view) can be established through practical laws of pure reason, and, in accordance with these, in real actions, and thus in

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However, this ad hoc classification of the idea of freedom as unique among all the ideas of pure reason appeared to be a victory in words rather than in philosophical substance; and it was here that Schiller and Schelling tried to make headway in the arenas of aesthetics and philosophy of religion, respectively. Other differences notwithstanding, they both converged on a notion which remained understated in Kant’s Third Critique, namely the notion of the personal. That is, they both recast the puzzle about freedom as a mysterious, unique causality in nature in terms of the emergence of personality from within nature. Freedom did not mean starting from nowhere. Rather, it meant a qualitative shift that elevated the natural to the personal. In other words, by working from and beyond Kant and Herder, both Schiller and Schelling began to articulate a pantheistic vantage point, which posited a basic homology between God rising to God-self and humans achieving freedom. The key to each of these ascending processes was creative activity, albeit on vastly different scales. Drawing on Beiser’s work as a resource for corroborating the proposed pantheistic overlap between Schelling and Schiller would seem to be tricky business though. By pointing to Schiller’s academic training at the Karlschule with its tradition of “philosophical medicine,”57 Beiser confirms and deepens Zammito’s observations about the medical enlightenment as an important field for aspiring intellectuals like Herder and Schiller in their partial rebellion against Kant, never mind that Schiller tried to stay on more conciliatory terms with Kantianism. However, Beiser proceeds to gainsay any substantial philosophical link between Schiller and Schelling, at least at first glance. Thus, Beiser notes early on in his study: From a broader historical viewpoint, it is striking that Schiller did not seem to be aware of one of the most important monistic theories of the late eighteenth century. This was the organicist theory that there is only a difference in degree between mind and body because both are simply stages in the development and organization of living force. This theory has its origin in the esoteric Leibniz, . . . ; it was later developed into an explicit monistic doctrine by Herder, Jacobi and Schelling toward the end of the eighteenth century. It was this theory that would later play a fundamental role in the development of German idealism, when it became a cardinal tenet of the absolute idealism of Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel.58

A few pages later, Beiser adds that Schiller’s Philosophische Briefe (Philosophical Letters) are frequently interpreted as close to Herder and thus placed in the

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vicinity of organicism and vitalism. Yet Beiser points out that this is credible neither for Schiller’s dissertations at the Karlschule nor for his Philosophical Letters, both of which keep leaning toward a dualist metaphysics.59 In his Introduction, Beiser thus classifies the claim that “Schiller’s objective aesthetics anticipates the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hegel” as an unsupported myth in Schiller scholarship. He identifies Hegel as the “ultimate source” of this misconception, which “completely ignores . . . Schiller’s insistence that the idea of freedom has to be read into appearances, and that beauty is a strictly normative or regulative principle.”60 However, in the later pages of Beiser’s study we find that this objection to Hegel claiming Schiller as a precursor for himself does not obviously apply to Schelling. In particular, Beiser’s own exposition of Schiller’s line of argument in the Aesthetic Letters (1795)61 brings out an element that, on my reading, goes to show that Schiller’s mature outlook was rather close to Schelling’s pantheism in the Freedom essay, even if Schiller might not have been comfortable with the Christological idiom that Schelling deployed in his later Philosophy of Revelation. The crucial common denominator comes into relief when we follow Beiser and attend to Schiller’s rendering of the dynamic interrelation between “person” (Person) and “condition” (Zustand) in the Aesthetic Letters, which will be my textual focus in Chapter 3, where I set out to identify Schiller as the implicit target of criticism in Heidegger’s 1936 essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Regarding Schiller’s account of person and condition, Beiser notes that this distinction is meant to capture “that which endures, or stays the same, and that which changes in the human being.”62 In fact, the fundamental relation between a person and her condition feeds into Schiller’s subsequent elaboration on the polarity of form and content which, in the Twelfth Letter, yielded his famous account of two fundamental drives that animate our human nature: the form drive (Formtrieb) and the sense drive (Stofftrieb).63 Schiller’s view of the person, then, can be delineated as follows: The person alone is “nothing but form and empty potential”; the condition alone is “nothing but world” which means the “formless content of time.” In order not to be mere world, the person must impart form to matter; in order not to be mere form, it must give matter to form. The interdependence of matter and form imposes two basic demands on human nature  .  .  . that we should materialize form, i.e. we should externalize and embody it in something particular . . . that we should formalize matter, i.e. we should internalize it and make it our own.64

If these formulations by Beiser make for an accurate characterization of Schiller’s philosophical approach in his Aesthetic Letters, then it is not difficult to see

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the thematic affinity to Heidegger’s treatment of God’s inner history through which He ascends from God-ground to personal God-self. More specifically, Beiser’s present summary ties in nicely with a passage that I would select as the pantheistic “crescendo” in Heidegger’s 1936 text on Schelling: The Being of the existing God is becoming in the primordial simultaneity of absolute temporality, called eternity. The being of things is a becoming as a definite emergence of divine Being into the revealedness of opposites still concealing themselves. The thinghood of things is so little determined by an indifferent objective presence of material bodies that matter itself is conceived as Spirit. What “we” feel and see as matter is Spirit which has congealed [geronnener Geist] into the extended gravity of inertia. (ST 123/GA42 215)

This formulation underscores, once more, the pantheistic theme complex at the heart of Heidegger’s engagement with Schelling in the mid-1930s. Tracing this bigger constellation is imperative for a comprehensive understanding of Heidegger’s intricate relation to philosophical anthropology. For it is this constellation of intellectual influences which, I argue, points back to the Herderian anthropological turn in tandem with the organic revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, a revolution that was to regain momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century when the monist movement came into its own. Attending to these ramifications requires that we subject Heidegger’s claims to critical scrutiny whenever he skips over the second half of the eighteenth century (through elusive remarks about “romantic nature philosophy”) as well as over the second half of the nineteenth century (by driving a wedge between Nietzsche’s thought and the “classicist” ideals associated with the names of Goethe and Winckelmann and—more elusively— Schiller).65 More simply put, if the proposed placement of Heidegger within an ongoing discussion over monist metaphysics is correct, then we should be wary of his all too quick dismissal of “Weimar classicism,” a posture of strategic distancing which runs like a red thread through his writings during the decisive decade: from Heidegger’s mid-1930s texts, via his double volume on Nietzsche, up to the Letter on Humanism, where this stratagem found its rhetorically most finessed expression. As far as his relation to Schelling is concerned, the 1936 lecture leaves it open just how great a philosophical distance Heidegger perceives between his own project and Schelling’s brand of panentheism. By and large, this first lecture is delivered in a respectful and sometimes even conciliatory voice. As we will see in the next chapter, the second lecture of 1941 is marked by a somewhat different tonality, as Heidegger shows himself to be increasingly critical of Schelling’s presumed leaning toward anthropomorphic metaphysics.

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Revelation: Heidegger’s Second Schelling Lecture vis-à-vis Scheler and Simmel

In this chapter, I attend to Heidegger’s renewed effort at interpreting Schelling, which is put forth in his 1941 lecture “The Metaphysics of German Idealism,” published as volume 49 of Heidegger’s Collected Works. Chronologically, it would seem that we are getting ahead of ourselves, since the next chapter will return us to Heidegger’s 1936 discussion of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Thematically, however, this order of engagement with Heidegger’s texts is expedient, according to my working hypothesis that Schelling remains among the most crucial references in the development of Heidegger’s thought, especially during the previously delineated decisive decade from 1936 to 1946. Also, as it turns out, in the 1941 lecture Heidegger does not bring the significance of art in revealing sacred meanings to bear on his discussion of German idealism and its metaphysics. So, with an eye on the next chapter, we are not running the risk of undue repetition. As one might expect, Heidegger’s 1941 discussion of Schelling expands on issues he had broached in his 1936 treatment of this thinker, but the accent has shifted to some extent. Above all, in the 1941 text Heidegger charges Schelling more directly with “anthropomorphism” (GA49 73). This criticism is relevant for my overall account of how Heidegger’s thought evolves toward a special form of artisan thinking, which he keeps contrasting with philosophical anthropology. Thus, Heidegger shows little patience with those recipients of his work who associate his magnum opus Being and Time with any such anthropological endeavor (GA49 33–4, 55, 58, 70–3, 103). What makes Heidegger’s 1941 lecture even more significant is that his critique of Schelling’s “anthropomorphism” clearly shows a thematic link to Max Scheler and Georg Simmel. Specifically, in a subsection titled “The ‘Essence’ of Da-sein” (Das “Wesen” des Da-seins), Heidegger stresses that Being and Time’s conception of the “selfhood of man”

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(Selbstheit des Menschen) has nothing to do with the so-called “subjectivity” of the subject, and therefore cannot at all be determined in terms of “egohood” (Ichheit) or “anything person-like” (Personenhaftigkeit) (GA49 60). We can refer to this stance as Heidegger’s abiding impersonalism, which he previously presented in opposition to Scheler’s philosophy of the person. This critique of Scheler is contained in Heidegger’s 1928 lecture course “Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz” (translated as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic), given the same year Scheler suddenly died and roughly one year before Heidegger’s encounter with Cassirer at Davos. Thus, we find in the early pages of this lecture a short section titled “In memoriam Max Scheler,” where Heidegger expresses grief at the loss of a colleague, whom he considered a thinker of great stature and a kindred spirit in terms of philosophical temper (GA26 62–4). Indeed, while Heidegger also enjoyed philosophical friendships with Karl Jaspers (until their falling out) and Rudolf Bultmann among others, the reader of Heidegger’s 1928 text can easily gain the impression that Heidegger felt a special connection with Scheler, which was based not so much on philosophical agreement as on shared religious sensibilities. Later in the published version of the Leibniz lecture, Heidegger returns to Scheler. In a moment of human warmth, he relates the memory of their last extensive conversation in December 1927 (GA26 165). On this occasion, Heidegger reports, they agreed on the nature of the challenge for philosophy in its current (i.e., late 1920s) condition: “The most essential: The moment has come . . . to dare cross over into genuine metaphysics, again” (ibid.). At the same time, Heidegger hints that he found Scheler overly optimistic in thinking the means for effecting such a crossing-over (Überschritt) were already in reach. Heidegger, for his part, thinks that the first step had to be more radical by going to the root of the problem, prior to solving it. What was called for, then, was to overturn the entire Western tradition of metaphysics by concentrating it into the simplicity of the basic problem of Being. In this vein, Heidegger notes how he and Scheler parted ways in happy anticipation of entering into “promising battle” with one another. Sadly, this was not meant to be (ibid.). Aside from differing in their optimism regarding the (un)timely retrieval of “genuine metaphysics,” Heidegger provides another clue about Scheler’s philosophical agenda, which puts him in proximity to Schelling and, I will argue, to Simmel. In the aforementioned short section “In memoriam Max Scheler,” Heidegger pays his late colleague another qualified compliment, when he characterizes Scheler’s leaning toward “philosophical anthropology” thus:

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“Incredibly bold in envisioning the idea of a weak God, who cannot be God without man, so that man himself is thought as ‘co-achiever of God’ [Miterwirker Gottes]. All of this stayed at a great distance from shallow theism or blurry pantheism. Scheler’s plan aimed at philosophical anthropology, an exposition of man’s special status” (GA26 63). Clearly, Heidegger gives Scheler credit for steering clear of flat-footed theism and fuzzy pantheism, while he remains critical of how Scheler joins the human and the personal-divine named “God” as inseparably linked in “co-achieving” each other. Witnessed by Heidegger’s subsequent 1941 volume on Schelling, Heidegger insists that the personal “figuration” of any deity is grounded in an impersonal sense of divinity which, at another layer of removal, is rooted even more originally in the holy as the ultimate fountain from which sacred meanings may emanate, though this can never be forced or guaranteed by human effort.1 The first thing to note is that both Schelling and Scheler proffered rather complicated notions of the personal, in the context of divine revelation. Other differences notwithstanding, what Schelling and Scheler share is the conviction that “personality” (in the sense of Persönlichkeit or what they also call Personalität)2 is an emergent quality, which originates from interactive gestures of communication and meaning-sponsoring. Accordingly, personality for these thinkers is neither a private character trait that could be accessed introspectively by attending to certain episodes in one’s own mental life, nor is it a public behavioral disposition, which could be discerned by empirical descriptive psychology. In other words, both Schelling and Scheler entertained a notion of interaction as more basic than any subsequent distinction in terms of inner thoughts and outward behavior. By way of stage setting, we can say that these two thinkers rejected as artificial and metaphysically obscure any notion of free agency construed as a linear-causal sequence leading from immaterial decisions (formed inside some private mind) to material consequences (tangible effects in the so-called external world). This objection to freedom causally understood had been part and parcel of Schelling’s Freedom treatise, from the first. Above all, the causal conception of freedom is notorious for generating the familiar paradox or, rather, the philosophical dead end of substance dualism, namely the apparently unanswerable question of how immaterial minds communicate with a material world. The locus classicus for this interface problem, as we might call it, are Descartes’s Meditations, a text which remains one of Heidegger’s favorite targets throughout his many writings. Yet, for Schelling and for Scheler, the problem with causal accounts of freedom actually

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cuts deeper than that. For even if substance dualists of Descartes’s ilk could answer the interface problem, it is still not clear how a singular immaterial mind could even begin to form ideas or plans fit for purposive action. Lest individual spontaneity deteriorate into random mental events, one would have to explain the relationship between a solitary mind and a non-random order of meaning, in which purposive action could take place. Schelling’s and, by extension, Scheler’s answer is that this cannot be explained, as long as we continue to tie the notion of intentional action to the notion of an isolated thinking subject. In short, for them, even more basic than the ontological interface problem of two unbridgeable substances is the problem of epistemic solipsism. As a matter of principle, purposive action can never originate from mental isolation. For Schelling and Scheler, this means participation as an “ur-phenomenon” (Urphänomen) of meaningful existence is prior to, and constitutive of, personal identity. Both thinkers thus postulate a profound mirror relationship between human existence and divine existence, for in either case there can be no personality independent of communicative interaction. In this respect, Scheler’s notion of man as the “co-achiever of God” directly echoes one of the core principles of Schelling’s Freedom essay as well as of his later Philosophy of Revelation, namely that God’s personality can only show itself through the “act” of revelation—and if we try to think of the divine as independent of revelatory activity, we are left with the notion of an impersonal God-ground.3 Heidegger saw several problems pertaining to this approach. His overarching complaint was that positing such a mirror relationship between the divine and the human was a prime example of an unwarranted analogy. In his 1941 lecture, Heidegger thus prefaces his critical commentary on Schelling’s distinction between “ground” and “existence,” with the following remark: “Even a superficial acquaintance with Schelling’s Freedom treatise shows that it is not just an ‘analogy of beings,’ which plays a role in it. Instead there is an ‘anthropomorphism’ at work, not behind the thinker’s back but with him being fully aware of it” (GA49 73). In the same passage, Heidegger also uses another expression to flag the flaw in Schelling’s approach as he sees it. Besides labeling it as “anthropomorphism,” he also refers to Schelling’s view as afflicted by “anthropomorphy” (Anthropomorphie) (ibid.).4 In this instance, Heidegger’s terminological choice is very intentional. Using the low-frequency term “anthropomorphy,” I take it, is meant to signal that Schelling is not simply guilty of anthropomorphic reductionism. That is, Schelling’s analogy between the “divine” and the “human” does not absorb the former into the latter. Instead,

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it thoroughly meshes both terms in this relation, so that the personal-divine and the personal-human can no longer be separated with respect to their essential features. Yet, for Heidegger this is an illegitimate collapse of essences. In making this point, he does not strike the posture of someone who has ready access to divine essence, which he could then neatly contrast with the essence of being human. Rather, Heidegger’s objection to analogical reasoning takes the form of charging Schelling with a non sequitur. For Heidegger, just because in the sphere of human affairs we can think of personality and communicative interaction only as inherently intertwined, it does not follow that the way the divine (or, in the last instance, the holiness of Being) communicates has to follow the same pattern.5 Our epistemic limitations in thinking about personality must not hastily be extended from the human sphere to the sphere of the divine. In short, Heidegger argues that Schelling illegitimately used “personality” as a bridge term that effaces the essential difference between the human and the divine. To put Heidegger’s critique of Schelling to the test, I will proceed in five steps corresponding to the following five segments, which make up the remainder of this chapter. First, I will provide a thumbnail sketch of Schelling’s conception of “the living God,” centered on his working definitions of monotheism and creation. Second, I will trace how some of Schelling’s central claims recur in Scheler’s religious phenomenology, which revolves around the relation between Spirit and world. Third, Scheler’s critique of Simmel’s philosophy of life will be examined in conjunction with Heidegger’s specific objection to Simmel’s resort to universal history. Fourth, Simmel’s philosophical analysis of the immanent transcendence of life will be presented in its own right, to gauge how compelling Scheler’s and Heidegger’s respective criticisms are. As we will see in this section, Simmel’s 1918 discussion goes to show that he was actually very sensitive to the issues raised by Heidegger’s concern over Schelling’s leaning toward anthropomorphy. Fifth, in preparation for the next chapter, I will round out the present line of inquiry with some additional remarks as to why Heidegger’s second Schelling commentary may be viewed as a philosophical teaser of sorts.

Schelling’s living God In Schelling’s oeuvre, the notion of “the living God” (der lebendige Gott) is articulated in most detail in his Philosophy of Revelation. There it is embedded in Schelling’s working definition of monotheism:

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Heidegger’s Style Monotheism is the doctrine that explicates God as such, or according to his Godhead [Gottheit]. Yet what is the basis of genuine Godhead? The true God, it is said, is the living one. Yet to be living, he has to step outside his unpreconceivable being [unvordenkliche Sein] and turn the latter into an aspect of himself. In so doing he frees his essence from this unpreconceivable state of being, and such freeing allows him to posit his essence as Spirit [Geist]. At the same time, this provides him with the possibility to be creator in that he puts another being over against his unpreconceiveable being. (PO 191) [all emphases in the original]

This passage is as crucial as it is puzzling. On the one hand, it introduces Schelling’s fundamental distinction between two modalities of God, namely God in the mode of His “unpreconceivable being” and God in the mode of Godhead. On the other hand, it points to the central, Kant-inspired theme complex that asks about the conditions of possibility for God’s activity as creator. Under the name of the living God, it is the transition from God to Godhead that liberates God from his unpreconceivable status through positing His essence as Spirit. Only by “stepping outside” His unpreconceivable being does God come alive, become creative, and so emerge as “the true God.” These formulations set the stage for Schelling’s general claim that monotheism, properly understood, is inherently pluralist. From this point of view, we can make sense of both the unity and the creative productivity of a single God only by acknowledging His inherently plural nature, which is implied by the puzzle of the unity of the Trinity. For Schelling, the living God of Christianity is a plural God: “The creator is not simply singular, and since this plurality constitutes a closed totality, he is the All-One” (PO 189).6 To bear out this tenet and to clarify the present notion of the unpreconceivable, we need to consider Schelling’s two most central claims about creation: first, that no necessity of its occurrence can be derived from the general concept of God and, second, that creation is inherently multifaceted and cannot be explained as “something simply positive” (PO 181). Throughout, Schelling objects to the idea that creation begins with the conscious, voluntary decision of an intelligent demiurge or creator God. As he writes a few pages earlier, assuming such act is hardly more than declaring creation to be incomprehensible, and such naïve acceptance amounts to nothing but “stale theism” (PO 170). Instead, creation must be understood as irreducibly complex as far as the different factors are concerned, which are joined in its process: Creation is not simply something positive, as if it was an extricating from within. Rather, that which is originally there is subjected to limits and thereby becomes something self-contained [ein in sich Seiendes] and in possession of itself [sich

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selbst Besitzendes], insofar as capability [das Können] has been engendered with respect to it. (PO 181)

In other words, what is naïve about the notion of an intelligent creator God is the uncritical assumption that capability and its flip side, possibility, is a simple given. God’s capability to create the world is correlative to the possibility of the world’s being created. Yet, for Schelling, God did not just have the capability to create the world, then decide to actualize this capacity, and so make the world. In the first instance, God is not yet a fully personal agent (PO 155).7 Alternatively, Schelling proposes that creation has to be explained in terms of the dynamic, process-like interplay between necessity and contingency. On a preliminary note, we might compress this basic insight in the formula: possibility is not a simple given but concurrent with the processive interplay of necessity and contingency.8 Yet, if prior to creation’s unfolding God cannot be thought of as an agent yet, how shall we think of Him? We already saw that Schelling refers to God in His noncreating state as “unpreconceivable being.” With the preceding remarks about possibility, necessity, and contingency in mind, we can now begin to clarify this bewildering phrase. When Schelling refers to “unpreconceivable being,” he does not mean to offer a definition of God. Specifically, he steers clear of any attempt to derive God’s existence from the concept of God as a necessary being. As Schelling poignantly puts it: “The existence of God cannot be demonstrated, only the God-ness of that which exists can,” and even that may be achieved “only a posteriori” (PO 175).9 If it were not for the empirical phenomenon of creation, namely the experiential diversity of the world around us, this would be the end of the story. On the plane of the unpreconceivable, there is no logical or conceptual necessity for the divine to ever get out of its noncreating condition, which Schelling intimates in terms of undisturbed tranquility or Gelassenheit—an expression that was to become a key entry in the later Heidegger’s philosophical dictionary. For Schelling, this implies that God becomes personal only through participation in the experience of each of His creatures, and that all of these creaturely experiences matter to Him and affect Him. Accordingly, all of history is relevant to God, and nothing in history is a mere preliminary to a later chapter or episode. Specifically, history (in the sense of Geschichte rather than Historie)10 is itself creative insofar as it bears witness to God’s ongoing Creator activity, in the course of which He keeps revealing His personality. In terms of God’s abiding revelatory effort, then, Geschichte is not really a linear process, whose diachronic expanse would threaten human existence with a potentially paralyzing sense of

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insignificance. Rather, its process character is profoundly communicative, an ongoing exchange between the divine and the human. However, one of Schelling’s most fundamental contentions is that we misconstrue this communication, if we model it on the dialogue between two (or more) self-conscious interlocutors. Divine revelation does not unfold like ordinary human conversation. In particular, it does not begin with two thinking subjects that could be called God-self and human-self. As Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation aims to show, the very notion of an infinite divine Subject does not make sense, since infinity and subjectivity do not go together.11 That’s why the “stale” demiurge model keeps begging the question as to how we can meaningfully speak of freedom with respect to God’s revelatory act. Schelling’s proposed alternative is to construe salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) not as a formal sequence but as a concrete matrix of spiritual stimulation. That is to say, as salvation-historical beings, humans encounter God’s creation not as an indifferent physical environment but as a spiritual challenge. Eschatologically speaking, time is neither neutral nor linear, but evaluative and contrastive. Thus, one can say, with Schelling, that essentially time is not chronometric but prismatic, insofar as God’s ongoing revelation is continuously inflected in human experience. To put it a bit provocatively: Instead of displaying His preexisting personality to us, God’s personality is revealed through us. Schelling stressed this point toward the end of his Freedom essay. In terms of becoming-personal, divinity and humanity “pervade” (durchdringen) each other (F 66; cf. 64). As we will see in the next section, this schema of pervasion and the concomitant idea of the created world as spiritually demanding proved crucial for Scheler’s religious phenomenology which, to some extent, anticipated Heidegger’s analysis of “moods” familiar from Being and Time.

Scheler’s religious phenomenology In The Eternal in Man (1921), Scheler places great emphasis on “the essential relation of spirit and world” (die wesensmäßige Relation von Geist und Welt), the clarification of which he ranks as one of the most profound insights philosophy can offer (EM 183). More specifically, world is featured as the connecting tissue between the finite human spirit and the infinite divine spirit, though this calls for further clarification. In order to explicate the complex meaning Scheler assigns to the terms involved in this relation, we can start by noting that Scheler’s

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phenomenological account neither proffers nor simply assumes a definition of “world.” Instead, the significance of world is approached as a “primordial phenomenon” (Urphänomen) that is given to us, and which cannot be produced by human experience. In spelling out the phenomenological distinctness of world, Scheler’s 1921 account anticipates integral parts of Heidegger’s analysis of “worlding” in his Kassel Lectures (1925) and in more widely known texts like Being and Time (1927) and The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (1929/30). Most important for our purposes, Scheler, much like Schelling before him, elucidates the basic phenomenological content of world in terms of “resistance” (Widerstand) (EM 187, 218). The crux is that by experiencing the resistance of the world as such (prior to confronting any particular opposition), we gain a glimpse-like, essence-directed vision (Wesensschau or wesentliche Anschauung) of God’s creativity. However—and this pivotal point is easy to miss in Scheler’s text—such glimpse at God’s creativity does not pertain to God’s creation of the world as a dynamic totality of tangibles, for the latter only constitutes God’s second creation. Instead, by encountering the resistance inherent in worldhood what we can grasp about the essential relation between spirit and world pertains to God’s first creation, namely the creation of the human soul qua finite spirit. Here I am referring to the human soul, in the singular, because at this level of Scheler’s analysis the finite spirit has not yet been poured out into a multitude of uniquely distinct human souls. Rather, in the first instance, finite spirit refers to a general soul capacity, which all humans share and which renders them equal as children of God. This universal aspect of the human soul constitutes the common denominator of spiritual existence among all human beings, that is, what enables them to be in touch with God. It is this general capacity for participating in a religious act and thus for sharing God, which Scheler calls “potency” (Potenz) and which he ascribes to all members of humanity across history and irrespective of cultural or creedal difference (EM 195). It is this potency of the human soul, namely the finite spirit’s inherent ability to encounter and receive God, which God creates from Himself in the first act of creation. To repeat, at this first qualitative stage, there is no multitude of human souls yet, and thus no spiritual individuality in the usual sense associated with that expression. This may seem somewhat paradoxical because it implies that, originally, the personal core of the finite human spirit is not really personal, that is, not uniquely individual. However, if we think of this core feature in terms of spiritual equality in tandem with essential human dignity, then it does not seem outlandish to assume a general soul capacity which makes all of us equal in God’s eyes. Scheler, for his

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part, expounds this egalitarian idea(l) as the great principle of solidarity. This principle informs his holistic ethical vision of a “moral cosmos” in which all members are co-responsible for each other and thus united in what biblically is called the Kingdom of God (EM 51). If it were not for this fundamental background sense of solidarity, none of us would be capable of being affected by individual episodes of, say, remorse, which serves Scheler as one of his prime examples (EM 29–59, esp. 47, 49–50). In other words, Scheler’s brand of ethical theism implies that the worldly relation between finite human spirit and infinite divine spirit is infused throughout with a special kind of moral sensibility, which is more basic than any subsequent psychological episode of moral feeling. In encountering the world as such, humanity’s aforesaid general soul capacity is always already morally engaged, even before anyone consciously experiences any particular moral reaction or sentiment (like compassion for someone’s suffering or indignation over injustice). According to Scheler’s religious phenomenology, moral involvement does not have to unfold consciously. Thus, he remarks: “Spiritual acts cannot be perceived or observed introspectively: they exist only as enactable and in the course of their enactment [Vollzug]” (EM 179). In its most essential sense, moral sensibility is inseparable from religious sensibility (cf. EM 304), since universal human solidarity is grounded in the encounter with a created world. This encounter exerts a moral “pull” on us, which is in no way confined to the psychological sphere of personal introspection. In forging the aforementioned link between cosmic createdness and moral efficacy, Scheler openly follows St. Augustine, when he associates divine creativity with continuous (moral) sustenance (EM 194, 374–5, cf. 218 and 297).12 From this neo-Augustinian vantage point, creation has an inherently appellative character. This perspective on how humans confront the moral cosmos as an ethical calling also informs Scheler’s notion of the eschaton, understood as the ultimate guiding impulse that orients the world—what in a religious idiom would be called God’s will for His creation. Accordingly, Scheler construes salvation history in a manner that appears compatible with Schelling’s eschatology. The underlying purpose of history consists in humanity and divinity coachieving spiritual integrity, which in Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation was designated as “personality.” Yet the present account of humanity and divinity’s co-achievement, to which Heidegger drew attention in his 1928 lecture cited earlier, calls for a qualifier, especially in light of Heidegger’s deep-seated worry about ill-founded anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine. Scheler was aware of these complications. For humans,

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he argued, the moral efficacy of the world is encountered as an ethical demand. By comparison, God does not encounter His creation as a mandate. Creation appeals to Him differently. God lovingly affirms it through His eternal “yes,” and thereby extends a standing offer to the finite spirit to align itself with God’s love for creation (EM 219); and the way God extends this offer is by pushing the finite spirit through history, as it were. In this regard, Scheler’s account is closest to Schelling’s eschatological notion of prismatic temporality, which we sketched in the previous section. Metaphorically speaking, for both thinkers history is the echo chamber of God’s loving call. According to Scheler’s religious phenomenology, in the first phase of creation the finite spirit, namely humanity’s universal soul capacity, gets delimited from the infinite divine. This is followed by a second phase, during which the finite spirit is then released into historically embedded, experiential multiplicity, so that out of this diversity a higher spiritual unity may rise. If we wish to condense this into a formula, we could say: Experiential diversity is meant to serve spiritual harmony. Hence, what Christians sometimes call the “new earth” is not a formation in history but a spiritual commonwealth whose significance transcends history. This covenant constitutes the highest standard or summum bonum, against which earthly goings-on and human existence writ large are measured (EM 260–2). Importantly, according to Scheler’s ethical theism such eschatological standard cannot be reduced to a moral formalism. Here we need to expand on an earlier observation to the effect that for Scheler moral sensibilities and religious sensibilities are ultimately fused (EM 304), because they both originate in the “idea of creation” (Schöpfungsgedanke). Scheler often features this idea as synonymous with the “idea of God” (Gottesidee), since we cannot make sense of God apart from His creative work (EM 56, 187, 193–4, 297, 333). In this regard, Scheler was just as adamant as Schelling in his Freedom essay that we cannot grasp the meaning of creation, if we envision God as a mere “demiurge” or deus faber (EM 218). This is because independently of creation we cannot attribute any spirit-like characteristics to God. Prior to any contrast between God and His creation, all we have is an unbound divine that is as sovereign as it is impersonal. In this mode, God can only be envisioned as “unpreconceivable being” (Schelling) or what Scheler calls Ens a se (EM 188). In Scheler’s dictionary, this expression refers to God’s immeasurability before we can even begin to compare God’s creativity to any instance of human creativity. This is why any philosophy of revelation, which aims to elucidate the mystery of “God’s free deed” (EM 58) cannot start by positing some kind of

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super-subject or divine decision-maker. For such an approach would be naively anthropomorphic, indeed, and beg the main question Schelling and Scheler meant to address: how the unbound, impersonal divine may ascend to personal divinity through the unfolding relationship between creator and creation. With this important caveat in mind, we can follow Scheler’s terminological practice and treat the “idea of creation” and the “idea of God” as interchangeable. Generally, for Scheler, ideas are unlike concepts, insofar as ideas are actionguiding forces within the moral cosmos, whereas concepts belong to the formal apparatus of human cognition. Concepts clarify, but only ideas can motivate. In this sense, the moral “pull,” which the finite human spirit experiences in confronting the world as such, is not concept-based but idea-driven. To further clarify this crucial element in Scheler’s religious phenomenology, it is expedient to take a quick look at how Scheler traced the limitations of Kantian ethics back to Kant’s epistemology presented in the First Critique. Scheler’s primary objection in this context is that being affected by ideas—most notably, by the idea of God—engenders a “certainty” (Gewissheit) that is altogether different from “knowledge” (Wissen) in the sense of rational comprehension. For Kant, Scheler complaints, anything supra-sensible or “asensual” cannot be processed by the organizing epistemic structures of the rational mind and so falls outside the compass of publicly shareable, empirical knowledge (EM 251). Over against this standard for exclusion, Scheler holds that sensual data do not exhaust the range of what can objectively be “given” to humans, unless we unduly restrict the human spirit to its capacity for rational formatting, namely to those synthetic a priori principles for establishing epistemic coherence, which Kant summarized under the rubric of transcendental apperception (EM 109). As an alternative, Scheler’s phenomenological approach discerns multiple “spheres” (Sphären) of meaningful organization. In each of these spheres (which bear a certain resemblance to Ernst Cassirer’s symbolic forms), the human spirit confronts fundamentally different kinds of “givens” (Urgegebenheiten) (EM 195–6).13 Importantly, for Scheler, these different spheres must not be construed merely as so many frames of interpretation. In other words, Scheler does not view himself as an advocate of hermeneutic pluralism based on metaphysical monism. He expressly rejects any philosophical position which holds that, ontologically, there is but one reality, but the human mind can organize the raw data which it receives from this single domain according to different interpretive frames and so produce a variety of knowledges (such as aesthetic knowledge, next to natural-scientific knowledge, political knowledge, and religious knowledge).

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Contra Kant’s amorphous notion of an orderless, gestalt-free “stuff-of-sensuality” (Empfindungsstoff), Scheler insists that the data which the human spirit receives are not raw. These data are always already ordered by the eternal ideas from which they spring (EM 195). The appellative character of the moral cosmos is energized by ideas, the highest of which is the idea of God. These ideas are not the product of human minds. They have the power to affect and (morally) guide human existence, exactly because they are not generated within history. Here we can see the programmatic proximity between Scheler’s ethical theism and the eschatology of Paul Althaus. Just like Scheler in The Eternal in Man, so does Althaus emphasize the evaluative, transcendent character of salvation history in The Last Things. For both thinkers, the guiding impulse of creation has nothing to do with inner-worldly teleology, be it in the form of biological adaptation or social utopias. Instead, the idea of creation conveys a timeless ideal of spiritual community, which calls on humanity from “the beyond of history” (das Jenseits der Geschichte) in Althaus’s memorable phrase.14 On my reading, it is this eschatological aspect of Scheler’s religious phenomenology that accounts for his aforementioned aversion toward monist metaphysics and its presumed tendency to absorb the works of the spirit into a singular historical process. This hermeneutical gesture, Scheler charges, effectively conflates the interactive dynamism between spirit and world. Such conflation, I submit, is the common target of Scheler’s and Heidegger’s religiousphenomenological writings at the beginning of the 1920s, in which both of them tend to treat Simmel as a philosophical scapegoat of sorts. That is, they single out Simmel’s philosophy of life as one of the most prominent representatives of wrongheaded monist metaphysics as they see it.

Scheler and Heidegger contra Simmel In Vom Ewigen im Menschen (On the Eternal in Man), Scheler charges that even though Simmel’s philosophy might be compelling in other regards, it fails to offer an accurate account of the life of religious ideas and their history-transcending power to profoundly reorient human existence. Simmel’s “metaphysics of life,” he submits, amounts to the “most extreme form of religious subjectivism,” for it reduces the idea of God to but one of the many possible “objectivations” (Objektivationen) of life (EM 240). What Scheler finds unacceptable is that Simmel’s The View of Life treats any expression of theism as just another product

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of life’s creativity, which in principle is no different from life’s other creations such as artworks, political constitutions, or scientific theories. Here Scheler goes as far as to charge Simmel’s position not just with religious subjectivism but with idolatry, since it directs the believer’s spiritual focus away from God and onto the believer’s own religious experience of God in the course of worship. Such bending-back-on-oneself turns genuine faith into idolatry, because in lieu of worshipping God we worship our own worshipping of God. Bluntly put, Scheler reads Simmel’s metaphysics of life to the effect that God-ideas come and go, while life continues. If God is immanent to life, then life trumps God. That is, if life is the giver of God rather than the other way round, then God is not really God. According to this train of thought, Scheler’s present objection culminates in the claim that Simmel’s account of how life generates God-ideas amounts to an unnecessary “detour” (EM 241), since it is bound to return to itself anyway, without ever being able to reach higher. This line of critique sounds strikingly similar to Heidegger’s, aside from the fact that Scheler is not shy to use an overtly theistic idiom, while Heidegger’s drift away from Catholicism at the time makes him wary of such religious language use.15 In his early Freiburg lecture, “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (1920/21), Heidegger’s criticism of Simmel is focused on the notion of “universal-historical orientation” (universalgeschichtliche Orientierung) (GA60 45, 48).16 According to Heidegger, this orientation is something that Simmel inherited from his former teacher Dilthey, next to Ernst Troeltsch, who is introduced as the “most significant representative of philosophy of religion” at the time of Heidegger’s writing. What Heidegger finds most objectionable about this viewpoint is that it attenuates history’s inherently subversive quality, which Heidegger underscores as the “disturbing” quality of “the historical” (GA60 37). In other words, in works by Simmel, like Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892) and The View of Life (1918), Heidegger discerns an “epistemologicalpsychological” bias, namely the tendency to approach the phenomenon of history as a process, the dynamics of which are determined by the human mind’s recurrent effort at meaningful organization (GA60 41). While Heidegger immediately adds that, for Simmel, these attempts to establish a meaningful order among the otherwise amorphous data of historical experience are neither complete nor long-lasting, his main complaint remains intact, namely that history is reduced to a human project. More specifically, Heidegger argues that Simmel’s philosophy of life or Lebensphilosophie is framed by a monist metaphysics, which absorbs all phenomena into an overarching “historical dialectic” (GA60 46–7).17

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According to this dialectic, the movement of history is construed as the serial alternation of setting up (social, political, artistic, religious) orders and watching their subsequent dissolution. In short, this universal-historical orientation reduces the dynamic of history to the ups and downs of human cultural labor, and in the last analysis history becomes just another name for culture. In Heidegger’s judgment, this “culture-philosophical” approach to history constitutes a specific version of subjectivism, for it turns each historical epoch into the “expression” (Ausdruck) of a “culture soul” (Kulturseele) (GA60 43). That is to say, for Heidegger’s Simmel the effort at meaningful organization is not limited to the individual psyche. Instead, the vicissitudes of history relate to the more or less short-lived products of group work, where a particular community or society sets up structures (including social codes, architectural constructs, or theoretical frameworks). Thus, “culture soul” refers to implicit collective agendas rather than explicitly stated personal thoughts. For Heidegger though, this humanistic account of history still amounts to subjectivism broadly conceived, for it understands history in terms of human intentionality, even if intention here refers to often loosely orchestrated social trends rather than to clearly articulated personal thought contents. By and large, Heidegger objects, Lebensphilosophie à la Simmel reduces history to a thoroughly human affair: a pendulum in dialectical motion, which swings back and forth between the temporary cohesion and dissolution of cultural products. Against the backdrop of these observations, the aforementioned “epistemological-psychological” bias which Heidegger diagnoses for Simmel’s stance can now be specified. What is artificially “placating” (beruhigend) about Simmel’s view is that the very standard for distinguishing between temporary order and subsequent disorder is provided by the human mind’s capacity for finding meaning in history. That is to say, the human mind’s meaningsponsoring powers constitute the total “frame” (Rahmen) (GA60 65) for historical understanding, which leaves no room for any measure of meaning that might originate from “the beyond of history,” to use Paul Althaus’s phrase, again. Thus, Heidegger sums up what he finds objectionable about any universalhistorical orientation, including Simmel’s, in the following statement: “History is no longer placed in opposition to any supra-temporal reality [überzeitliche Wirklichkeit]. Instead, the safeguarding of the present against history is achieved by dragging history [Geschichte] itself into the objective process of historical becoming [historisches Werden]” (GA60 43).18 This kind of historicist approach has weighty implications for any philosophy of revelation. If history is total,

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that is, if there is no meaningful “outside” of history, then whatever may be considered holy or divine can only be revealed as thoroughly immanent to the currents of history. Furthermore, once history gets equated with the dialectics of cultural evolution, any instance of revelation will be viewed as nothing but an intra-historical, cultural event. For Heidegger, such a perspective imposes an unwarranted eschatological limit, because it only allows for different orders of meaning formation within history, while methodologically precluding the possibility that there might be a history-transcending domain. Already in 1918/19, Heidegger had sketched a review for Rudolf Otto’s immensely influential study on The Holy (1917), in which he voiced agreement with Otto to the effect that the holy designated a sphere, the “objectity” (Objektität) of which was toto genere different from anything that could be integrated into universalhistorical accounts of cultural development (GA60 333). By now we can see how Scheler’s and Heidegger’s respective objections to Simmel converge on charging him with a form of subjectivism, which measures history according to the creative powers as well as the limits of the human mind. In a particularly poignant passage, Heidegger ascribes to Simmel the claim that “the free human personality holds history in its hand; history is a product of free, forming subjectivity” (GA60 41). However, without any further qualifications, this characterization of Simmel’s view is too condensed to be persuasive. Comparable to Scheler’s discussion in On the Eternal in Man, Simmel’s The View of Life proffers a complex conception of personality (VL 49, 86–96) which points back to Schelling’s discussion of the essence of human freedom in the context of divine revelation. Unless one attends to the details of Simmel’s nuanced account of freedom, charging him with subjectivism (not to mention idolatry) appears hasty. My goal is not to provide a full-fledged defense of Simmel over against Scheler’s and Heidegger’s respective criticisms. Instead, I will rest content with highlighting those details in Simmel’s The View of Life, which relate his thought to Schelling’s. Steering clear of any premature declaration about winners and losers in this constellation, the point I wish to make is that for Scheler’s and Heidegger’s dismissal of Simmel to be compelling, they would have to take on certain elements of Schelling’s thought in more detail than they actually do. This caveat applies not only to Scheler’s 1921 text under consideration, but also to Heidegger’s two Schelling commentaries penned in 1936 and 1941. By the same token, scrutinizing some select points of contact between Simmel and Schelling will show that Heidegger’s critique of Schelling’s “anthropomorphial” use of

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analogy, in particular, calls for further qualification. Before rounding out this chapter with some remarks as to why Heidegger’s second Schelling commentary remains a philosophical teaser in this regard, the next section is meant to let Simmel have his say in order to put Scheler’s and Heidegger’s rather harsh dismissals of his work in perspective. To be sure, this approach does not rule out that Simmel’s discussion gives rise to questions or problems of its own.

Simmel on life’s immanent transcendence The best entry point for situating Simmel within the present author constellation is his commentary on Schelling and pantheism in an extraordinary footnote, which is so rich in content and so pertinent to my overall discussion of philosophical anthropology that it calls for a longer excerpt. What would otherwise be an excessively long citation is justified in this case, because the following passage contains precisely those details, which are glossed over in Scheler’s and Heidegger’s commentary on Simmel’s The View of Life. In the weighty footnote at hand, Simmel considers “the claim that there is no unquestionable warrant for calling the Divinity ‘living’” (VL 69n. 2). Indeed, what Simmel has to say about this issue goes to show that he did not mean to absolutize life in the way that Heidegger and Scheler found so objectionable, and which prompted Scheler to charge him with idolatry. As Simmel puts it: Life or sentience is ultimately a specific type of existence and to think of it as the “highest”—to place all of being into the exclusive alternative of the purely material and the vital-spiritual—merely because human beings on earth do not experience anything else, seems to me to be a narrow-mindedness most radically sublimated in all those metaphysical systems that announce the “spirit” or “life” as the Absolute. Naturally, nothing would be gained if one chose to describe God as the super-vital: even the most careful attempt at precise definition oversteps what we are justified to think. But nothing hinders us, in fact everything entitles us, to remove the constrictedness of the life- and soul-concept from the Absolute, in full disregard of the fact that this constrictedness is the limit of all of our possibilities. Even the attempt to find something freed from this in the concept of “value” would not lead to a more legitimate determination of the divine Absolute, for to me an actualization of values without the basis of life, soul, and spirit seems a mere word. Schelling’s absolute “indifference” would seem more satisfying if he did not separate it at once into the poles of nature and spirit and thereby imprison it yet again within the alternative

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Heidegger’s Style confines of our contingent experience. Spinoza seems farther along when he ascribes to God infinite attributes, of which only two, thinking and extension, are comprehensible. But he still understood these as real determinants of the Divinity—a point that is surely incontrovertible in consequent pantheism, but again signifies anthropomorphism for a transcendent God. From this perspective negative theology of the mystic is freer and deeper than all earlier or later dogmatics and philosophy of religion. (VL 69n. 2)

Among the numerous important details comprised in this passage, one of the most striking observations for our purposes is that, already in 1918, Simmel charged Schelling with “anthropomorphism,” much in the way in which Heidegger would accuse Schelling of “anthropomorphy” in his 1936 and 1941 commentaries. What is more, in this place, Simmel shows the same tendency as Heidegger, namely to interpret Schelling’s account of God as existing vis-à-vis God as ground in terms of the two “poles of nature and spirit.” In fact, here Simmel’s profile appears to be that of a religious skeptic (rather than an abrasive atheist or bland agnostic) who should have been right after Heidegger’s own heart. On my reading, the kind of religious skepticism we can find in Heidegger’s writings came into its own through his protracted engagement with Hegel, which I will treat in Part Two of this study. In the present context, I use the phrase “religious skepticism” in a more basic sense, simply to capture Heidegger’s reservation toward any readymade projection of the inherent limits of human experience onto the nature of the divine. In the same vein, Simmel cautions against “anthropomorphic” characterizations of the Absolute in terms of “life,” “soul,” or “spirit.” Cognitively and experientially, the scope of our possibilities does not dovetail in any obvious or intuitive way with the scope of God’s metaphysical possibilities. Even using more abstract language that would refer to God as a highest “value” is not much more fitting, since the invocation of any value without reference to some form of life or other seems vacuous to Simmel, while tying it to a certain concept of life would reintroduce anthropomorphism. Confronted with this dilemmatic choice between varieties of God-talk, which are either anthropomorphic or empty, Simmel signals some sympathy with the mystical brand of negative theology. His remarks on this subject appear not only in tune with Heidegger’s 1941 critique of Schelling, they would also seem to resonate well with Scheler’s call for philosophical self-limitation and his concomitant insistence that negative theology remains the “fundament” for his own version of religious phenomenology, which he also identified as a novel form of “natural theology” (EM: 172–8; cf. 138, 144–5). Of course, Scheler would

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take exception to Simmel’s present wholesale rejection of “value” terms that might be deployed in an effort to characterize the moral charge discernible in God’s creation, which Scheler sought to defend (cf. EM 330). Another important detail, which should have given Scheler and Heidegger pause in dismissing The View of Life’s presumed subjectivism out of hand, relates to Simmel’s account of teleology as the real opposite of freedom. For one thing, this strand in Simmel’s discussion resonates well with the claim in Heidegger’s 1936 commentary on Schelling that it is Kant’s Third Critique (rather than the First Critique) which constitutes the main reference point for the German Idealists’ reaction to Kant (VL 26). For another thing, this theme complex also goes to show that Simmel was at pains to keep his philosophy of life at a clear distance from any biological reductionism that would explain life merely in terms of organic functioning or survival instincts. Such biological reductionism is precisely what Simmel warned against, for this would amount to a “naïve identification of actual life with life in general” (VL 104). This proviso is substantiated by Simmel’s way of contrasting teleology with freedom, a contrast which he articulates as follows: The antithesis of freedom is not coercion, . . . . Only a being that is somehow free can be coerced: to say that natural things, ruled by natural laws, must behave this way or that, is a silly anthropomorphic expression. Their behavior throughout is only actual, and to say that it is also necessary in the sense of some sort of duress imputes to them an initiative or capacity for human resistance. The antithesis of freedom, rather, is purposiveness. Freedom is not something negative, not the absence of coercion, but an entirely new category to which the development of man ascends once it has left the level of purposiveness bound to his inner physicality and the continuation of this purposiveness into action. Freedom is a release, not from the terminus a quo, but from the terminus ad quem. From this comes the impression of freedom in art, science, morality, and real religiosity; from it also comes its utter absence of contradiction with causality. (VL 29–30)19

Once again, Simmel appears rather close to Heidegger. The aforementioned passage anticipates Heidegger’s agenda in his 1930 seminar, to which I drew attention in Chapter 1 in the context of the Davos debate and its immediate aftermath. In this seminar, Heidegger set out on a quest for a noncausal conception of freedom. In making a case for the need to work out such an alternative, Heidegger stressed human finitude. He did so in a way that clearly echoes Simmel’s insistence that freedom must not be construed as the opposite of coercion, nor can it properly be understood as contradicting causality. (Remember that Heidegger’s treatment of Simmel in the early Freiburg lecture

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showed that he was well familiar with Simmel’s The View of Life by 1920/21.) We already noted that Simmel, much like Heidegger, was more skeptical than Scheler about the legitimacy of “value” talk with respect to the divine or the holy. This difference notwithstanding, Simmel’s present comment on how “freedom in . . . real religiosity” is neither bound by, not contradictory to, the causal workings of “natural laws,” should have been quite agreeable to Scheler. Given our findings about the tenets of Scheler’s religious phenomenology expounded in On the Eternal in Man, one would expect him to applaud Simmel for exposing the flaws in the idea that the claims or actions of lived religion gainsay the causal closure of God’s creation. In light of what we previously sketched as Scheler’s account of divine revelation in terms of God’s creation as prismatized in history, it seems that he should have been more sympathetic to how Simmel criticized any attempt at rendering freedom antithetical to natural laws as a “silly anthropomorphic expression” (VL 29; cited earlier). Finally, Simmel seems to anticipate Scheler’s religious-phenomenological conception of “act center” (Aktzentrum) (EM 179), when he underscores how “crude” our customary conceptualizations of human action are (VL 110). The crucial detail in this segment of The View of Life is that, when Simmel refers to “organism,” he does not mean it as a reference to any natural unit that is governed by some biological necessity or “vital automatism” (VL 110–12; cf. 27). Instead, he harks back to his previous observation about the “distance that exists between the physical givenness of the human organism and its practical behavior,” on account of which “man can in principle be described as the nonpurposive creature” (VL 28). In keeping with these earlier remarks, Simmel now refers to organism as an order of meaning that asserts its “personality” not only vis-à-vis “lifeless matter” but also over against the “indifferent stream of being as a whole” (VL 112). For Simmel, then, an organism’s personality shows through its participation in an order of meaning that is not governed by inner-worldly teleology, if by the latter we mean either causal-mechanical or biological necessity. And in the voice of the religious skeptic, who can appreciate the significance of negative theology, he underscores the limits of conceptual language, which fails to fully capture this special sovereignty of “organic beings” with a personality of their own. We do not conceive of organic beings as among those that find their unity only through selection out of the continuity of being, as can only happen under the control of a concept. They have, rather, an objective unity immanent to themselves; they find their formative boundary through their own characteristic

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entelechy; they have a center within themselves that frees them from the (so to speak) indifferent stream of being as a whole, a stream that gathers everything into a continuum. (VL 112)

Here Simmel’s use of the phrase “characteristic entelechy” is meant to emphasize the difference between the “objective unity immanent” to organic beings with a personality of their own, on the one hand, and the concept-bound unity, which we invoke when we classify different kinds of natural objects (animate or inanimate) in nature, on the other hand. Accordingly, for Simmel, the sense of immanent objectivity that determines the “characteristic entelechy” of organic beings is essentially different from the objectivity that our conceptual schemes selectively carve out of the continuum of life by way of linguistic fiat. Thus, the “formative boundary” of organic beings capable of personality is informed by and oriented toward a “center,” which is not a random fix point within an indifferent (i.e., value-free) continuum, but has an evaluative bent of its own. Simmel’s proximity to Scheler’s phenomenological conception of “act center” becomes even more apparent, when he elaborates on the concept-defying verve of “the act”: The act, regarded as the pulsebeat of immediate life, cannot be introduced at all adequately into a preexisting schema; it determines its essence from the interior of life, and its interminglings with what precedes and what follows and with the whole psychic complex of this life make its delimitation by an extrinsic concept—however necessary this may be in practice—something accidental and external. The act is one, because life arises out of itself to a certain intensity of will and application of power, sharpening to a crest with which it projects above its leveled, unpunctuated gliding through the course of the day. This concentration and accentuation out of the rhythm of volitional life itself, which yet does not break continuity with life’s total course, is this life’s scene-form which we sometimes call “an action,” and which for this designation need not be fenced in by a concept that isolates the action content. (VL 112)

What Simmel addresses as the “concentration and accentuation out of the rhythm of volitional life itself ” is what I explicated with respect to Scheler’s religious phenomenology as the “appellative” as well as “resistant” character of the world, which we encounter—however indistinctly, at first—as the moral pull of the world experienced as created. For Scheler, we saw, this moral-cosmic dimension of our experience of the world qua creation has an indelible personal accent, which informs all genuine revelation broadly conceived: The religious act—herein differing from all other kinds of cognitive acts, including those of metaphysics—demands an answer, an act of reciprocity

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Heidegger’s Style [Wider- und Gegenakt] on the part of the very ob-ject [Gegenstand]20 to which its intention is directed. And this implies that one may only speak of “religion” where the object bears a divine personal form [göttliche personale Gestalt] and where revelation (in the widest sense) on the part of this personal ob-ject is what fulfills the religious act and its intention. While for metaphysics the personality of the divine forms a never-attainable boundary of cognition, for religion this personality is the alpha and omega. Where it does not stand before the mental eye, where it is not thought, believed, and inwardly received, there can be no question of religion in the strict sense. (EM 248)21

Under the section heading of “Cult and Liturgy,” Scheler expands on this point by stressing how the personal element of revelation goes hand in hand with its inherently performative aspect. This connection between the personal and the performative implies that “religious insight” (religiöse Erkenntnis) into God’s being does not precede its “cultic expression” (kultischer Ausdruck), but depends on the latter as the “essentially necessary vehicle” (wesensnotwendiges Vehikel) for its growth (EM 259). This train of thought culminates in one of the basic Pascalian tenets of Scheler’s religious phenomenology, namely the claim that “religion is just as much exercise as it is insight” (EM 260).22 These findings show that what might seem most objectionable to Scheler, namely Simmel’s previously cited remark that “the act . . . determines its essence from the interior of life,” is actually quite compatible with Scheler’s own insistence that any genuinely religious act only grows in the course of concrete expression. Accordingly, Simmel’s notion of entelechy as a personal orientation irreducible to any thisworldly teleology proves rather close to Scheler’s conception of an “act center,” around which the personality of a faith community takes shape, as it gains more and more momentum. Gaining momentum here means that the faith collective becomes morally effective by converting worshipful interaction among its members into concrete pastoral works that reach beyond the bounds of the perish. Thus, Simmel and Scheler appear to see eye to eye, when it comes to the inherently interactive quality of religious revelation, which both authors interpret in terms of a dynamic reciprocity between the personal and the performative. To repeat, it is only if we ignore Simmel’s commentary on teleology as the real opposite of freedom, that we are likely to misread him as an advocate of vitalist reductionism, as Scheler seems to have done in 1921. That is, in reviewing those passages in The View of Life which speak to the personality of organisms, Scheler tends to ignore the fact that Simmel characterizes the “objective unity” of any such personality not simply as immanent to life, but describes it in terms of

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immanent transcendence (VL 119). With respect to human beings, in particular, the “formative boundary” (VL 112) of their personality is organized around an ideal source of appeal, namely an idea which vests all their actions with a broadly moral charge. This moral charge, however, can never be codified by way of concepts. In this regard, one of the most prominent parallelisms between Simmel’s philosophy of life and Scheler’s religious phenomenology is their staunch opposition to the moral formalism implied by Kant’s deontology, which both thinkers criticize as artificial and uninspiring. One lingering difference is that Scheler’s ethical theism tends to rank those action-guiding ideas, which transcend all physiologically governed teleologies, in such a way that religious ideas are deemed most personal and thus closest to the spiritual root of humanity. As a religious skeptic, Simmel does not endorse any such ranking and so refuses to give religion pride of place in the manner Scheler does. That is, Simmel would have been sympathetic to many of the things Scheler had to say about how we can concretely experience the moral “resistance” of the world, especially in acts like that of remorse and reverence. However, Simmel would have been reluctant to root all experiences in a single idea, like the idea of creation (Schöpfungsgedanke) as dovetailing with the idea of God (Gottesidee) which, for Scheler, held the key to humanity’s interactive moral fiber. Yet, my goal was not to demonstrate that Simmel and Scheler are both ethical theists. Rather, my point was to show that Simmel’s philosophical position in The View of Life is not obviously vulnerable to the charge of “religious subjectivism” that both Scheler and Heidegger leveled against him, shortly after his death. Specifically, Simmel’s nuanced comments on freedom versus teleology, next to his remarks about the linguistic limits for conceptualizing action, indicated various overlaps between Simmel’s metaphysics of life and Scheler’s religious phenomenology. While any attempt to quickly equate Simmel’s religious skepticism and Scheler’s ethical theism would be unconvincing, the fact remains that Simmel’s religious skepticism is not irreligious or anti-religious.23 Like Scheler, Simmel retained a methodological appreciation for negative theology. Moreover, we found that Simmel charged Schelling with “anthropomorphism,” in a way that appeared very similar to how Heidegger would subsequently accuse Schelling of “anthropomorphy” in his 1941 commentary. Specifically, Simmel was wary of characterizing ultimate reality or the Absolute in terms of “spirit,” “life,” or “value.” In this respect, one would have expected a more favorable judgment of Simmel’s work than Heidegger issued in his 1920/21 lecture, where he had little good to say about Simmel and basically wrote him off as an unoriginal

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thinker, who had inherited Dilthey’s and Troeltsch’s universal-historical orientation. It should be clear by now that such a glib dismissal hardly does justice to the wealth of ideas contained in Simmel’s volume. It also remains odd that, according to Gadamer’s report mentioned in my Introduction, Heidegger showed himself enthusiastic in private conversation about Simmel in 1923. If Gadamer is correct, then Heidegger must have had a change of heart somewhere between 1921 and 1923. If Heidegger really adopted a favorable view of Simmel around that time, he did not express it in print and, to my knowledge, he never explicitly retracted his negative verdict on Simmel issued in the early Freiburg lectures. By and large, Heidegger gave Simmel short shrift. In The View of Life, Simmel does not offer a one-dimensional “historical dialectic,” which would reduce the meaning-sponsoring power of history (Geschichte) to the ups and downs of cultural labor, that is, to a linear sequence where man-made order and its dissolution keep alternating. Instead, in the name of immanent transcendence, Simmel was prepared to ascribe an ideal, teleology-transcending “personality” to certain organisms-in-action. Such organisms could include, but were not limited to, faith communities engaged in historically embedded, worshipful interaction. At the same time, it must be conceded that Simmel for his part seems to have underestimated just how close his own featuring of “personality” remained to the “living God,” whose inherently plural profile Schelling struggled to articulate in his Philosophy of Revelation.

Heidegger’s second Schelling commentary as a philosophical teaser Considered in its entirety, the present four-author constellation (Schelling, Simmel, Scheler, and Heidegger) confronts us with a layered case of mistaken identity. At first glance, it would seem that Scheler and Heidegger are shoulder to shoulder in their joint opposition to Simmel’s subjectivism as framed by monist metaphysics. In fact, most of their explicit criticisms of Simmel in the early 1920s say as much. Yet the textual situation proves more involved. Upon scrutiny, we found that Scheler’s religious phenomenology had much in common with Simmel’s philosophy of life, particularly in terms of their respective investment in a notion of personality that is strongly reminiscent of Schelling’s. Simmel acknowledges Schelling in passing, but as he assumes the mantle of the religious skeptic Simmel hints that “Spinoza seems farther along”

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than Schelling (VL 69n. 2, cited earlier). This oblique reference to the pantheism controversy, which I delineated in Chapter 1, appears too cursory to justify such ranking of Spinoza over Schelling. Heidegger, to his credit, focuses precisely on the document in which Schelling sought to deliver a definitive account of the relation between Spinoza’s system and his own philosophical position, namely the Freedom essay of 1809. What is more, Heidegger draws attention to those segments in Schelling’s text where the stakes of the pantheism controversy come to the fore most clearly. As noted in the previous chapter, Heidegger will not treat this controversy comprehensively though, since central figures like Herder are left to one side. Still, Heidegger does put his finger on statements in which Schelling aims to set the record straight “once and for all,” including the following emphatic pronouncement: And here then, once and for all, is our definite opinion about Spinozism! This system is not fatalism because it allows things to be contained in God; for, as we have shown, pantheism at least makes formal freedom not impossible. Spinoza therefore must be a fatalist for a completely different reason, one independent of pantheism. The error of his system lies by no means in his placing things in God but in the fact that they are things—in the abstract concept of beings in the world, indeed of infinite substance itself, which for him is exactly also a thing. Hence, his arguments against freedom are entirely deterministic, in no way pantheistic.24

Accordingly, Schelling argues against the claim (championed by Jacobi) that pantheism implies fatalism and, by the same token, Schelling argues against the verdict that Spinoza is a fatalist due to his commitment to pantheism. Instead, Schelling locates the problem with Spinozism elsewhere, namely in Spinoza’s abstract conception of substance which demotes God to an impersonal being of nearly thing-like status, in contrast with Schelling’s own conception of a “living God.” It is passages like the preceding block quote that Heidegger had in mind, when he offered the following comment, which returns the reader to the philosophical challenge of avoiding anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine. In a compressed note in the later pages of his 1941 discussion, Heidegger writes: “The eternal ground in God—approached in terms of ‘longing’ (Sehnsucht), thought according to human standards; thus, ‘the eternal ground’ [is] brought closer, in human fashion, but thereby not humanized and downgraded. On the contrary: ‘ground’ is elevated into its absolute essence. Instead of causal mechanism, the human being’s personality [Persönlichkeit] [is taken] as a guide (a ‘living’ god, not a mechanical one). Besides: how [is] human

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being comprehended here, anyway” (GA49 124)? Heidegger accurately presents “personality” as the theoretical centerpiece of Schelling’s philosophical analysis in the Freedom treatise. What is more, he concedes that, even though Schelling uses the human conception of personality as a “guide” (Leitfaden; lit. guiding thread) toward understanding the dynamic relation between God as “eternal ground” and God as “living,” this does not obviously amount to “humanizing” (vermenschlichen) or “downgrading” (herabsetzen) God in either of these modes. Instead, Heidegger seems prepared to allow this approach as a worthwhile candidate for understanding the dynamic efficacy of the divine Absolute at a clear distance from Spinoza’s “mechanical God.” To be sure, Heidegger does not accept this approach simply as is. Instead, his present remarks hint that Schelling’s invocation of personality raises anew the question of how the meaning of Mensch (man; human being; humanity) is to be grasped here. In this place, then, Heidegger appears more cautious and less accusatory, when it comes to the issue of anthropomorphizing in the context of divine revelation.25 Similarly, a few pages down, Heidegger underscores once more that, with Schelling, any claim about how humans are made in the “image” of God (as His Eben-bild) or about how God may only recognize Himself vis-à-vis man must not be mistaken for mere “humanification” (Vermenschung) or conflation (Zusammenfall) (GA49 129). Finally, closer to the end of his volume, the worry over “anthropomorphy” (GA49 172) is put in question rather than presented as a clear philosophical shortcoming on Schelling’s part. In this regard, Heidegger’s second-round commentary on Schelling in 1941 remains a philosophical teaser of sorts, since these later segments in his text would seem to soften much of his previous criticism in terms of Schelling’s presumed tendency to unduly bridge or even mesh the poles of the divine and the human. Yet, Heidegger doesn’t retract these criticisms, which suggests that a basic difference remains between his views and Schelling’s, even if this difference is not articulated as straightforwardly in Heidegger’s 1941 lecture as one might wish. This sense of suspension notwithstanding, our previous considerations furnished important clues about a central conviction that Simmel and Scheler adopted in somewhat modified form from Schelling, while Heidegger continued to reject it. As a matter of principle, Schelling holds that creation (the rise of the personal from “within” the Absolute) and revelation (the disclosure of God’s loving personality to humanity) could not have happened independently of each other. In this sense, creation and revelation are essentially coextensive for Schelling. God can only reveal Himself as living by creating “away from” Himself.

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Heidegger will contest this, and the way he goes about resisting Schelling’s coextension thesis, as we might call it, assigns him a rather unique position within the four-author constellation I have been delineating throughout this chapter. Heidegger agrees with the other three parties that human finitude can never face the divine Absolute directly. At the same time, he staunchly rejects one central assumption that Schelling, Simmel, and Scheler all share. This is the broadly pan(en)theistic axiom that ultimate reality is infused throughout with the potential for personality, and if it were not, then the finite human spirit could never communicate with or feel addressed by the divine. For Heidegger, this is “anthropomorphy” par excellence.26 While he remained attracted to Scheler’s account of religious ur-phenomena, which testify to the appellative-resistant character of being-in-the-world, he did not warm to Scheler’s great principle of solidarity. For Scheler, we saw, the moral pull we experience in confronting the world as such is a testimony—however muffled it may be, at first—to God’s loving will for all of His creation. So understood, God’s personality pervades all of His creation indiscriminately. Heidegger will contest precisely this egalitarian idea, which both Scheler and Simmel had inherited from Schelling, their various reservations toward Schelling notwithstanding.27 The fundamental difference between these positions, Heidegger’s stance versus the compatible visions of Scheler’s phenomenology and Simmel’s philosophy of life, appears even more acute in light of the other text that rang in the decisive decade in Heidegger’s philosophical development, his 1936 essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In the two Schelling lectures, we saw, Heidegger’s philosophical agenda is primarily one of de(con)struction. He sets out to dismantle what he perceives as “anthropomorphial” misrepresentations of the relation between the divine and the human, based on faulty analogical reasoning. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” however, he strikes a more constructive note, when he explores the meaning-sponsoring power of artworks to mediate between human finitude and the divine Absolute by conveying a sense of the holy, free of anthropomorphic projection. At the same time, and pace Schelling, Heidegger will not let go of his impersonalism in matters of revelation, as will become clear in the next chapter.

3

“The Origin of the Work of Art”: A Critique of Schiller Incognito and the Beginning of Artisan Thinking

Like Heidegger’s first lecture on Schelling, the essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” (or “Origin” for short) belongs to a historical moment when nationalist sentiment was gaining considerable momentum in Germany. The text was drafted shortly before the Berlin Olympics were held in 1936. (Never mind that Jesse Owens was going to put a serious dent in Germany’s aspirations for Olympic gold.) It is commonly assumed in Heidegger studies that prior to the Berlin Games, namely sometime around 1934/5, the outlook of the author of Being and Time had already undergone a decisive “turn,” as Heidegger became increasingly disenchanted with National Socialism and Hitler’s leadership qualities.1 In this chapter I will not try to settle the question to what an extent Heidegger distanced himself from factual Nazism as opposed to some idealized form of Nazism, the “inner greatness” of which he kept praising as late as the 1950s, with no signs of recanting in the subsequent Spiegel interview of 1966.2 Rather, I shall argue that Heidegger’s Origin essay shows clear symptoms of a certain kind of spiritual elitism, which can be diagnosed in terms of cultural nationalism. Moreover, if we read Origin together with the Introduction to Metaphysics, which was composed less than a year earlier, it becomes clear that this elitist outlook was not conceived merely as a private matter, at a safe distance from cultural politics. Instead, it issued a determined call for the German people’s cultural rebirth to be effected through an awakening in language. In one of the most comprehensive studies on Heidegger’s intellectual evolution to date, Holger Zaborowski draws attention to the important but widely neglected fact that Heidegger offered a seminar on Friedrich Schiller during the winter semester 1936/7, roughly around the same time when he delivered the third version of his artwork essay as a public lecture in Frankfurt.3

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Using a posthumously published protocol, Zaborowski cites a passage from one of the later sessions in the seminar where Heidegger remarks that in Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795)4 “[t]here remains the ideal of reason and thus of nihilism.”5 This ideal, so the suggestion goes, became manifest in the French Revolution, whose violent legacy had been a crucial stimulus for Schiller’s Letters. The present connection between reason and nihilism anticipates, of course, Heidegger’s famous dictum that “reason is the fiercest enemy of thinking,” with which he concluded his later essay on “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’” in 1943.6 This thematic parallel is not surprising, given that both the Schiller Seminar and the Origin essay coincide with the early phase of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures. Next, Zaborowski hints at an odd solidarity between Heidegger and Schiller, as they both struggled philosophically with the disappointment over a failed revolution. Not only are all differences between the Revolution of 1789 and that of 1933 bracketed for the moment. Heidegger also emerges from these passages as the more progressive thinker, since he sets out to overcome the nihilistic rationalism that imposed insurmountable limits on Schiller’s aesthetics. In this context, Zaborowski points the reader to Heidegger’s 1936 lecture on Schelling, in which Heidegger drew attention to Goethe’s meeting with Napoleon in Erfurt. During this meeting the conversation turned to poetry and the tradition of tragic drama. Napoleon is said to have told Goethe that this art form belongs to dark times that were wedded to an outmoded understanding of destiny (Schicksal). For Napoleon these times are over, because now “politics is destiny!”7 On this note, Napoleon invited Goethe to come to Paris where a “greater worldview” could be witnessed. After recounting this summary on Heidegger’s behalf, Zaborowski cautions that it would be all too easy to view this anecdote in Heidegger’s lecture chauvinistically as a stab at French power politics in tandem with praise for Goethe featured as Germany’s iconic poet, who resisted temptation by a foreign power.8 Yet, according to Zaborowski, something else is at stake, namely an altogether new understanding of the relation between “spirit and politics,” at a clear distance from “Napoleon’s proto-totalitarian conception” of governance.9 What remains baffling about Zaborowski’s interpretation of Heidegger’s stance in 1936 is that, biographically, he credits Heidegger with embodying the spirit of Weimar while, philosophically, he goes along with Heidegger’s pronouncements about the “nihilistic” limits of Weimar aesthetics, which are especially noticeable in Schiller’s Letters. Since the protocol for Heidegger’s seminar on Schiller may be deemed inconclusive in light of its publication history, let us examine Heidegger’s covert engagement

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with Schiller in Origin, which is widely recognized as one of the most influential writings from this phase in his career.10

Strife and play in the Origin essay The backbone of Heidegger’s essay, I would argue, is his conception of genuine artworks as belonging to a revelatory process that he describes alternately in terms of “strife” and “play” (H 34, 39, 41, and esp. 47). No serious philosopher of art writing in the German tradition could miss how this terminology echoes the theoretical idiom that Schiller deployed in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, a path-breaking work from the era of Weimar classicism that continues to exert a strong influence on art theory.11 Also, shortly before Heidegger’s Origin essay, the year 1934 marked Schiller’s 175th birthday, which the Nazi propaganda machine turned into an “unprecedented spectacle.”12 Even though Heidegger does not mention Schiller once, his entire essay can plausibly be read as an intricate engagement with Schiller incognito.13 As an additional piece of prima facie evidence, besides the previously mentioned Schiller seminar held in 1936/7, the credibility of this claim is supported by the fact that the majority of Heidegger’s analytical vocabulary—including the title notion of “origin” (Ursprung)—can be traced back to Schiller, while some of Heidegger’s analytical terms may equally relate to Goethe.14 To give but one prime example, in Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections we find the following saying: “Art: a second nature; mysterious too, but more understandable, for it originates in the understanding” (“Kunst: eine andere Natur, auch geheimnisvoll, aber verständlicher; denn sie entspringt aus dem Verstande”). Heidegger’s former opponent at Davos, Ernst Cassirer, explicates this curious dictum as follows. Art is both mysterious and yet understandable, because it has “a rationality of its own—the rationality of form.”15 This rationality differs from alternative rationalities, for example, that of science or morality. Thus, we can “understand” (verstehen) art, but not in the way we understand scientific propositions or moral claims. From the standpoint of these other rationalities, art appears mysterious. Yet, in light of its own order art in general and every artwork in particular has a rational structure unique to itself, independent of scientific calculation or moral(istic) reasoning—what Kant in his Third Critique called “purposiveness without a purpose.”16 The important point not to miss here is that according to Goethe’s and Schiller’s conception of the understanding (Verstand), the latter is generative and inclusive of different

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rationalities. In short, for the “Weimar Dioscuri” as Goethe and Schiller are sometimes called, understanding is inherently pluralistic and its creativity can spawn a multitude of different rational orders. This pluralist insight is routinely obscured by Heidegger, who tends to reduce rationality to scientific reasoning and calculative thought, the all-engulfing sway of which he will later stigmatize in terms of Gestell. In Origin, he had not yet coined the expression Gestell, but it is clearly prefigured in those passages where he speaks of the “Gestalt of technological-scientific objectification of nature” (Gestalt der technisch-wissenschaftlichen Vergegenständlichung der Natur) (H 32), which he then associates with an “ungodly” impulse that makes us experience reality in reductive ways: as if it was of our own making or simply our representation (H 38).17 In the present phrase concerning the objectification of nature, I maintain the term Gestalt which is notoriously hard to translate, since it merges the aspects of form and matter (rather than content) in ways that are difficult to replicate in English. Generally, Gestalt refers to something that takes shape in our experience as formed matter or manifest form. While it is tempting to translate Gestalt simply as shape, one must not reduce its meaning to physical contour, outline, or geometric shape. As an active manifestation of form, a Gestalt is never just given, but retains an inherently dynamic character, insofar as the tension between form and matter can vary. This complex dynamism is precisely what Schiller explored in his Letters as the “interplay” between form and matter, a topic that resurfaces obliquely in Heidegger’s remarks on the “intertwinement of matter and form” (Stoff-Form-Gefüge) (H 12, 14, 56).18 In Schiller’s text, form and matter are construed as two fundamental tendencies within the same realm of creative activity, and not as the names for two separate ontological domains, that is, not as disembodied thought over against unthinking matter.19 In the Twelfth and the Nineteenth Letters, in particular, Schiller spoke of the “drive toward form” (or Formtrieb) and the “drive toward matter” (or Stofftrieb). Sometimes Stofftrieb is also translated as “sense drive” to underscore that Stoff for Schiller has a tangible quality but is not identical with physical matter in the natural-scientific sense.20 According to this approach, since both form and matter are construed as tendencies or drives, one cannot say that matter is simply static or passively waiting to receive form. Likewise, one cannot define form as a fully independent active principle, since without any material boundary, form would dissolve into limitlessness. In the Twenty-fifth Letter, Schiller summarizes this insight and declares that “man does not need to flee matter in order to show himself to be spirit (Geist).”21 In the Twenty-

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seventh Letter, he reformulates the dynamic interplay between matter and form in terms of an ascension from inarticulacy to articulacy. In this place, Schiller’s example refers to the phenomenon of dance, which became so significant for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.22 Finally, Schiller posits a vital link between beauty and social character: “All other forms of communication divide society, because they relate exclusively either to the private receptivity or to the private proficiency of its individual members, hence to that which distinguishes man from man; only the aesthetic mode of communication (schöne Mitteilung) unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all.”23 The last statement makes for an expedient segue into Heidegger’s text where, contrary to Schiller and Nietzsche, he downgrades concrete communicative interaction to a phenomenon of secondary importance. Thus, Heidegger distinguishes primal Language (which in English should receive a capital “L”) from actually spoken languages (with a lowercase “l”). The former he equates with Being, in the sense of ultimate reality as an unfolding process of revelation; the latter he characterizes in terms of everyday conversation and verbal exchanges. Importantly, Language has little to do with what people actually say, for it is something that humans can never fully grasp or control. As Heidegger puts it in Origin: “Language is neither merely or primarily the phonetic and written expression of what needs to be communicated. In the first instance, Language does not convey what is revealed and what is concealed in words and sentences. Rather, it brings beings as beings, for the first time, into the open” (H 59/OBT 45–6) [translation modified].24 The present distinction between Language (capital “L”) and languages (lowercase “l”) is overlaid with another distinction. Thus, Heidegger proceeds to characterize primordial Language as essential poetry in distinction from poetry more narrowly conceived. For Heidegger, essential poetry is most original, because it belongs to the very source of revelation, from which Being “speaks” to us over and above the level of words and sentences. Poetry in the more narrow sense refers to written poetic works like Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex or poems by Hölderlin, Rilke, George, and Trakl, to name only a few of Heidegger’s favorites. According to this account, essential poetry does not need and is not primarily instantiated by narrow poetry. Yet Heidegger does not wish to sever the connection between these two different notions of poetry altogether. Thus, he designates essential poetry also as “Urpoesie” and thereby forges a terminological link to narrow poetry labeled as “Poesie” (H 60). But this terminological connection remains spurious, since it rests on Heidegger’s conflation of saying (Sagen) and saga (Sage). To see this, consider the following passage with which Heidegger’s Origin essay stands and falls:

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Projective saying [entwerfendes Sagen] is poetry: the saga [die Sage] of world and earth, the saga of the arena [lit. play-space or wiggle room, Spielraum] of their strife and, thereby, the saga of the site where the gods are either near or distant. Poetry is the saga of the unconcealment of beings. . . . In such saying [Sagen], the concepts of its essence—its belonging to world-history, in other words— are formed, in advance, for a historical people. (H 60/OBT 46) [translation modified]

Some commentators like Julian Young have suggested that earth, in Heidegger’s account, stands for the “epistemic depth” of people’s experience of their lifeworld. Using the astrological metaphor that Heidegger lifted out of Rilke’s writings, the earth is like the “dark side of the moon” as it refers to all those interpretive schemas that are occluded by the “perspective” on reality we currently favor.25 In other words, earth stands for the potentially infinite realm of untapped interpretive possibilities. Generally, that is a helpful way of clarifying Heidegger. The only problem is that it does not explain on what grounds Heidegger assigns different “earths” to different peoples. Indicated by the preceding quote, the thesis of multiple earths is based on an approach that discriminates among different linguistic essences which are correlated with different historical destinies. Moreover, in the first sentence of the last block quotation, Heidegger identifies essential poetry with a “projective saying” (entwerfendes Sagen), but then proceeds to flesh this out in terms of “saga” (Sage), namely those stories that tell us of the site(s) where gods can be experienced as being near to us or very distant. This resort to sagas puts the reader on a path that can lead to cultural nationalism, depending on the exclusivity with which these tales are claimed as a cultural possession. For example, if the Germans claim the Nibelungen Saga as a cultural treasure that is theirs alone, then the specter of cultural nationalism looms large. Alternatively, if they concede that such epics have grown over centuries and incorporated multiple cultural influences, then sagas or story collections like the Grimm Brothers’ tales may well be viewed as cultural treasures to be shared, without a nationalist ethos.26 Theoretically, at least, the suggestion that such sagas may influence how people view the world has a certain credibility. It does not seem far-fetched to say that different cultural communities may receive their ethos as a people from certain foundational epic tales or chronicles, from which they glean a sense of direction in history or even of “destiny” (H 28–9/OBT 22). However, it is far from clear how sagas could provide any such historical orientation without the actual use of spoken or written language. This circumstance alerts us to a major inconsistency in Heidegger’s essay. He

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explicitly associates primordial Language with essential poetry, which he places over and above any instances of concrete language use. Yet, in order to preserve a sense of cultural heritage, he then ties it back to narrow poetry, namely to actual poetic works such as epic tales or sagas. The same inconsistency is present and perhaps more easily noticeable in the Introduction to Metaphysics, because here Heidegger mentions an actual poet, Homer. Language is the primal poetry in which a people poetizes Being. In turn, the great poetry by which a people steps into history begins the formation of its language. The Greeks created and experienced this poetry through Homer. Language was revealed to their Dasein as a breakaway into Being, as the formation that opens beings up.27

This striking passage has at least three important, if troublesome, implications for Heidegger’s artwork essay. First, considered as a work of art Homer’s poetry is actually not of this world. Rather, it was a “world-opening” gift from primal Language (a.k.a. Being) sent to the Greeks, and only after they had received this gift were they able to speak and develop their own language. In other words, Homer’s poetic language initiates the Greek language, but doesn’t belong to it. Instead, it marks a radically new beginning in history. Before Homer, the Greeks did not speak Greek and did not really exist as a Greek people, or so Heidegger implies. Second, in keeping with Heidegger’s understated, yet crucial thesis of multiple “earths,” ultimate reality or Being emerges as a discriminator that assigns distinct historico-linguistic destinies to different peoples.28 To quote a telling passage from the Introduction to Metaphysics: “[R]ank and dominance belong to Being. If Being is to open itself up, it itself must have rank and maintain it. . . . What is higher in rank is what is stronger. . . . The true is not for everyone, but only for the strong.”29 Statements like this expose the ad hoc character of Heidegger’s controversial claim in the same volume about a spiritual kinship between Greek and German.30 In fact, according to the theoretical framework of Origin, there cannot be any spiritual kinship across different language communities at all. Similarly, in some of his later writings Heidegger tended to assess the spiritual potential of the Japanese language more positively and respectfully than he did that of the French language, but the criteria for such ranking are never spelled out.31 Third, the elusive connection between essential poetry and narrow poetry allows Heidegger to place essential poetry above history, while still giving it an aura of cultural heritage associated with the ethossponsoring potential of historically transmitted sagas. Without insisting on this connection, Heidegger could not tie his exposition of revelation via primordial

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Language to the discussion of actual artworks such as van Gogh’s painting of shoes or a Greek temple.32 As for Heidegger’s famous discussion of van Gogh, Zaborowski observes that, in 1936, such engagement with a Dutch artist is worth noting in its own right and casts a favorable light on Heidegger in contrast with Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, who dismissed van Gogh in no uncertain terms. Yet such praise in passing does not do justice to the textual situation in Origin. Heidegger’s engagement with van Gogh does not amount to recognizing the stature of a great non-German artist. Rather, Heidegger’s text tends to co-opt van Gogh by using him as an example of great art followed by an explicit statement to the effect that the artist’s identity should not matter at all (H 51/OBT 39). To be fair, it is generally possible to relate such de-emphasizing of the artist’s identity to various political agendas, including liberal or socialist ones. For example, Karl Popper de-emphasized the significance of the artist as creator just as much as Heidegger did. However, Popper did not tie this approach to an eschatology of primal Language through which Being reveals itself to different peoples in qualitatively different ways. That is to say, Popper did not stratify the human community of language users into different spiritual classes, with Germany and ancient Greece at the top.33 Nor did Schiller, for whom artistic sensibility marked the “beginning of humanity” according to the “ideal of equality,” not the initiation of a people into its unique world-historical destiny.34 For Heidegger, by contrast, artworks fall like meteors from the darkness of an outer space into our world where we encounter them as alien objects. Their origin cannot properly be situated within the historical circumstances of human agency. Thus, Heidegger writes toward the end of his essay: “Whenever art happens, . . ., a thrust enters history and history either begins or resumes. History, here, does not mean a sequence of events in time, no matter how important. History is the transporting [Entrückung] of a people into its appointed task as the entry [Einrückung] into its endowment” (H 63/OBT 49). This puts a decidedly otherworldly, or better “non-worldly,” spin on art’s capacity for expressing social criticism and bringing about political change: its revolutionary charge comes from a realm beyond history, never from within the materiality of our cultural environment. This brings us to the decisive element in Heidegger’s discussion, namely the asymmetry he posits between earth and world. Throughout the Origin essay Heidegger characterizes earth and world in such a way that the former influences and sustains the latter, but not vice versa. The most telling passage in this regard is the following:

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Heidegger’s Style World and earth are essentially different and yet never separated from one another. World is grounded on earth, and earth edges into [durchragt] world. But the relation between world and earth never atrophies into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. In its resting upon earth the world strives to surmount it [diese zu überhöhen]. As the self-opening it will tolerate nothing closed. As the sheltering and concealing, however, earth tends always to draw the world into itself and to keep it there. (H 34/OBT 26) [translation modified; italics added]

In this manner, Heidegger does not allow for any kind of feedback effect from world to earth. World always remains a surface phenomenon. Moreover, Heidegger does not consider the possibility of creative friction among different lifeworlds. Whenever he comments on the strife or “counter-play” (Widerspiel) between earth and world, world occurs only in the singular (H 41). This way of folding a culture’s different experiential domains into the single horizon of one “world” gives a wooden character to his discussion and creates yet another problem in addition to the one already identified, namely the unwarranted conflation of “saying” and “saga.” This further difficulty consists in the fact that Heidegger’s remarks about “world-historical” vision toward the end of his essay do not obviously apply to his opening remarks about the “world” of a peasant woman. For Heidegger in 1936, we saw, what makes great artworks great is their conductor quality for channeling new world-historical visions from Being to a people. On this occasion, he explicitly says that he is only interested in “great art” (große Kunst) (H 25). But restricting his discussion to great art in this manner has the strangely grandiose effect that art can become significant in people’s lives only on a world-historical scale. Certainly, Heidegger is free to restrict the scope of his inquiry as he sees fit, but then he has to explain how the peasant woman’s hypothetical encounter with van Gogh’s shoe painting recreates the experiential coordinates of her world in ways that are tied to the German people’s spiritual mission. All the things that Heidegger mentions about getting up early, being worried about hard winters, and feeling in touch with nature, would seem to apply equally to a great variety of peasants form various countries. To be sure, there may be noticeable differences in terms of climate zones and so on, but it is far from clear whether and how such differences can be mapped onto the different earth-bound “linguistic essences” among peoples. Unless we are already given to the discriminatory idea that the wind just blows differently in Germany and in Greece than it does in other countries, there is no apparent connection between Heidegger’s rather romanticized version of the world of peasant life and a nation’s collective awakening in language.

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Contrary to Heidegger’s message in Origin, Schiller endorsed and promoted an ideal of shared aesthetic experience. Thus, a commitment to equality in materially grounded communication remained integral to the egalitarian ethos conveyed in his Letters, from where it found its way into Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In this poetic text, specifically in the aphorism “On the Gift-Giving Virtue,” Nietzsche captured the spirit of Schiller’s aesthetics well, when he wrote: Thus the body goes through history, becoming and fighting. And the spirit— what is that to the body? The herald of its fights and victories, companion and echo.  .  .  . Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls.35

This last observation about a distinct philosophical affinity between Schiller’s and Nietzsche’s aesthetics is of special interest, because in his subsequent Nietzsche lectures, which stretch from 1936 to 1940/1, Heidegger will say a lot of things that could be taken as prima facie evidence for the connection I am proposing here. In this regard, the most pertinent passages can be found in Heidegger’s discussion of Nietzsche’s “physiological aesthetics,” which will be one of the primary themes treated in the next chapter. As we will see there, Heidegger continues to circumvent Nietzsche’s proximity to Schiller. In fact, in the Nietzsche volumes, he aims to make a stronger case by plumbing a gulf that separates Nietzsche’s “classical” nihilism from Weimar “classicism” associated with the names of Goethe and Winckelmann, while Schiller’s name will be conspicuously absent, once more.

From preprophetic discourse to artisan thinking For the purposes of this study, the most important element in Heidegger’s Origin essay is the meteoric quality he ascribes to artworks: how they originate in the supra-historical realm of Being, from where they “fall” into history like alien objects. This meteoric quality of art is mirrored by the preprophetic quality of Heidegger’s philosophical style, which accounts for the great rhetorical efficacy of his writing, the prickly charm of Heidegger’s hook. Calling Heidegger’s style “preprophetic” is meant to highlight a specific technique of twofold removal that is characteristic of his texts, particularly when he treats of Hölderlin’s spiritual

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(geistig) authority.36 As is well known, for Heidegger the iconic manifestation of “great” art is provided by the body of Hölderlin’s poetic work understood as Dichtung rather than Poesie. Thus, John Sallis explains: “Heidegger activates the distinction between Poesie and Dichtung in order to mark the difference between the art of poetry (one art among others) and the poetic determination of all art. To say that all art is essentially Dichtung is to say that all art is essentially ποίησις, a bringing-forth of the work of truth.”37 According to the findings gathered in the previous two chapters, we can say that the ultimate truth a work of art can “bring forth” consists in the appellative character of ultimate reality or Being. In other words, what great art reveals is the “pull” the moral cosmos (Scheler) exerts on us, in ways that exceed formal ethical theorizing. The “summons” (Anspruch) of Being cannot be reduced to any formula like Kant’s categorical imperative. Being’s call does not neatly translate into propositional content. Rather, it involves a profound spiritual reorientation with the potential to shatter all preconceived value systems or social hierarchies. In this sense the revelatory power of great art is spiritually as well as socially subversive, that is, prophetic. Like the artworks in Heidegger’s Origin essay, the words of poets fall on society like meteors from a different order of signification. This prophetic conception of art’s revelatory power immediately raises a central question about the criteria that would allow us to distinguish great art from its inferior instances. So considered, concerns about determining the authenticity of art-mediated revelation are homologous to concerns about avoiding false prophets. We already saw that Heidegger fleshes out the notion of a great work of art in terms of its fitness to bestow a novel vision of historical destiny on a people. Yet, this detail does not directly speak to the present question, for it only specifies the transformative effect of great art, not the selection criteria that could aid us in recognizing great art from the first. Even if, for the sake of argument, we were to accept Heidegger’s equation of greatness in art with opening new vistas of historical destiny, how could we possibly know that it is indeed Hölderlin’s poetic work, which will catalyze such visionary impact? A more comprehensive engagement with this question will be forthcoming in Chapters 6 and 7, where we will examine how Heidegger ranks Hölderlin above other poets like Rilke. For now it suffices to note that, whatever pressure critics may put on Heidegger’s elevation of Hölderlin’s work to a uniquely privileged site of art-guided revelation, such criticism ought to remain sensitive to the fact that Heidegger’s commentaries are structured according to the organizing principles of prophetic discourse.

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Specifically, when Heidegger invokes the revelatory power of Hölderlin’s poetic work, he refers to Hölderlin’s prophetic persona, whose meteoric voice reaches us from beyond history. He is not interested in Hölderlin’s biographical self.38 Accordingly, Heidegger does not present Hölderlin, the individual who lived from 1770 to 1843, like an Old Testament prophet. “When they are in their essence, poets are prophetic. Yet they are not ‘prophets,’ according to the JudeoChristian meaning of this title.”39 It is not Hölderlin the man who serves as God’s mouthpiece; it is the body of his works that is considered as a conduit for the release of holy meanings, which originally emanate from Being. Similarly, Heidegger does not claim any prophetic authority for himself. More modestly, he presents his own texts as philosophical meditations (rather than academic philosophical treatises) which are meant to point the reader to Hölderlin’s texts as so many sites for possible revelation. What we confront in Heidegger’s preprophetic writings, then, is a situation of double mediation: His interpretive commentaries or Erläuterungen serve as signposts for Hölderlin’s texts, which, in turn, are viewed as signposts for a renewed sense of the holy, through which Being—not Hölderlin or Heidegger—summons us. This format of double mediation gives a tantalizing flair to Heidegger’s style, which early critics like Walter Kaufmann find objectionable. In this vein, Kaufmann takes issue with two related flaws in Heidegger’s way of doing philosophy as he sees them: Heidegger’s authoritarianism in combination with a cloaked resort to theological exegesis. Thus, Kaufmann notes that “Heidegger spurns theology and exalts philosophy far above it, and yet his philosophy cannot be fully understood without reference to theology.”40 Moreover, Heidegger cherry-picks a handful of artists and thinkers, whom he presents as authoritative in their wisdom, insulated from all critique. But does Heidegger ever entertain the possibility that Hölderlin or Sophocles, Heraclitus or Parmenides might be mistaken about anything? His attitude toward these men is invariably one of humility before authority. . . . He proceeds exactly like a theologian who cites Scripture. If Heidegger should say in his defense that he has chosen texts that happen to contain the truth, texts in which the unconcealedness of Being is achieved, he would only set up his own judgment as authoritative.41

Kaufmann puts his finger on something essential, but overall he underestimates the complexity of Heidegger’s preprophetic mode of thinking. As a case in point, it is true that Heidegger treats Hölderlin’s texts like a conductor of sacred

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meaning, but in doing so he does not strike the posture of a priest or pastor laying down dogmatic truth before his congregation. What Heidegger articulates is better described as a preprophetic wager. He invites the reader to take a chance with Hölderlin’s poetic work, and he cautions against any attempt to turn Hölderlin the man into a guru figure available for quasi-religious fanfare. Here as elsewhere, Heidegger remains staunchly opposed to the cult of personality. Furthermore, Heidegger is adamant that the encounter with Hölderlin’s texts must not be modeled on the way people participate in organized religion. Thus, he remarks laconically: “One better not disfigure Hölderlin’s poetic work through ‘the religious’ of ‘religion’.”42 At this crucial juncture, however, things get complicated, because Heidegger does not simply distance his preprophetic attempt with Hölderlin from the traditional institutions of organized religion, but from the communal aspect of worship altogether. This has profound implications for the way people may receive Being’s call as mediated by great artworks, in general, and by Hölderlin’s poetic work, in particular. Here we are returned to the question about the relation between divine revelation and human practices of worship, which was central to Max Scheler’s religious phenomenology. As we saw in the previous chapter, under the rubric “Cult and Liturgy” Scheler emphasized how the personal aspect of revelation is intimately tied to the performative aspect inherent in worship. Based on this connection, Scheler argued that “religious insight” (religiöse Erkenntnis) into God’s being cannot fully be severed from “cultic expression” (kultischer Ausdruck) as its necessary vehicle. In other words, Scheler subscribed to the Pascalian principle that “religion is just as much exercise as it is insight” (EM 260). This commitment to embodied religious cognition put Scheler in proximity both to Schelling’s philosophy of revelation and to Simmel’s conception of immanent transcendence, even though Scheler himself did not seem to have recognized the full extent of this philosophical affinity. For his part, Scheler put great emphasis on the claim that only in a concrete communal setting does the personality (in Schelling’s sense) of a faith community come into its own, by converting worshipful interaction among its members into concrete pastoral services that reach beyond the limits of the perish. Upon scrutiny (and despite Scheler’s respectful dismissal of Schelling’s “noble pantheism”) Scheler and Schelling were mostly in agreement regarding the inherently interactive quality of religious revelation, which both thinkers explicated in terms of a dynamic reciprocity between the personal and the performative. This means that, according to Scheler’s ethical theism, revelation depends on the communicative

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body of a “church,” though not necessarily on any clerical order. The emphasis lies on the hermeneutic collaboration of all group members, as they try to make sense of the appellative character of ultimate reality, whether we refer to this reality as God or as Being. In this manner, Scheler’s religious phenomenology remained open to alternative, nontraditional faith collectives. Yet for him the limit of unchurched faith was spelled by the communicative gestures among the believers or believers-to-be, which genuine religiosity could not do without.43 Compared to Scheler’s and by extension Schelling’s approach to revelation, Heidegger’s decisive move is to replace the communicative body of the church with the textual body of a particular poetic oeuvre like Hölderlin’s. In this regard, Kaufmann’s aforementioned criticism is not precise enough, when he charges that Heidegger is unphilosophically authoritarian and “proceeds exactly like a theologian who cites Scripture.” The issue, I submit, is not exhausted by the fact that Heidegger assigns Hölderlin’s writings a revelatory potential comparable to the way traditional Christians treat the Bible as a literary vessel for God’s word. The real problem is that Heidegger’s preprophetic style inserts one more layer of removal between Being’s holy appeal and humanity’s testimonial response, when he disallows that recipients of Hölderlin’s words read his texts interactively by joining in healthy exegetical competition. To explain, Kaufmann’s criticism culminates in the complaint that Heidegger presents the pronouncements of Hölderlin (next to Sophocles, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) as if they were irrefutable. That is, the credibility and logical consistency of the texts by these poet-thinkers cannot be evaluated according to the standards of rational philosophical discourse. However, this is a feature that Heidegger’s commentary on Hölderlin shares with most, if not all, kinds of prophetic discourse. After all, traditional Christians and even religious phenomenologists like Scheler would openly say that you cannot “refute” (the Bible’s featuring of) Christ. All you can do is either accept or reject him as a guide to salvation. To repeat, prophecy is an existential wager, not a logical argument. Heidegger’s invocation of Hölderlin, then, is problematic not because it presents Hölderlin’s Dichtung as irrefutable, but because it precludes that Hölderlin’s work be shared universally, which would require unrestricted, joint reading accompanied by the critical feedback effects among those, who choose to bear witness to Hölderlin’s poetic work. In this sense, Heidegger’s preprophetic wager is markedly different from Scheler’s broadly Pascalian wager.44 Thus, we can agree with Kaufmann’s general observation that Heidegger’s “philosophy cannot be fully understood without reference to theology.” Yet, by

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itself that assessment is too vague. What needs to be specified is how Heidegger’s preprophetic thinking differs from the more familiar forms of prophetic discourse. In this regard, the hallmark of Heidegger’s approach to revelationladen documents is the suspension of the church as a communicative body for the joint interpretation of Being’s holy dispensations. Put in more traditional religious language, which Heidegger routinely eschews, we can say that Heidegger’s rewrite of philosophy as a meditative discourse of pious thinking always bespeaks a struggle toward worship, never a struggle within worship.45 According to this preprophetic orientation, Heidegger’s Denken is characterized by a tenacious insistence on keeping the meta-discourse about Hölderlin’s poetic work from becoming too concrete. This “meta-” quality is apparent in those pronouncements where Heidegger delineates Hölderlin’s prophetic persona as “the poet of the poet” (der Dichter des Dichters).46 For Heidegger, this implies that Hölderlin is neither a prophet in the Judeo-Christian sense nor a literary author in the ordinary sense of poet. Not only does Heidegger scoff at the notion of a Hölderlin religion. He also dismisses the idea of a new wave of Hölderlin scholarship, which would inevitably curtail the prophetic dimension of his Dichtung and turn it into a matter of mere literary studies.47 This neither/nor account allows Heidegger to shroud Hölderlin’s texts in preprophetic mystery, since they defy the usual group efforts associated with theological exegesis, on the one hand, and with the interpretation of literary works of art, on the other hand. Instead, we must learn to appreciate how Hölderlin’s meta-poetic voice offers (the chance of) a new experience of the holy, which under favorable circumstances could bloom into new forms of full-fledged worship in the far-off future. For now we have to settle for less. As Heidegger puts it in the little volume Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens: “We come too late for the gods and too early for Being.”48 This dictum assumes programmatic significance for Heidegger’s brand of preprophetic discourse which, I suggest, is best described as a special brand of artisan thinking.49 At a clear distance from academic philosophy, this phrase refers to a careful initiation into a new mode of thinking, which is increasingly mindful of the sacred potential lying dormant in poetic works like Hölderlin’s. Engaging in artisan thinking is similar to becoming an apprentice, whose holistic learning experience consists in recalibrating his or her religious sensibilities in ways that exceed the dichotomy of theory and practice. So considered, artisan thinking is a constant balancing act, since it must avoid falling in line with the well-established research areas of theology and literary studies. According to Heidegger, it takes

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a special spiritual discipline to keep these academic disciplines at arm’s length. Given his own emphasis on the prophetic import of Hölderlin’s writings, it is perhaps not surprising that Heidegger faces greater challenges in establishing the right kind of distance between his newly minted form of artisan thinking and traditional theology than he does over against literary studies. In keeping with this two-front battle, the guiding question for the Heideggerian project of artisan thinking is how to share, and how not to share, Hölderlin’s work. For reasons spelled out in the upcoming chapters, Heidegger fares better in dealing with the negative aspect of this question, that is, how not to share the meteoric missives of prophet-poets. He appears philosophically stronger, when it comes to critically examining the strengths and weaknesses of alternate conceptions of revelation, in terms of their respective metaphysical commitments. In keeping with the central thesis of this study, Heidegger’s favorite target during the decisive decade of his career is philosophical anthropology and how it dissimulates misrepresentations of ultimate reality by imposing unwarranted anthropomorphic restrictions. On this register of opposing faulty metaphysics, Heidegger speaks in the voice of the religious skeptic, which brings him close to certain quarters in negative theology. However, Heidegger goes to great length in downplaying this association, which is signaled, for example, by his surprisingly glib dismissal of Simmel examined in Chapter 2. When it comes to the positive side of the question, namely how to share works of Hölderlin’s caliber, Heidegger’s philosophical recommendations become increasingly problematic, insofar as his preprophetic meta-discourse on Dichtung leans more and more toward cultural nationalism. We already saw symptoms of this tendency in his Origin essay, particularly in those passages where Heidegger forges a link between great art and a people’s historical destiny. Here Heidegger’s interpretation of van Gogh’s painting of shoes appeared less than convincing, since it remained unclear how the encounter with such a work of art could infuse the lifeworld of a German peasant woman with a renewed awareness of her country’s spiritual mission. Similar tensions are noticeable in Heidegger’s two prominent zero-hour texts, the essay “Why Poets?” and the Letter on Humanism. Yet, as we shall see in Part Three, in those later texts Heidegger’s preprophetic style is more sophisticated. Compared to the remarks on historical destiny in Origin, the Letter on Humanism is much more subtle regarding Heidegger’s rhetorical modulations of Hölderlin, whose persona as “the poet of the poet” is now recast in the figure of the German poet. Yet, for chronological as well as heuristic reasons, it is expedient to look at Heidegger’s

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strong suit, first, by taking a close look at how he articulates his own version of religious skepticism vis-à-vis Nietzsche and Hegel. As will be demonstrated in the next couple of chapters, in Part Two, Heidegger finds several worthwhile elements in Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s respective critique of modern metaphysics. In the end, however, they are both found guilty of succumbing to the temptations of philosophical anthropology, which Heidegger tries to avoid at all costs.

Part Two

Battleground Nietzsche

4

Heidegger’s Nietzsche Volumes: Nihilism, Physiological Aesthetics, and Volitional Metaphysics

Heidegger’s decision at the end of his career to publish his Nietzsche lectures, which were delivered several decades earlier (1936–1940/1), suggests that he wanted these texts to be part of his legacy. Published in a two-volume set only a few years before his self-consciously staged Spiegel interview (to be held back until after his death), the Nietzsche lectures can thus be seen as integral part of Heidegger’s philosophical “living will” or Testament, to borrow Lutz Hachmeister’s recent title phrase.1 Yet Emmanuel Faye reminds us that assessing Heidegger’s work in general, and Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche in particular, confronts the researcher and commentator with substantial difficulties: As has been rightfully emphasized, the fact that Heidegger refused the establishment of a critical edition poses a problem. When we cannot compare the volumes of the Gesamtausgabe with earlier editions or the author’s manuscripts themselves, his later rewrites are no longer discernable. And when comparison is possible, it requires lengthy and painstaking research that few commentators have the patience to carry out successfully, especially in France, where many studies continue to be based on the Nietzsche of 1961, without ever referring to the courses actually given on Nietzsche, even though their publication in the Gesamtausgabe began in 1985 and has been completed since 2003.2

Without ignoring this important caveat by Faye, I suggest that even in this controversial version of the Nietzsche volumes Heidegger’s main steps of interpretation are discernable. In this regard, the widely available 1961 edition can still serve as a thematic road map for pinpointing Heidegger’s most important maneuvers in the contested territory of Nietzsche scholarship, even if one agrees with Faye that considered by itself this textual basis does not suffice to diagnose the ways in which Heidegger carried out his agenda. Accordingly,

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I start here with Nietzsche I and Nietzsche II in order to announce the stakes of what will further be analyzed in the next chapter, where I turn to Heidegger’s subsequent statements on Nietzsche vis-à-vis Hegel in the anthology Holzwege. While the “two Heideggers,” before and after the Second World War, are often played off against each other by publishers and critics, I believe that this distinction underestimates the continuity among Heidegger’s works. For that reason it is critical not only to look at early and later versions of his treatment of figures like Nietzsche, but also to consider his intellectual genealogy as a German philosopher who, like his contemporary Paul Tillich, kept moving between philosophy and philosophical Christianity. Only then can Heidegger’s alternative approach to nondoctrinal, theologically sensitive thinking or Denken (NII 321–3) be thrown in sharp relief. It remains to be seen just how secularized his forays into unorthodox forms of faith really are, especially since Heidegger himself was not very fond of the expression “secularization” and often used it dismissively (NII 288).3 On a provisional note we can say that Heidegger seeks to replace the authority of Scripture with a new textual anchor for an unchurched form of religious devotion and spiritual comportment. Such orientation is not to be based on biblical sources but on select poetic texts, including the works of Hölderlin, above all. In this vein, he works out a textual ontology for a canon of sacred poetic writings, which he is at pains to present at a clear distance from “sentimental” romantic conceptions of art as an inspirational medium (NI 287). Speaking of a “textual ontology” in this context means that, for the unchurched faith emerging from Heidegger’s writings, poetry rather than the Bible was assigned the task of revelation. Traditional Christians rely on Scripture as God’s word, such that Scripture unlocks reality for the believer not as a neutral given but as a summons. In Chapter 2, we already saw how the idea of the created world as directive in character became a leitmotif in Max Scheler’s religious phenomenology. Reality as Wirklichkeit has an efficacy of its own, which is animated by the Holy Spirit. Differently put, within the narrative frame of Genesis, the “real world” qua creation is not separable from God’s will. God has left His footprints everywhere, which exhort the believers to respond to God’s creativity with their own creative efforts, by shaping the world in keeping with God’s salvific plan. Heidegger will adopt this revelatory frame, but replace God with “Being” and then feature poets like Rilke and Hölderin as the messengers of Being’s calling. It is true that Heidegger, on occasion, explicitly rejects the identification of God and Being.4 At the same time, it is very clear that “Being” for Heidegger designates ultimate

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reality, and that this ultimate reality somehow addresses itself to human beings. Even if Being must not hastily be equated with a personal creator god—in keeping with Heidegger’s staunch impersonalism in matters of revelation— his statements to the effect that Being can “call” on humans and assign them a historical destiny reraise rather than preempt the question about the relation between Being and God.5 As Judith Wolfe observes in her instructive study on Heidegger and Theology, “Heidegger remains ambivalent about this question.”6 In the two Nietzsche volumes, in particular, Heidegger is clearer about the ways in which Being should not be characterized as divine than about the ways in which it might. Thus, prior to celebrating Hölderlin as Germany’s poet-prophet par excellence, Heidegger drew Nietzsche to his side to underscore his distance from the expressly Christian elements that survived in the romantic experiments with art religion or Kunstreligion. In fact, in the first volume Heidegger sketches a three-front battle against different (ir)religious misconceptions of ultimate reality. These misconceptions belong to hermeneutic rival traditions, which continue to shape the course of modern metaphysics up to the present, and Heidegger diagnoses this braid of undesirable lines of influence in terms of the prevalent misreadings of Nietzsche as an “atheist.” In other words, Heidegger warns against any philosophical profiling of Nietzsche based on skewed comparisons with these three traditions, which are themselves suspect: Thus Nietzsche’s atheism is something altogether his own. Nietzsche must be liberated from the dubious society of all those supercilious atheists who deny God when they fail to find him in their reagent glass, those who replace the renounced God with their “God” of “Progress.” We dare not confuse Nietzsche with such “god-less” ones, who cannot really even be “god-less” because they have never struggled to find a god, and never can. Yet if Nietzsche is no atheist in the usual sense, we dare not falsify him as a “sentimental,” “romantic,” halfwayChristian “God seeker.” We dare not turn the word and concept atheism into a term of thrust and counterthrust in Christianity’s duel, as though whatever did not conform to the Christian God were ipso facto “at bottom” atheism. (N I: 287/ N2 66)

Accordingly, Heidegger wants to disabuse Nietzsche from being either falsely associated or contrasted with (1) the superficial atheism of scientific thinkers who deny God and instead elevate technological progress to the highest authority; (2) traditional Christian theism, the proponents of which use “atheism” as a pejorative catch-all phrase for any view that does not dovetail with their dogma; and (3) the half-baked romantic attempts to aestheticize religion. Here the

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romantic option is arguably the most elusive one on Heidegger’s list, since he does not pause to provide examples of this stance.7 Yet it stands to reason that the works he had in mind would include texts like Ernst Bertram’s immensely successful book Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (1918), which by its very title tied the era’s reception of Nietzsche to the Romantics’ program of a national religion presented under the provocative banner of mythology.8 Released right at the end of the First World War, there were 21,000 copies in print by the time the seventh edition appeared only ten years after the volume’s original publication. The book also received the newly established Nietzsche Prize in 1919, only six months after it was published.9 Delivered into a social climate when the reading public in Germany began to lose patience with the formal treatises characteristic of the neo-Kantian branches in academic philosophy, Bertram’s blockbuster proved to be an attractive alternative conceived under the auspices of the George Circle’s emphasis on cultural heritage and vivid literary style.10 In this regard, it may not be an overstatement to say that Bertram’s Nietzsche was for the era of Heidegger’s youth what Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841) was for the Protestant Europe of the nineteenth century. Next to popular writings like Bertram’s, the other key reference for Heidegger’s multifaceted defense of Nietzsche against ill-formed accusations of “atheism” is the work of Nietzsche’s friend and housemate in Basel, Franz Overbeck (1837– 1905). Indeed, Overbeck’s friendly, though by no means uncritical, reception of Nietzsche’s philosophical wrestling with Christianity would prove of great interest to Heidegger. Around the previous turn of the century, Overbeck had gained prominence inside and outside the Swiss-German theological intelligentsia for his pioneering study How Christian is our Present-Day Theology? (Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie) (1873), which appeared the same year as the first of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Equally influential was Overbeck’s posthumously published treatise Christianity and Culture (Christentum und Kultur) (1919). Prior to this last work, the exchange of letters between these two thinkers was published as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Correspondence with Overbeck (1916).11 In 1903, the second edition of How Christian Is Our PresentDay Theology? came out with a new preface by the author, in which Overbeck acknowledged Nietzsche’s influence on him as crucial.12 The widespread attention paid to the Nietzsche/Overbeck correspondence is signaled by a letter that Heidegger’s direct contemporary Walter Benjamin wrote to Ernst Schoen (dated February 28, 1918) in which he notes: “This correspondence you might have read already or, surely, you are going to do so

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soon.”13 Benjamin’s diction suggests that the Nietzsche/Overbeck exchange is so obviously important that he cannot really recommend it to Schoen. Rather, Benjamin seems to report that he, like numerous intellectuals of his day, was then in the process of absorbing this correspondence. The question was not whether one should read it, but how far one had already advanced in this endeavor. At the same time, Overbeck’s comments in Christian Religion contra Christian Theology had become a standard point of reference in the polemical pronouncements by those thinkers, who sought to deepen the opposition between faith and knowledge, in an ongoing campaign to defend the religious core of Christianity against its theological dilutions.14 The leading figure here is Karl Barth.15 At one point, Barth and his fellow theologian Eduard Thurneysen appeared so obsessed with Overbeck’s thought that their partner in conversation, Emil Brunner, complained to Thurneysen in a letter (dated February 23, 1921) about the excessive “Overbeckerei” (Overbeckese; waxing Overbeck) he perceived in their writings at the time.16 While these select statements by Benjamin and Brunner may be viewed as anecdotal evidence, they still go to support the claim that in the 1920s and their religious-philosophical aftermath Overbeck had attracted a great deal of attention among people concerned with the new vistas opened out by German-speaking theology. Especially during his years in Marburg, Heidegger was in close (though not always friendly) contact with the different factions loosely grouped under the umbrella of dialectical theology. While Heidegger kept a respectful distance from Barth and was on good terms with Rudolf Bultmann, he is reported to have acted quite “rudely” toward Emil Brunner and Paul Althaus on the occasion of their respective visits to Marburg in the mid-1920s.17 Given this vivid professional engagement, it is safe to assume that Heidegger was well aware of Overbeck’s provocative case for a nuanced (re)appreciation of Nietzsche within the context of the newly burgeoning genre of Religionsphilosophie or religion-philosophy. Unlike the German noun, the hyphenated expression “religion-philosophy” is awkward in English. Still, this clunky designation is useful, for it signals a difference in meaning between this new genre and what Anglophone readers are likely to associate with the more familiar phrase “philosophy of religion” as a subdivision in philosophy. Unlike philosophy of religion in its now customary sense, Religionsphilosophie claimed importance as an independent hybrid form of inquiry, which systematically contested the status of philosophy as insulated from religious concerns.18 This was a period of profound reorientation in European intellectual life, when theological self-

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criticism was pushed to its extreme. Such criticism drew philosophy ever closer to religion, and vice versa, all the while aiming to abolish theology proper. Whether this trend was well received, as by Barth and Thurneysen, or with reservation, as by Brunner, it was Overbeck who had generated its first impetus. Quoting from the second edition of How Christian is Our Present-Day Theology?, Löwith summarizes Overbeck’s position thus: From the moment that Protestant theology borrowed the methods of historical and philosophical criticism from the secular sciences, theology was doomed to become the grave digger of Christianity. Whoever engages in theology for any purpose beyond that of theology itself must recognize that it is “part and parcel of the secularization of Christianity, a luxury which it allows itself but which, like all luxuries, can be had only for a price.”19

It is against this backdrop of theological self-critique initiated by Overbeck that Heidegger, in the course of his Nietzsche lectures, embarked on a quest for clarifying the inherently religious side of Nietzsche’s presumed “atheism.” As Heidegger would have known, Overbeck and Nietzsche had much in common in their aversion toward institutional forms of theological reasoning, but their opposition differed in philosophical temper. In Christianity and Culture, Overbeck’s growing disenchantment with his own vocation as a theologian culminated in a somber statement to the effect that, even though he was “opposed to its basic principles,” he would rest content for the moment with “letting Christianity completely alone.”20 As is well known, Nietzsche was more combative in his encounter with Christianity (cf. NI 160), and it is this more agonistic side that Heidegger means to explore in his exposition of “classical nihilism,” which runs like a red thread through the two Nietzsche volumes. More precisely, “classical nihilism” is the organizing theme that guides Heidegger’s nuanced defense of Nietzsche against false accusations of atheism. In this sense, the notion of classical nihilism assumes a positive meaning for Heidegger. Under the rubric of such nihilism Heidegger pays his philosophical respects to Nietzsche as a “ruthless” (rücksichtslos) (NI 557) thinker, whom he commends for avoiding the threefold trap of Western metaphysics, namely the aforesaid triplet of shallow atheism, traditional Christianity, and half-baked romantic spirituality. Yet there is an important turning point in Heidegger’s discussion when his qualified praise for the merits of Nietzsche’s special brand of nihilism gives way to a critique of Nietzsche’s philosophical shortcomings, insofar as his thought pushed Western metaphysics to its limit without being able to “overcome” it. About two-thirds into Nietzsche I, this turning point can be found in a striking passage where

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Heidegger says “No!” to Nietzsche (NI 421/N2 205). Here Heidegger poses the (rhetorical) question as to whether Nietzsche’s thinking can plausibly be said to reach into the “originary beginning”21 of Western philosophy, and this question receives a negative answer. Thus, Heidegger declares: Neither Nietzsche nor any thinker prior to him—even and especially not that one who before Nietzsche first thought the history of philosophy in a philosophical way, namely, Hegel—reach the originary beginning [anfänglichen Anfang]. Rather, they comprehend the beginning in the sole light of a philosophy in decline from it, a philosophy that arrests the beginning—to wit, the philosophy of Plato. Here we cannot demonstrate this matter in any detail. Nietzsche himself quite early characterizes his philosophy as inverted Platonism; yet the inversion [Umkehrung] does not eliminate the fundamentally Platonic position. Rather, precisely because it seems to eliminate the Platonic position, Nietzsche’s inversion represents the entrenchment of that position. (NI 421/N2 205)

This (self-)characterization of Nietzsche’s philosophy as “inverted Platonism” has become a common place in Heidegger studies as well as in Nietzsche scholarship, but the implications are far from clear. In fact, I will argue that the remainder of Heidegger’s own Nietzsche discussion goes to show that this routine reference to Plato is a bit of a red herring.22 The aforementioned block quote already contains an important clue in this regard, namely the reference to Hegel. If only in passing, Hegel is singled out as the first thinker (before Nietzsche) who thought about the history of philosophy, philosophically. Its brevity notwithstanding, what we can glean from this weighty remark is that Hegel approaches philosophy not as a static mental possession (like a set of true propositions that could be handed down from generation to generation, or from age to age) but as a movement in thought, which undergoes qualitative change. Thinking for Hegel works differently over time. Or, as Heidegger will emphasize later in his 1943 essay on “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’,” there are different “epochs” (Zeitalter) of thought, which cannot be incorporated into a single historical chronology (H 208/OBT 159). However, when it comes to these qualitative changes within the course of Western metaphysics, Hegel for all his historical sensibility is not the real game changer, according to Heidegger’s most considered account. If one proceeds further in Heidegger’s two Nietzsche volumes and subsequently consults the entries in the Holzwege anthology, one finds that the main culprit of Western metaphysical thinking is neither Plato nor Hegel. Instead, this questionable honor goes to Leibniz, who emerges from Heidegger’s discussion as the pioneer of volitional metaphysics (NI 215/N1 213).23 In a way

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to be explained, it is Leibniz who mobilizes the modern notion of the subject by turning the cognitive self-certainty that Descartes claimed in his Meditations for the “thinking thing” into an appetite for knowledge. Nietzsche, as we shall see, adds one more twist to this trajectory of Western thinking, when he transforms Leibniz’s conception of an appetite for cognition into a hunger for perception. If we follow Heidegger in tracking these qualitative shifts within modern metaphysics, we can say that Leibniz deserves special attention, because he was the thinker who injected a new element of desire into the modern paradigm of Cartesian epistemology, before Nietzsche converted Leibniz’s affective turn in metaphysics into an aesthetic turn. In this sense, Nietzsche’s post-Leibnizian volitional metaphysics marks the final stage of Western thought. To test the overall credibility of Heidegger’s philosophical assessment of Nietzsche, the remainder of this chapter divides in three subsections. In the first, Heidegger’s partial apology for Nietzschean nihilism will be explicated in more detail. This will prompt a follow-up question about the meaning Heidegger intends when he further specifies Nietzsche’s nihilism as “classical.” As we shall see in the second subsection below, the key to this puzzle is provided by Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics. Not only does the latter tie in with Heidegger’s previously examined 1936 essay on the origin of art. It also helps connect the two leitmotifs around which Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes are organized. In this sense, the discussion of physiological aesthetics emerges as the connecting link between nihilism and volitional metaphysics. What is at stake once more is the revelatory power of art (NII 286), which Heidegger wants to investigate at a clear distance from romantic as well as “classicist” accounts of art as a medium for sharing holy or divine meanings (NI 133; NII 279). Finally, the third subsection will round out Heidegger’s diagnosis of how Nietzsche remains entangled in a post-Leibnizian metaphysics of the will. In keeping with the thematic orientation of my study overall, this last segment will also attend to some of Heidegger’s concluding remarks, which suggest that Nietzsche (like Schelling before him) did not manage to solve the problem of “anthropomorphism”. (NII 217, 219, 412/N4 184, 186).24

Why Nietzschean nihilism is not “godless” Focused on the signature formula of Nietzsche’s presumed atheism, that is, on his daunting dictum that “God is dead,” Heidegger seeks to wrest this declaration away from hasty accusations of nihilism. To this end, Heidegger

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begins sketching his alternative interpretation with the following suggestion: “By nihilism Nietzsche means the historical development [Tatsache],25 i.e., the event, that the uppermost values devalue themselves, that all goals are annihilated, and that all estimates of value collide against one another” (NI 159/N1 156–7). Much later in the second volume, this Nietzschean insight is contrasted with the way the term “nihilism” is commonly used, namely as an all-too-glib designation for “something that disparages and destroys, a decline and downfall” (NII 327/N2 221). Contrary to such common misgivings about what Nietzsche had in mind, Heidegger insists: “The essence of nihilism contains nothing negative in the form of a destructive element that has its seat in human sentiments and circulates abroad in human activities. The essence of nihilism is not at all the affair of man, but a matter of Being itself, and thereby of course also a matter of the essence of man, and only in that sequence at the same time a human concern” (ibid.). This formulation provides another clue that can help us clarify Heidegger’s previous assertion to the effect that nihilism, in Nietzsche’s dictionary, refers to a historical event where the highest values devalue themselves. What this implies for Heidegger’s Nietzsche is that “nihilism” is a historical movement that exceeds human action and malice. In short, “nihilism” does not name a human stance construed as an ideological commitment or immoralist outlook. Rather, it refers to an “epoch” of metaphysical thinking when Being conceals itself to man by way of misrecognition. So understood, “nihilism” does not refer to anything like moral failure or social anarchy. Instead, it bespeaks an affliction of the human spirit, such that humanity finds itself unable to recognize Being for what it really is. Accordingly, “nihilism” designates a special form of distorted revelation, a pervasive misapprehension of ultimate reality. Importantly, such distorted revelation does not amount to the complete absence of revelation. Distorted “nihilistic” revelation still counts as revelation, albeit in a deficient mode. For that reason Heidegger reliably uses the language of “concealment” to describe this inauthentic revelatory mode as the distorted correlate of authentic “unconcealment.” This dynamic correlation is captured in what is arguably one of the most telling passages in Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes: But insofar as Being is the unconcealment of beings as such, Being has nonetheless already addressed itself to the essence of man. Being has already spoken out for and insinuated itself in the essence of man insofar as it has withheld and saved itself in the unconcealment of its essence. Addressing in this way, while withholding itself in default, Being is the promise [Versprechen] of itself. (NII 333/ N4 226) [italics in the original]

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One semantic detail that is easily lost in the English translation is that “Versprechen” in German also carries connotations of “sich versprechen,” which means to have a “slip of the tongue” or to “misspeak.” Accordingly, Heidegger’s wording goes to underscore two things: first, that Being reveals itself to humanity as a “summons” or “promise” (with which Scheler would emphatically agree); and, second, that such revelation always harbors the risk of misrecognition. Methodologically, this has weighty implications both for Heidegger’s own philosophy of revelation and for his sympathetic critique of Nietzsche’s nihilism. Thus, one of Nietzsche’s great philosophical achievements in Heidegger’s book is that he recoded the well-worn notion of nihilism by transposing it from the dual register of ideology critique and moral theory onto the register of revelation history, namely the kind of Offenbarungsgeschichte that occupied religion-philosophers like Scheler, Tillich, and Althaus, whose respective projects all remained influenced by Overbeck’s deeply self-critical theology, other important differences among their spiritual and political outlooks notwithstanding.26 To put it in a nutshell, for Heidegger’s Nietzsche, “nihilism” refers to an ominous eschatological event. This event opens out a metaphysical era of concealment such that the wholesome, holy, and divine aspects of Being—what overtly theistic thinkers like Scheler and Althaus would call the eschaton of God’s creation—is no longer accessible to the experience and self-understanding of modern man. Viewed from this eschatological angle, Nietzsche’s enunciation “God is dead” does not amount to flat-footed atheism, but to a refreshingly uncompromising exposure of the de-deified spirit of the modern age, in which “de-deified” means something other than baldly “godless.” Heidegger bears out this distinction when he remarks: Only a thinking that is utterly lacking in stamina will deduce a will to godlessness [Gottlosigkeit] from the will to a de-deification [Entgöttlichung] of beings. On the contrary, truly metaphysical thinking, at the outmost point of de-deification, allowing itself no subterfuge and eschewing all mystification, will uncover that path on which alone gods will be encountered—if they are to be encountered ever again in the history of mankind. (NI 315/N2 94)

If so, where did Nietzsche go wrong? The short answer to this question is: when he elevated art to a new paradigm for revelation. To be clear, Heidegger is not opposed on principle to such elevation of art. After all, in the 1936 text of Origin Heidegger, too, explored the revelatory power of art, when he sought to show how artworks may catalyze special encounters with ultimate reality by instilling a people with a new sense of historical destiny. What he criticizes in his subsequent Nietzsche lectures is how Nietzsche expounds art’s novel status, namely as a

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dynamism in which the revelation of anything holy remains immanent to thisworldly perception. This brings us to Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics as the thematic bridge between Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s nihilism and his final critique of Nietzsche’s volitional metaphysics. By the same token, observing how Heidegger makes this connection will elucidate what he has in mind, when he labels Nietzschean nihilism as “classical.”

Physiological aesthetics and the meaning of “classical” For my present purposes, the most remarkable feature of Heidegger’s characterization of Nietzsche’s “physiological aesthetics” is that much of what he says could be taken as prima facie evidence for the connection I highlighted at the end of the previous chapter, between Schiller’s and Nietzsche’s thinking about art. However, just like he did in his Origin essay, Heidegger will omit Schiller’s name from his discussion. Even in those passages where he directly comments on Weimar “classicism,” he will only mention Goethe and Winckelmann but not Schiller. In this regard, Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes are even bolder than his 1936 text on art, for now he will posit a sharp contrast between the “classicist” thought of Goethe’s Weimar, on the one hand, and Nietzsche’s “classical” nihilism in association with Hölderlin, on the other hand. However, if our previous observations about Schiller and Nietzsche’s philosophical proximity in aesthetic matters are compelling, then Heidegger’s contrast between “classical” and “classicist” becomes questionable. In Nietzsche I, Heidegger articulates this contrast in the section “The Grand Style”: “When Nietzsche associates art in the grand style with classical taste, he does not fall prey to some sort of classicism [Klassizismus]. Nietzsche is the first—if we discount for the moment Hölderlin—to release the ‘classical’ [das ‘Klassische’] from the misinterpretations of classicism and humanism. His position vis-à-vis the age of Winckelmann and Goethe is expressed clearly enough” (NI 128/N1 127). To corroborate this claim, Heidegger cites entry no. 849 from Nietzsche’s posthumously published collection of fragments, The Will to Power. Even if we bracket for the moment the common objections that have been raised against Heidegger’s heavy leaning on this text, which Nietzsche never authorized for publication during his lifetime, the wording of entry no. 849 should still give us pause. For in this place Nietzsche criticized “the contemporaries of Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe, and Hegel” (NI 128/N1 127) [emphasis added] rather than these thinkers themselves.

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In the same breath, Nietzsche objects to the anti-French chauvinism of the “same generation” (dasselbe Geschlecht). Next, his main philosophical objection pertains to a misguided equation of “classicity” (Klassizität) and “naturalness” (Natürlichkeit) (ibid.). In Nietzsche’s formulation, neither the criticism about chauvinist sentiment nor the criticism about a misguided classicist naturalism is directly applied to Herder, Goethe, or the other thinkers mentioned. Instead, Nietzsche seems to object to popular adaptations of their thought, which were common among their contemporaries. If so, then Heidegger’s present reference to the “age of Winckelmann and Goethe” is ambiguous. Yet it stands to reason that Heidegger for his part really did mean to subsume Goethe’s own ideas under the elastic phrase “age of Goethe,” in tracing Nietzsche’s dismissal of faulty conceptions of nature. As Heidegger knew, the expression “classicism” (Klassizismus; or Klassik) is most frequently used as a term for culture-historical periodicization within the study of German literature, where the names of Goethe and Schiller are treated as nearly synonymous with the designation “Weimar classicism.” What is more, in his subsequent writings Heidegger reinforces the contrast between a Hölderlinian sense of “classical” and a Goethean sense of “classicist” in no uncertain terms. For example, in the Letter on Humanism (cf. Chapter 7) he refers to “eighteenth-century humanism, which for us is promulgated by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller. Hölderlin, by contrast, does not belong to ‘humanism,’ and this is because he thinks the destiny of the essence of man in a way that is more originary [anfänglicher] than such ‘humanism’ could” (W 320/P 244) [translation modified]. Similarly, in Nietzsche II, Heidegger presents Goethe’s name as representative of “German ‘humanism’” (NII 213/N4 181). What is more, in his later public lecture “Science and Reflection” (Wissenschaft und Besinnung) delivered in Munich on August 4, 1953, Heidegger comments on Goethe’s “failed argument with Newtonian physics” and notes that “Goethe was not yet able to see that his own representing of nature in the act of observation” was still tied to a subject-object relation and thus “metaphysically” no different from physics.27 Accordingly, if one considers how the expression “classicism” is commonly used in German literary studies in tandem with Heidegger’s further commentary on Goethe both in the Nietzsche volumes and on other occasions, it seems fair to assume that in the aforementioned quote (NI 128/N1 127) Heidegger wants to pair Nietzsche’s “classical” outlook with Hölderlin’s and then contrast them with the “classicist” views not just of Goethe’s contemporaries but of Goethe himself, along with Winckelmann, Herder,

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Hegel, and Schiller. If so, how is Nietzsche’s conception of nature, or “the natural,” superior to that of Goethe and his cohorts? To answer this question, Heidegger points to the great emphasis placed on the physiological within Nietzsche’s aesthetics: “If Nietzsche emphasizes constantly and with conscious exaggeration the physiological aspects of the aesthetic condition, it is in reaction to the poverty and lack of antithesis within classicism; he wants to put in relief the original conflict of life” (NI 129/N1 128).28 This emphasis on life’s immanent tension imparts to Nietzsche’s conception of the natural a sense of danger and instability, which Heidegger associates with the ancient Greek term deinon (ibid.). By contrast, the classicist view of nature reduces the latter to something “accessible to and calculable for human reason” (ibid.). However, ascribing such rationalist reduction of natural phenomena to Goethe appears problematic in light of Cassirer’s comment on Goethe’s remark in Maxims and Reflections about art as a mysterious “second nature,” which was explicated in terms of Goethe’s conception of an inherently pluralist understanding with the creative power to generate different rational orders or “rationalities” (cf. Chapter 3). Here Goethe’s approach to art and nature emerged in opposition to any one-track rationalism or scientific reductionism. In Schiller’s case, it would seem equally unconvincing to speak of an “undisturbed . . . rationalism” (ungestörte . . . Menschenvernunft) (NI 129) that would ignore the inner tensions and possible conflicts within the creative workings of nature or life writ large. As our previous examination of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man brought out, Schiller’s characterization of great artworks as belonging to a revelatory process of “strife” and “play” intimates a complex dynamism between form and matter, which was echoed by Heidegger’s own remarks in Origin about the “intertwinement of matter and form” (Stoff-Form-Gefüge) (H 12, 14, 56). In the Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger repeats this gesture of engaging ideas that are strongly reminiscent of Schiller’s drive theory without mentioning him by name. In fact, it is these Schillerian elements in Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics, which Heidegger singles out for praise. Nietzsche’s inquiry into art is aesthetics. . . . Nietzsche himself uses the expression “aesthetic condition” (Will to Power, no. 801) and speaks of “aesthetic doing and observing” (VIII, 122). But this aesthetics is to be “physiology.” That suggests that states of feeling, taken to be purely psychical, are to be traced back to the bodily condition proper to them. Seen as a whole, it is precisely the unbroken and indissoluble unity of the corporeal-psychical [unzerreiβbare Einheit des Leiblich-

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Seelischen], the living, that is posited as the realm of the aesthetic condition: the living “nature” of man. (NI 95–6/N1 95–6) [translation modified]

Thus, Heidegger characterizes Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics as monist metaphysics, which replaces any mind/body dualism with a holistic vision of living matter, that is, inherently creative corporeality. This shows how Nietzsche’s thinking about art has a philosophical pedigree, which goes back to the 1780s when the hotly debated idea of hylozoism gained prominence in European intellectual life, across various scientific discourses.29 Against the background of the then raging pantheism controversy, these passionate debates also fueled the clash between Kant and Herder, which in turn influenced Schiller’s efforts to reenvision the creativity of nature beyond the traditional dichotomy of abstract reason versus unthinking matter. In fact, Heidegger seems to bring Nietzsche’s aesthetics even closer to Schiller’s, when he restates the preceding account of the “indissoluble unity of the corporeal-psychical” in terms of becoming-form (das Form-werden) (NI 118/N1 118), which gainsays the traditional opposition of form and matter, especially in the context of art-mediated experience. “By ‘form’ Nietzsche never understands the merely ‘formal,’ that is to say, what stands in need of content, what is only the external border of such content, circumscribing it but not influencing it” (NI 120/N1 120). Such featuring of the dynamic reciprocity between form and matter closely resembles the account of the “drive toward form” and the “drive toward matter” proffered in the Twelfth and Nineteenth of Schiller’s Letters, which makes Heidegger’s contrast between the “classical” and the “classicist” look increasingly porous. Yet even if we are reluctant to accept the way Heidegger positions Nietzsche’s aesthetics over against Weimar classicism,30 it is worth taking another close look at Heidegger’s exposition of the “classical” in its own right. This will allow us to get a better grip on how the discussion of physiological aesthetics occupies an intermediate position in the Nietzsche volumes, wedged between Heidegger’s provisional defense of Nietzschean nihilism and his later dismissal of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will. Specifically, what role does the notion of the will play within the creative economy of “living” nature, and how does such featuring of the will serve Heidegger to signal the lingering weakness of Nietzsche’s thought on art as he sees it? To figure out the relation among these elements, we briefly have to trace how Heidegger elaborates on the meaning of the “classical” in terms of a “longing for Being” (NI 135/N1 134), which he then links to Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power: “Nietzsche interprets the Being of beings as will to power. Art he

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considers the supreme configuration of will to power” (NI 137/N1 135). Over against those critics, who would immediately construe this as a programmatic license to aestheticize power politics, Heidegger cautions: “Willing proper” is “absorbing and transforming” (NI 138/N1 136). Similarly, “power is not compulsion or violence” (ibid.). According to Heidegger’s Nietzsche, then, great art is expressive of the will to power, where the latter stands for a transfigurative, self-exceeding force and not for people being psychologically or ideologically swayed by imperialist aggression. Yet these conciliatory remarks, ought to be read together with those passages where Heidegger seems to discern a certain kind of metaphysical (rather than political or military) violence in Nietzsche’s will to power, namely by way of creative destruction. At this point, Heidegger harks back to his opening defense of Nietzsche against hasty charges of atheism. Having delivered a detailed comment on Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics in the meantime, Heidegger is now prepared to concede that Nietzsche is indeed a “nonbeliever” (or “unbeliever”; Ungläubiger) (NI 347/N 2 126) but in a very specific sense. The primary target of Nietzsche’s critique is not an individual’s trust in the grace of the Christian God. Rather, what Nietzsche rejects is belief understood as “self-entrenchment in fixation” (ibid.). Accordingly, the artistic “creator is thus necessarily a nonbeliever,” insofar as she refuses to believe that life could ever “come to a standstill at one possibility, one configuration.” For that reason, too, the “creator is at the same time a destroyer with respect to everything congealed or petrified” (ibid.). In this sense, the Nietzschean unbeliever, who doesn’t commit to any fixed interpretation of life, is ipso facto a passionate believer in life’s unbound creativity. Heidegger for his part is not opposed to the idea of open-ended creativity per se. What he rejects is an interpretation of life’s creativity in thoroughly immanent or this-worldly terms, such that each and every impulse toward novelty is assimilated into a single intra-historical process. Here one can notice how Heidegger’s 1920/1 criticism of Simmel recurs in the Nietzsche volumes. That is, Heidegger’s chief objection to Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power is that it confines ultimate reality, that is, Being, to a single process of universal history, without leaving any room for “the beyond of history.”31 The flip side of this distortion is that Nietzsche’s aesthetic metaphysics of the will entails an aspect of insatiability, which springs from an undue projection of human volition onto the plane of Being. The various merits of his thought notwithstanding, when Nietzsche spells out the life-affirming side of his “classical” nihilism, he gets caught in volitional metaphysics and thus becomes guilty of “anthropomorphy”

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(Anthropomorphie) (NII 218/N4 185). In keeping with the main points raised in his two critical commentaries on Schelling in 1936 and 1941, which may well be viewed as bookends for his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger’s final objection to Nietzschean metaphysics is centered on a faulty analogy between intra-historical human reality and supra-historical ultimate reality.

Volitional metaphysics: The will to perception In Nietzsche I, Heidegger had already hinted that the real innovator in Western metaphysics is Leibniz rather than Plato or even Hegel (NI 215/N1 213). He returns to this important point in Nietzsche II, when he invites the reader to “ponder the fact that the metaphysics of subjectivity has its decisive beginning in the metaphysics of Leibniz” (NII 211/N4 179). And in a remarkable passage, he summarizes the trajectory of modern thought that Leibniz helped initiate: Through Leibniz all being becomes “subjectival”—that is, in itself eager to represent, and thus effective. Immediately and mediately (through Herder), Leibniz’ metaphysics shaped German “humanism” (Goethe) and Idealism (Schelling and Hegel). Because Idealism above all grounded itself on transcendental subjectivity (Kant) and because at the same time it thought in a Leibnizian manner, the beingness of beings, through a peculiar melding and intensification in the direction of the absolute, was thought in Idealism as both objectivity and effectiveness. Effectiveness (actuality) is conceived as knowing will (or willful knowing); that is to say, as “reason” and “spirit.” (NII 213/N4 181)

For the reasons laid out in Chapter 1, Heidegger’s parenthetical reference to Herder calls for more in-depth treatment than is provided in the Nietzsche volumes or in Heidegger’s two Schelling commentaries, where one would expect such discussion the most. Despite this bracketing of Herder, Heidegger’s summary statement remains useful for putting the connection between Leibniz and Nietzsche in perspective. In fact, the aforementioned passage from Nietzsche II can profitably be read together with some less compressed formulations from Heidegger’s 1941 commentary on Schelling, with express emphasis on Leibniz (and without forcing us to repeat the findings already included in Chapter 2). Generally, Heidegger follows Hegel in presenting Descartes as the father of modern subjectivism. In the 1941 text at hand, however, he singles out Leibniz as the one, who co-opted Aristotle’s notion of energeia and thus “robbed it of its Greek essence” (GA49 81). In his quest for indubitable truth,

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Descartes opened the door to modern subjectivism by confining the meaning of truth to “certitudo” (certainty). Yet it was Leibniz, who really walked through this door, with his monadological interpretation of reality which effectively converted Descartes’s formal concept of the subject into a dynamic principle of reality, namely “subjectivity as such (‘ego-ity’ as subjectivity)” (ibid.). Focused on Leibniz’s cosmic rendering of subjectivity, Heidegger spells out this trajectory of infelicitous influence as follows: It is in this sense of “subjectivity” (as vis) that Aristotle’s ἐνέργεια gets reconstrued and so robbed of its Greek essence, at the same time as the monadological interpretation gets historically justified. Since then modern metaphysics, considered in terms of its essential tendency [Wesenszug], treats each and every being as a subject, i.e. as somehow referring to itself, as determined by reflexive being [Selbstsein] (even with Kant: thing in itself; freedom; the intelligible). (GA49 81–2)

What makes Leibniz’s conception of cosmic subjectivity dynamic rather than formal, is that he construes subjectivity not primarily in terms of cognitive certainty, but in terms of cognitive volition: a will or “appetite” (appetitus) for knowledge, namely self-knowledge. In this way, Leibniz sets the Cartesian subject in motion. Subjectivity becomes mobile and is now understood as a self-referential loop, a movement toward greater and, ideally, absolute clarity about oneself. This is the programmatic centerpiece of the German Idealists’ concern with systematicity. Thus, for Heidegger, the core of the great systems of German idealism, Schelling’s and Hegel’s included, is thoroughly Leibnizian. Knowledge is a broadly “spiritual” (geistig) movement or journey, in the course of which ultimate reality, named the Absolute, becomes clearer and clearer about itself. While Hegel and Schelling differed as to whether this journey was openended or bound for completion, they both adopted the Leibnizian idea that the Absolute is best understood as a cosmic drive for self-transparency, a movement that unfolds by folding back on itself. The Leibnizian principle undergirding this view is that ultimate reality is dynamic, insofar as the Absolute “wants” to know itself. The last stage in this modern development from Descartes’s ideal of cognitive certainty, over Leibniz’s dynamic monadology, onto the German Idealists’ neo-Leibnizian conception of an unconditional will to knowledge, is Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will. According to this Heideggerian narrative of philosophical (d)evolution, Nietzsche contributes one more important modification, when he reenvisions the Leibnizian will to knowledge as a will to perception, which turns spiritual life into an aesthetic phenomenon.

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As was already implied by our previous discussion of the Nietzschean model for physiological aesthetics, the term “aesthetic” is intended in a supple sense, which connotes both perception and artistic activity. For Heidegger’s Nietzsche, what the Absolute wants for itself is not absolute clarity but always more creative stimulation, fueled by ever new perceptions.32 Thus, for Nietzsche, the Absolute’s auto-directed telos, in the dual sense of propelling impulse and anticipated goal, is not intellectual transparency, but open-ended creativity. This adds a disconcerting quality of insatiability to Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will, as Heidegger reads it. Even though aesthetic rather than cognitive in its basic orientation, Nietzsche’s metaphysical vision remains thoroughly Leibnizian, insofar as it approaches reality as a self-referential, appetitive dynamism. In surveying the development of Nietzsche’s thought from “classical” nihilism to volitional metaphysics, Heidegger credits Nietzsche with the Hölderlinian insight that art’s creativity is reflected in “living” nature. For that reason, art must be understood in terms of revelatory events that exceed individual psychological episodes and (artistic) choice-making. On the downside, Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will remained mired in the problem of “anthropomorphism” (NII 217, 219, 412/N4 184, 186)33 by ascribing to ultimate reality an unrestrained appetite for stimulation, which is all too human and so does not befit “the dignity of Being” (NII 361/N4 250).34

5

Hegel and Nietzsche in Holzwege: Religious Skepticism, Witnessing, and “Subjectity”

Heidegger’s different Hegels As a close second after Nietzsche, Hegel remains one of Heidegger’s most frequent philosophical references. Jean Grondin has proffered a selective but helpful itinerary for tracking the different stages in Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel.1 Stage (1): At the end of his 1916 habilitation thesis, Heidegger insists that “philosophy cannot dispense with its genuine optics, namely, metaphysics.” What is more, on a prognostic note, he underscores in the same passage that relevant philosophy construed as “philosophy of the living spirit” (die Philosophie des lebendigen Geistes) will have to take on the task of a “confrontation” (Auseinandersetzung) with the “wealth and depth” of Hegel, whom he praises on this occasion as the author of the “most powerful system of any historical worldview.”2 Stage (2): In his lecture on Hegel of WS 1930/1, Hegel is now demoted to a negative foil with which Heidegger contrasts his own project in Being and Time and beyond. Specifically, Hegel’s speculative position is charged with “onto-theology,” one of the most intricate expressions in Heidegger’s vocabulary.3 I shall have more to say about this term in a moment. Stage (3): This interval falls outside the compass of Grondin’s essay, although some of his comments point in its direction. During this third phase Heidegger remains critical of Hegel, whom he keeps presenting as one of the crucial representatives of onto-theology. He does so most famously in his late treatise Identity and Difference (1957). Yet this third stage actually starts more than a decade earlier. Accordingly, the comments in Identity and Difference are preceded by a more mitigating, though not exactly conciliatory, exploration of Hegel’s thought, when Heidegger offers the following conclusion in his nearly 100-page-long essay “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” (1942/3): “However, no

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more than Kant before him and the later Schelling after him is Hegel able to master the power long-entrenched in the didactic systematizing of academic metaphysics. Nietzsche rails against this systematizing only because his thinking must remain in the essential, onto-theiological system of metaphysics” (H 195/ OBT 150). What does Heidegger mean in this place by “onto-theiological system” (with an extra “i”) and how does this apparent critique, not only of Hegel but also of the late Schelling and Nietzsche, relate to his more familiar dismissals of “onto-theology”? The key reference for unpacking the meaning of these nearly indistinguishable terms is provided a few pages earlier. Here, in a passage that is pivotal for appreciating the nuances of his terminology, Heidegger points back to Aristotle’s conception of “first philosophy” or prima philosophia: Aristotle calls this science he characterized (the science which inspects beings as beings) “first philosophy.” However, not only does it observe beings in their beingness, but it also, at the same time, observes that being which corresponds purely to beingness, the highest being. This particular being, τὸ ϑεῖον, the divine, is also called—in a strange ambiguity—“being” itself. As ontology, first philosophy is also the theology of true beings. It would be more accurate to call it theiology. The science of beings as such is intrinsically onto-theological. (H 190/OBT 146)

The first thing to notice is that “onto-theiology” does not enter Heidegger’s dictionary as a pejorative term. Rather, in its first instance, onto-theiology is used to acknowledge Aristotle’s account of first philosophy as properly “ambivalent” (zweideutig), insofar as Aristotle’s rendering of this science aptly captures its “strange” (seltsam) character as a braid in which ontology and theology intertwine. Ontology cannot leave theology behind altogether, insofar as the question about the being of beings cannot fully be separated from the question about the “highest being” construed as “the divine” broadly conceived. However, onto-theiology, Heidegger explains, takes a turn for the worse—and thus sinks down to the level of onto-theology—by opening the gates to false rivalries among ontology and theology with each vying for primacy over the other. Here Heidegger does not pause to spell out whether Aristotle himself is co-responsible for this development. Instead, he opts for a formulation, which places Aristotle and Plato at the beginning of a movement of metaphysical forgetfulness, namely a trend in Western metaphysics “from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche,” which occludes the “essence of metaphysics” itself (H 191/OBT 146–7). In this sense, the deterioration of onto-theiology down to onto-theology coincides with a process of metaphysical self-forgetting.

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Importantly, in 1942/3 metaphysics is not altogether dead for Heidegger, nor is it something he simply wishes to leave behind. Instead, with respect to the essence of metaphysics, he diagnoses the potential for metaphysical misconceptions, of which the Western metaphysical tradition is but one example. Hence, the version of metaphysics that Heidegger wants to overcome (which Nietzsche also tried, but presumably failed to accomplish) is the kind that misconstrues the relation of theology and ontology by disregarding their inseparability or unity-in-difference. In other words, Heidegger is fully aware that overcoming metaphysics remains, in some complicated sense, a metaphysical effort. Accordingly, Heidegger leaves open the possibility for a new appropriation of the old “truth” that any insights into the character of ultimate reality will have to be delivered in a prima-philosophical idiom. Such idiom will sublate the misguided rivalry between ontology and theology as falsely separated disciplines, while preserving a productive tension among them. This ambivalence inherent in onto-the[i]ology mirrors the ambivalence between the essence of metaphysics and its own potential for historical misappropriation or self-forgetting. The same ambivalence informs Heidegger’s double-edged verdict on Hegel in the essay under consideration. It would be nice, if we could use the adjectives “ontotheiological” and “onto-theological” to provide a Heideggerian account of a good Hegel versus a bad Hegel (comparable, perhaps, to Richard Rorty’s penchant for such distinctions with respect to authors like William James, John Dewey, and also Heidegger). However, the previous quote in which Heidegger declared that Hegel, Kant, the later Schelling, and Nietzsche all failed to free themselves from the “didactic systematizing of academic metaphysics” (H 195/OBT 150) forbids such neat opposition in terms of a good “onto-theiological” Hegel versus a bad “onto-theological” Hegel. This is because Heidegger, we saw, introduces “ontotheiology” as a properly ambivalent endeavor, with a favorable nod to Aristotle. But then, as he takes stock of the metaphysical aberrations that have haunted Western thought ever since, he tends to subsume the “onto-theiological” under the “onto-theological.” Thus, he effectively collapses his own initial distinction, and this gesture yields the one-sidedly negative meaning, which most Heidegger scholars now associate with the term “onto-theology.” In light of this textual situation, it seems strategically unwise to revive “onto-theiology” as a positive term and deploy it in describing those details in Hegel’s account of experience, which Heidegger presents as worth salvaging. Letting go of “onto-theiology,” terminologically though not in terms of its critical content, I propose a different designation for the outlook that the Heidegger of the early 1940s endorses and

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which he finds available in Hegel, albeit in tentative and rudimentary form. To capture what Heidegger finds worthwhile in Hegel, I will deploy the phrase religious skepticism for Heidegger’s own project.

Religious skepticism: Resisting natural consciousness As Heidegger begins to work out the contours of such skepticism in more detail, he distinguishes between the positive potential of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in contrast with the strictures of “school metaphysics,” to which Hegel succumbed over the course of the next ten years, as is evidenced by his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (1817). In the latter work, Heidegger submits, the original depth of Hegel’s programmatic notion of phenomenology has “declined [herabgefallen] into a narrowly circumscribed part of the philosophy of spirit” (H 197/OBT 151). In light of this periodicization, what are the details concerning Hegel’s conception of “experience” (Erfahrung) which Heidegger imports into his own metaphysical critique of Western metaphysics, and where exactly did Hegel fall from grace? Vis-à-vis Hegel, what does Heidegger’s endorsement of religious skepticism amount to? To get clear on these issues, it is useful to read Heidegger’s present essay on Hegel along with other entries in the carefully arranged Holzwege anthology. Heidegger himself invites the reader to do so, through his various cross-references among the texts included in this essay collection. For my purposes, the essays placed right before and right after the essay on Hegel deserve special attention in this regard, namely “The Time of the World Image” (1938) and “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God Is Dead’” (1943). The 1938 text is of particular interest insofar as it coincides with the end of Heidegger’s composition of Contributions to Philosophy (1936– 1938). In Contributions, Heidegger had still elevated Hegel, to the effect that after Hegel’s death German idealism loses its innovative edge and devolves into epigonal thought, which Heidegger associates with philosophical “garbage” (Abfall).4 Yet some five years later, in the Hegel essay of 1942/3, we see how Heidegger regroups Hegel by placing him in the company of Kant, the later Schelling, and Nietzsche, none of whom was able to resist the onto-theological sway of school metaphysics in the end. This does not necessarily call for the insertion of a fourth stage into the three-stage schema, which I extrapolated from Grondin’s account of Heidegger’s evolving relation to Hegel. What this shows, rather, is that from 1938 onward Hegel’s profile remains thoroughly

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Janus-faced in Heidegger’s estimate. That is to say, in the late 1930s Heidegger no longer wishes to condemn Hegel’s metaphysics as diametrically opposed to his own project, as he had done in the concluding pages of his lecture given during the winter semester of 1930/1.5 At the same time, he does not concede a solution to Hegel, when it comes to recapturing the “onto-the[i]ological” stakes of Aristotle’s conception of prima philosophia. At the most, Hegel gets partial credit, but for what? The answer to this question, I think, can be found near the end of Heidegger’s long 1942/3 essay. In this place, Heidegger explores the programmatic meaning that Hegel intended, when he labeled his project a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” As he proceeds to unpack the different aspects of Hegel’s phenomenological agenda, Heidegger offers what I take to be some of the most provocative formulations in his entire Hegel-commentary over the years. What is more, these formulations highlight the abiding contrast between Heidegger’s punctuation model for revelation as an event where divine meanings tear into history, on the one hand, and Schelling’s network model for revelation as an interactive process of religious communication, on the other. Here we should note that Heidegger, too, uses language that is suggestive of communication between the human and the divine. Yet, upon closer inspection, his use of nouns like Gespräch (usually translated as “talk”) describes something that is rather different from the way divine meanings are shared, according to Schelling’s model. What Heidegger calls Gespräch does not really refer to a dialogue in the usual sense of two parties exchanging meanings, verbally or otherwise. Rather, in the context of divine revelation, Heidegger tweaks the customary dialogical understanding of Gespräch (with its connotations of ordinary conversation) and converts it into a paradoxical conception of monological Zwiesprache: a peculiar form of “intertalk.”6 The latter refers to special revelatory moments when the holy Spirit is “gathering,” that is, when it becomes manifest by conversing with itself. Such language loop, in which the Spirit bends back on itself, Heidegger associates with the biblical term of “parousia” (Parusie): “Phenomenology is the gathering in conversation by way of the Spirit’s inter-talk with its parousia. Phenomenology, here, names the Dasein of Spirit. Spirit is the subject of phenomenology, not its object. The word, here, neither means a discipline of philosophy, nor is it a designation for a specialized kind of research whose concern is to describe what is given” (H 197/OBT 151) [translation modified].7 Here we can see how Heidegger features Hegel’s phenomenology as a discipline-transcending project. “Phenomenology,” for Hegel in 1807, was not a subdivision of philosophy, nor

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was it intended as anything like a particular research track in the descriptive, empirical sciences. Rather, phenomenology here refers to an anti-historicist platform for thinking about revelation. Such thinking, in Heidegger’s sense of Denken, remains different both from individual meditation and from collective forms of worship. At this point, Heidegger’s import of a Hegel-inspired form of religious skepticism comes to the fore. This is because thinking about revelation, in the first instance, is carried out in opposition to “natural consciousness.”8 Specifically, what is to be resisted (though it cannot be eliminated altogether) is the inherent tendency of natural consciousness to hypostatize the divine by putting a historical limit on it. How so? Limiting the divine, to which Heidegger is so opposed, can be done in one of two ways: either by mistaking a particular revelation of divine meaning for the last and final one or by rooting all particular revelatory events in one universal process of ongoing revelation. The first mistake amounts to an interpretive gesture that puts an end to salvation history, as if the latter had run its course and is now completed. The second mistake amounts to an interpretation that keeps revelation open-ended, but still confined to one overarching trajectory along which it unfolds. For Heidegger these mistakes are two sides of the same coin. They both belong to the same historicist paradigm, which shackles divine revelation to salvation history. As we saw in previous chapters, for Heidegger divine meaning cuts into history rather than emerge from within it. Accordingly, revelation as a history-shattering event is not bound to unfold in the continuous flow of salvation history. Instead, revelation short-circuits the continuum of salvation history and opens up radically new beginnings, when history starts all over again, so to speak. There is no processional unity that holds it all together. Revelation is expressive of the divine power to give birth to ever new epochs of the Spirit, each endowed with a novel past and future. Thus, revelation is profoundly disruptive, not process-like. Importantly, these disruptive events must not be construed as belonging to one series, for that would amount to positing a metahistory of ruptures, which is a historicist gesture par excellence and symptomatic of natural consciousness. Natural consciousness, then, is this very inclination to domesticate the divine by forcing it into the frame of historicist interpretation. Yet Heidegger is careful not to characterize natural consciousness as simply mistaken or one-sidedly bad. Natural consciousness is not something that humans could or should do away with. Above all, natural consciousness properly construed is not a human state of mind. Humans may fall under its sway, but it is not a phenomenon of human psychology. More accurately, then, in Heidegger’s

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language “natural consciousness” refers to one of the ways in which the Spirit can relate to itself by way of Zwiesprache or “inter-talk.” This conception of the Spirit as talking to itself points to the heart of Heidegger’s 1942/3 essay at hand, namely to Hegel’s notion of experience (Erfahrung), which Heidegger explicates thus: “Experience is the conversation between natural consciousness and absolute knowledge. Natural consciousness is the Spirit as historically being there, in its time. This Spirit, however, is not ideology. As subjectity [Subjektität], it is the effective reality of the effectively real [Wirklichkeit des Wirklichen]” (H 197/OBT 151) [translation modified]. The neologism “subjectity” is bewildering, at first, as is the accompanying, pleonastic phrase “effective reality of the effectively real.” To make sense of this terminology and to understand what Heidegger intends, when he equates natural consciousness with the way the Spirit is “historically there” (geschichtlich daseiend), we can profitably turn to an unpublished treatise on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Heidegger composed in 1942 and on which the 1942/43 essay included in Holzwege is clearly based. In fact, the unpublished text contains passages that some readers may find more helpful than the corresponding segments in the published version, even though the latter is more comprehensive in scope. As a case in point, the unpublished text proffers a more detailed exposition of the “dialogic-agonic essence” (dialogischagonische Wesen) (GA68 95) of Zwiegespräch, which indicates the conflict-laden relation between natural consciousness and absolute knowledge intimated by the preceding quote from the text in Holzwege. In this treatise, Heidegger summarizes the results of his discussion to the effect that experience (Erfahrung) for Hegel is “experience of consciousness” (GA68 101). Consciousness is characterized as a “dialectical movement” (ibid., 95, 101). This movement, in turn, is spelled out as a “self-confrontation” (Auseinandersetzung mit sich selbst), in the course of which consciousness “probingly takes itself apart” (prüfendes Sichauseinanderlegen), but also preserves a “unity of that which is gathered in itself ” (Einheit des in sich Gesammelten) (ibid., 94). Next, by extrapolating from Hegel’s phenomenological account of “pain” (Schmerz) and “labor” (Arbeit), Heidegger, in an interesting turn of phrase, proceeds to characterize Erfahrung as “suffering” (Erleiden). Here, “suffering” is meant in the structural-ontological sense of undergoing differentiation, not in the psychological or emotional sense of feeling anguished (ibid., 102–3).9 What undergoes differentiation is ultimate reality, which Hegel called “the Absolute” and which Heidegger calls “Being” or later “Beyng.” Of course, the two thinkers develop these terms rather differently, which means not everything Hegel says about the Absolute applies ipso facto

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to Heidegger’s account of Being. Yet, as a starting point for the metaphysical overcoming of traditional metaphysics, Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Being intimate a similar scope of inquiry. Here and in the following, then, whenever I juxtapose the phrases “Hegel’s Absolute” and “Heidegger’s Being,” I do not mean to ignore important differences in terms of philosophical results. I simply want to underscore a shared philosophical ambition and a similar entry point for investigating the nature of ultimate reality. So understood, the proposed parallelism is sufficiently supple and generally tenable, I think. At this point in my discussion, one might raise another objection that applies to both thinkers, namely that neither Hegel’s notion of the Absolute nor Heidegger’s notion of Being can easily be equated with the Divine, much less with God. But then, anything we might learn from Heidegger’s Hegel-commentary does not obviously speak to what I have called Heidegger’s punctuation model for divine revelation. To this I would reply that, while it is true that Heidegger eschews identifying Being and the Divine (or Being and God), he does not separate them either.10 This is why Heidegger’s religious skepticism is not an irreligious outlook. In keeping with our previous observations about Heidegger’s “onto-theiological” insight that, in the end, ontology and theology cannot neatly be separated, we can point to one pivotal passage, which not only gives credence to my progression in this chapter, but also lends further support to my general approach adopted in this study. It can be found near the end of Heidegger’s 1930/1 lecture on Hegel. Following Grondin, we already noted that this lecture falls into a period when Heidegger was eager to contrast his project in Being and Time with that of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Yet this gesture at distancing never took the form of a wholesale rejection. In fact, Heidegger’s mature take on Hegel in the early 1940s and thereafter is thoroughly eclectic; and this eclectic attitude is already prefigured even in the 1930/1 lecture, never mind that the general tone of this earlier text is more critical and sometimes dismissive. One important element, then, that Heidegger favorably singles out in this lecture is Hegel’s conception of the “absolvent history of self-consciousness” (GA32 188). “Consciousness,” in the cosmic, anti-psychologistic sense Hegel gives to the term Bewuβtsein, stands for the revelatory motility of the Absolute, namely the Absolute’s will to show itself. According to Heidegger, one of the main axioms of Hegel’s thought (which goes back to Leibniz) is that ultimate reality wants to be with us by revealing itself to us. In short, it is an inherent quality of the Absolute that it tends toward revelation. This tendency unfolds in qualitatively different stages that are not linearly ordered. Specifically, the dialectical movement of

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consciousness has two main “directions,” that is, qualitatively distinct orientations. The first orientation is one of externalization, when the Absolute begins to differentiate away from itself, in a process Hegel calls “alienation” (Entfremdung); the second orientation is one of reinternalization, when the Absolute reverts to its unity of primordial indistinction. However, this return is not a simple going back. Rather, upon “absolving” itself into different epochs of the Spirit, the Absolute returns to itself in an elevated state of “absolute knowing” (absolutes Wissen) (GA32 188). Having confronted itself, in the course of breaking itself up into historical intervals, the Absolute’s reunion marks a level of tranquility that is higher than its original condition, because now the Absolute “knows” its own power of differentiation, upon having “suffered” its own absolution. While much of this may sound very similar to Schelling’s philosophy of revelation and its account of the movement from God-ground to God-self, there remains a decisive difference.11 For Schelling, the divine Absolute comes into its own by building up personality within the sensuous matter of the world. This is part and parcel of Schelling’s materialist conception of the Divine as inseparable from the works of the Spirit. For Heidegger’s Hegel—that is, the resourceful Hegel of the Phenomenology (as opposed to the misguided Hegel of the Encyclopedia)—the Absolute does not remain on the spiritual level of personality. The move from God-ground to God-self is never final or decisive, insofar as the Absolute always has to return back into its impersonal tranquility. In short, the personal aspect of faith (viz. historical-epochal manifestations of the Spirit in the concrete life of particular faith communities) is but a “recurrent purgatory” for the Absolute, not its final or highest state. This is why, for Heidegger, no revelation in the history of the world religions can claim decisive status for itself. All religions have to dissolve back into the ground of Being from which they originated. Being gives birth to various epoch-bound, religious visions, like that of Greek polytheism, prophetic Judaism, and Nazarene Christianity.12 Yet, in the end, they are only spiritual stations along the way. No single religion or creed has a unique or lasting purchase on the religion-spawning power of Being. In Heidegger’s philosophy, this puts a strangely impersonal spin on revelation, in the following sense. Within Hegel’s dialectical schema, as Heidegger reads it, the first movement, by which the Absolute begins to differentiate (externalize, alienate, absolve) itself, marks the passage from “consciousness” to “self-consciousness.” In this first phase, Heidegger submits, humanity seems to play the strange role of a catalytic proxy for the Absolute qua consciousness-in-motion. As Heidegger puts it: “We

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had to fill the position of consciousness and so move it forward, since—left to its own devices—it precisely turns away from self-consciousness, from the inner difference, and from infinity” (GA32 188). Importantly, this “we” does not refer to a global collective of human individuals or persons. Rather, “we” stands for human existence, in Heidegger’s sense of Da-sein or ek-sistence. Recall that one of Heidegger’s own axiomatic assumptions is that human ek-sistence, ontologically understood, is a self-exceeding movement.13 Ontically, that is, considered superficially on the (psychological, anthropological) level of lived experience, humans are people, of course. Yet, ontologically, that is, considered formally structurally, “we” as Dasein are nothing but a movement of spiritual (geistig) unrest. Yet there is a further complication, in that Dasein does not simply mirror the Absolute’s unrest as it rises up from “consciousness” (cosmic tranquility) to “self-consciousness” (cosmic unrest). Apparently, the Absolute does not raise itself without provocation. The last quote from Heidegger’s text hints at a certain inertia, as if the Absolute was reluctant to move from consciousness to self-consciousness. Thus, human Dasein, Heidegger suggests, assumes the provisional role of an aggressive dissolvent in the cosmic economy, that is, in the Absolute’s dynamic relation to itself. Dasein “stands in” (an die Stelle treten) for the Absolute underway to alienation. In biblical language, which the Heidegger of the early 1930s reliably avoids, we could say that human ek-sistence is the “thorn in the flesh” of ultimate reality. For Heidegger, this acute quality of Dasein must not be translated into personalistic terms. “We” are not Promethean troublemakers or heroic individuals, who stand up against the gods or against the natural forces of an uncaring universe as (French) existentialism would have us believe. Above and beyond the distinction between individuals and collectives, “we” are a cosmic disturbance, which prods the Absolute along the path of self-alienation, up to a “turning point” (Wendungspunkt) when “we lose” our “proxy role” (die Rolle dieser Stellvertretung). Now it is the Absolute’s cosmic consciousness on the way back into its elevated origin which “fills our place” (GA32 188).

Witnessing and unconditional “subjectity” Against the background of the preceding considerations leading up to this weighty pronouncement, we can now make sense of Heidegger’s notion of “inter-talk” (Zwiegespräch) by attending to the precise role assigned to the Spirit with respect to the way the Absolute “suffers” its own revelation. For Heidegger’s

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Hegel, the Spirit plays the role of an impersonal witness: a formal, immaterial mode of observation rather than a personal observer made of flesh and blood. In such mode, the Spirit reflects the dialectical movement of revelation (when the Absolute “absolves” itself into history) and recollection (when the Absolute withdraws away from history, back into the primal womb of time, which lies beyond history). Within this dialectical movement, it is the point where revelation turns to recollection, which Heidegger here designates as Wendungspunkt. In the early 1940s, he will also refer to it as “reversal” (Umkehrung),14 before settling on the term Kehre, which served as the title phrase for the later essay “The Turning,” a text that originated as a public lecture given in the Club at Bremen in 1949.15 In the 1942/3 essay on Hegel, with which we began this chapter, Heidegger expounds the notion of “reversal” with reference to Hegel’s understanding of Skepsis. Here we are back at the heart of what I introduced as Heidegger’s Hegelinspired religious skepticism. Thus, Heidegger writes: The reversal [Umkehrung] is the skepsis into absoluteness. It reverses all phenomena in their appearance. (H 187/OBT 144) The presentation of phenomenal knowledge brings itself fully into the constancy of despair. It brings despair to fulfillment. Hegel writes that it is “skepticism coming full circle” [der sich vollbringende Skeptizismus]. We thus restore to the word “skepsis” its original meaning. . . . Skepsis moves and stands within the light of the ray by which the absoluteness of the absolute—the absolute that in and for itself is with us—has already touched us. (H 148/OBT 114) [translation modified]

This skepsis of accomplished skepticism or “skepticism coming full circle” does not primarily pertain to the attitude of an isolated human subject. Instead, it ought to be understood in the broader sense of “unconditional subjectity” (unbedingte Subjektität) (H 149/OBT 115). Such “subjectity” refers to the way the Absolute absolves itself into, and so suffers through, different perspectives. More precisely, “unconditional subjectity” refers to what we might call the zero coordinate of any such perspective, that is, of any historical world (epoch of the Spirit) opened out by revelation.16 It is unconditioned insofar as it does not depend on, or derive from, any experiential content or object, nor does it depend on the cognitive activity of a personal thinker. Instead, any such zero coordinate marks an emanation point, from which a new world is opened out. For Heidegger, it became clear, each event of revelation changes the very coordinates of history. Hence, we cannot use the same historical map or calendar

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to describe the before and after of a revelatory event. This is because the event gives birth to a radically new order of historical experience, where neither the past nor the future is what it “used to be.” Contrary to the historicist notion of one universal history, Heidegger insists that there are as many histories as there are divine revelations. In this account, the Spirit functions like an impersonal prism, through which the light of the Absolute gets bent, so that each epoch of the Spirit is constituted as a special inflection of divine light. Dasein qua human ek-sistence is called upon to reflect this light. The difficulty is to stay mindful of the fact that the world we live in is only one out of infinitely many possible prism effects that the Absolute’s luminosity can generate. Moreover, this model for revelation creates a skeptical atmosphere, bordering onto “despair” (cf. last block quote), for reasons that are stated on the last page of Heidegger’s essay “The Time of the World Image” (1938), which, to repeat, directly precedes the 1942/3 Hegel essay in the arrangement of Holzwege. In “World Image,” such desperate atmosphere is spelled out in strictly nonpsychological terms. Skepsis and despair have nothing to do with anybody feeling uneasy or frantic. Instead, these terms are intended in a formal sense and so refer to “the unpredictable” (or “incalculable”; das Unberechenbare) with respect to the decisive question, namely “whether Being will once more be capable of a god, whether the essence of Being’s truth will summon the essence of man more originarily [anfänglicher]” (H 110). This question cannot be answered or decided by human intervention. The initiative lies not with humanity. Rather, it is the Spirit of our age that bears witness to the prism effect of divine light, which has been allotted to us. In the case of modernity, the prism effect is one of obscurity, so that we receive the Absolute’s divine light not as a clear figuration of a god, or gods. Instead, a shadow is cast over our age, which ordinary opinion tends to misinterpret by way of shallow skepticism leaning toward atheism. Such shallow skepticism is different from what Hegel meant by “skepticism coming full circle,” which Heidegger here associates with the mindful acceptance of how unpredictable Being is in its revelatory power. Thus, Heidegger remarks critically: “Everyday opinion sees in the shadow merely the absence of light, if not its complete denial. But, in truth, the shadow is the revealed [offenbar], though impenetrable testimony [Bezeugung] of hidden illumination. Conceiving of the shadow this way, we experience the incalculable as that which escapes representation, yet is revealed [offenkundig] in beings and points to the hidden Being” (H 110). This pronouncement is noteworthy in its mitigation of theological language. Heidegger clearly engages the issue of revelation, and he

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goes on to suggest that what is at stake here might prove to be the “highest and toughest” kind of “revelation” (die höchste und härteste Offenbarung) (ibid.).17 Yet instead of using doctrinal language, he deploys optical metaphors to delineate something that seems close to a negative version of natural revelation. Accordingly, the unavailability of a God-figure is just as much a revelation of Being as the availability of such a new creed-founding occurrence would be. Differently put, even if the spiritual vision of our age cannot be focused into a new god image, this lack of focus is not the absence of light. It is a symptomatic case of blurred vision. Concealment is just as much a mode of revelation as unconcealment. Even if, currently, we can see “no” god(s), such absence is not nothingness in the sense of vacuity or inexistence, but “nothingness” in the sense of rich indistinction, a fertile ground from which new forms of religious experience may (or may not) grow in our unpredictable, spiritual future. “The nothing is never nothing, and neither is it a something in the sense of an object; it is Being itself to whose truth man will be given over [übereignet] when he has overcome himself as subject, when, that is, he no longer represents beings as objects” (ibid.).18 Overcoming subjectivity, then, is achieved when Dasein lets itself be claimed by the truth of Being, that is, when Dasein bears witness by reflecting the divine light of the Absolute. Such reflection (in the sense of Hegel’s Reflexion) is decidedly not an act of individual consciousness, achievable by a Cartesian subject. To be clear, Heidegger is aware of how the historicist Hegel celebrates Descartes as the father of “sovereign” philosophy at the threshold of “modernity” (GA68 77–8). However, Heidegger’s main interest lies with the radical, prehistoricist Hegel of the Phenomenology of the Spirit, whom he declares superior to Descartes, according to the contrast between Hegelian subjectity and Cartesian subjectivity. This radical Hegel follows a “path” that is “different” from Descartes’s (H 147/OBT 113). Understood in terms of Hegel’s notion of subjectity, then, overcoming modern subjectivity is neither merely passive nor merely active, but a peculiar amalgam of both.19 Hence, it is the active-as-wellas-passive character of reflection that marks the “first and highest act” of Hegel’s accomplished skepticism, which serves as the blueprint for Heidegger’s religious skepticism as I understand it (GA68 128–9).20 To be authentically reverential and remain properly skeptical, human Dasein has to ensure that the Absolute will not be mistaken for what it is not. The main lesson, then, we can learn from Heidegger’s Hegel in Holzwege is that human Dasein’s ultimate calling is to bear witness to the revelatory power of Being, and to ensure that such testimony withstands the temptation to curtail

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this power according to the historicist vision of salvation history construed as a universal process. Based on this understanding of witnessing, Heidegger endorses an eschatology of reticence. Such eschatology is focused on the beyond of history, not on the religious turmoil within history. Under conditions as shadowy or sketchy as those of the present age, the somewhat cagey mandate issued by this eschatological outlook is not to place any salvation-historical limit on the Absolute qua Being. At the same time, this commendation of spiritual discipline to be effected by the maintenance work of religious skepticism signals the asceticmystical side of Heideggerian artisan thinking, in proximity to negative theology. Framed by Heidegger’s present Hegel discussion, the negative virtues of artisan thinking become manifest through a protracted exercise in spiritual abstinence. Yet, to stay true to accomplished skepticism, these negative virtues must never be incorporated into the communicative body of a church. In terms of the Spirit’s inflection and Dasein’s reflection of divine light, the mindful achievement of proper reverence for Being remains an affair of impersonal Bezeugung (H 110/ OBT 85). Pace Schelling, such witnessing is deemed more fundamental than any actual communicative exchanges and meaning-sponsoring gestures among the members of historically situated communities of faith. In this regard, the radical Hegel of the Phenomenology gets a lot of partial credit from Heidegger for de-personalizing “consciousness” and “self-consciousness,” before the Hegel of the Encyclopedia succumbed to the temptation of historicist hermeneutics, which subsequently inspired and presumably mislead liberal theologians like Harnack and Troeltsch.21 To highlight the stakes of this historicist temptation, Heidegger lifts a curious metaphor out of Hegel’s text, which is also meant to alert us to a vital connection between Hegelian and Nietzschean metaphysics.

A “torn sock”? Heidegger diagnoses one of the historicist Hegel’s main flaws in terms of the metaphysics of the will. After abandoning his own radical-phenomenological roots, Hegel began to think of the revelatory power of the Absolute not only as showing an impulse toward revelation (which Heidegger would find generally acceptable) but as showing an irresistible will to revelation underway to complete self-transparency. Here, Heidegger begs to differ. In the unpublished 1942 text on Hegel’s Phenomenology, he agrees that revelation can only take place if the Absolute is willing to open itself up to human awareness. But this situation

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should be articulated as a conditional: If the Absolute is so willing, then Dasein is granted the possibility of receiving (a prismatized version of) the Absolute. Taken by itself, this conditional claim does not imply that revelation had to happen at all, nor does it entail that the process of revelation—once it is initiated—has to unfold like a progressive one-way street, which would render revelation irreversible and thus irresistible to the Absolute itself (GA68 72–3). This point recurs in the published version of the 1942/3 essay on Hegel in Holzwege, where Heidegger points the reader to Hegel’s quaint metaphor of a “torn sock.” Thus, he quotes from one of Hegel’s early notes: “A patched sock is better than a torn one, not so with self-consciousness” (H 134).22 The patched sock, I take it, is salvation history construed by historicism as a continuous, “hole-free” process. The image of the “torn” sock, by contrast, points to a philosophy of revelation that Heidegger would favor, namely, one in which revelatory events mark profound ruptures that tear into the “fabric” of history. Yet another (less metaphorical) formulation of Heidegger’s strong reservation toward the historicist Hegel’s progressivism can be found in the 1958 essay on “Hegel and the Greeks,” included in the anthology Wegmarken (Pathmarks). Here, once again, Heidegger’s criticism is leveled at his favorite target: a one-way account of revelation as a “necessary process of the advance of Spirit toward itself ” (W 428/P 324).23 These remarks provide us with an important clue concerning the connection between Heidegger’s criticism of Hegel’s progressivism and his critique of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will, in Holzwege. For the later Hegel, as Heidegger profiles him, the Absolute’s passage from consciousness to self-consciousness constitutes a linear path of qualitative ascension, which reaches its climax in the Absolute gaining “absolute knowledge” (complete self-transparency) of itself. Since this knowledge is not propositional knowledge, Hegel often uses the alternate phrase “absolute idea” instead of “absolute knowledge.” This spiritual journey toward absolute knowledge, we saw, is propelled by the Absolute’s will to revelation (H 132). This will, Heidegger charged, was misconstrued as irreversible and gap-free by the historicist Hegel, who aimed to “patch the sock” of salvation history and so turn it into a universal process. Nietzsche, for his part, does not deploy Hegel’s idealist language in terms of the Absolute moving toward absolute knowledge. What he shares with Hegel, though, is the general assumption that the truth about ultimate reality is not something that can be captured by propositional knowledge. Thus, for Nietzsche, too, absolute knowledge is a matter of revelation broadly conceived. What is more, Nietzsche proffers an account of revelation that is informed by the monist metaphysics of

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his day. This means that Nietzsche’s view of ultimate reality does not leave room for a beyond of history, as Heidegger’s eschatology of reticence requires. Instead, ultimate reality is interpreted as a this-worldly, intra-historical dynamism. Certainly, Nietzsche does not subscribe to Hegelian progressivism, which views the ascending history of the world in parallel with the ascending history of philosophy, underway to a final apotheosis of the Spirit. According to Nietzsche, there is no reason to assume that history is characterized by a set pattern of incremental improvement, in anticipation of some beatific conclusion at the end of history. Still, Heidegger takes issue with a streak of historicism that seems to survive in Nietzsche’s thought, namely the tendency to view history as a continuous, singular process of open-ended creativity. In this context, the role of art or, more precisely, of artistic activity takes on special significance in Nietzsche’s vision of life as an aesthetic phenomenon. This aestheticization of ultimate reality draws Heidegger’s criticism in Holzwege. As we will see in the next section of this chapter, Heidegger will argue that Nietzsche, too, patched up the sock of history, though he did so in ways different from Hegel. In keeping with his own turn to art around the year 1936, Heidegger will credit Nietzsche with singling out art for special consideration, but in his final verdict he will find Nietzsche guilty of two things, an aesthetic version of historicism and a psychologized conception of ultimate reality or Being. In Hegel’s case, we noted, Heidegger objected to ascribing to the Absolute an irresistible will to reveal itself. In Nietzsche’s case, we will find, Heidegger is critical of interpreting ultimate reality in terms of an insatiable will to creativity, which manifests itself in an equally insatiable appetite for ever new modes of perception as the necessary “fuel” for this cosmic drive toward innovation.

Nietzsche and life’s perceptual appetite The 1943 essay concerned with Nietzsche’s (in)famous pronouncement about the death of God is particularly relevant for my purposes, because it can aid us in gauging the plausibility of Heidegger’s claim that, even though Nietzsche rebelled against the systematizing of German idealism, he did not succeed where Hegel failed. The reason for this is that Nietzsche, too, remained caught up in ontotheology. What appears immediately questionable about this joint dismissal of Hegel and Nietzsche is their rather different estimate of the truth-revealing

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power of art. In Holzwege, Heidegger touches on this apparent difference, but his treatment of the issue appears somewhat truncated. It is only in the Afterword to the opening essay for this anthology, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), that Heidegger engages Hegel’s well-known declaration of the death of art familiar from his Lectures on Aesthetics. For Heidegger, this verdict implied that art is no longer an “essential and necessary mode for the event of that truth which is decisive for our historical [geschichtliches] Dasein” (H 66). Unwilling to put his cards on the table just yet, Heidegger intimates that the decision about the credibility of Hegel’s judgment is still pending. As for Nietzsche’s approach to the relation between truth and art, Heidegger’s discussion in the 1943 essay is likely to meet with resistance by many Nietzsche scholars because of his nearly exclusive focus on select statements lifted out of the posthumously published torso The Will to Power. Heidegger will inject isolated quotes from other texts like Beyond Good and Evil and the Second Untimely Meditation (cf. H 232, 241), but these references remain strictly subordinated to the “decisive years of 1884/85” when the will to power stood before Nietzsche’s “mind’s eye” (denkendes Auge) as the “essential impulse” (Grundzug) of being (H 242). In very condensed form, Heidegger explicates Nietzsche’s phrase “will to power” as referring to a self-propelling drive for organization independent of content. Neither “will” nor “power” make any sense, if we consider each component in isolation. Thus, Heidegger submits: “Just as there is no will for itself, there is no power for itself ” (H 231). Instead, Nietzsche’s conglomerate phrase refers to a dynamism in which will and power stand for interdependent aspects of one and the same movement. In this sense the will to power is the “will to will” (Wille zum Willen) (ibid.), a phrase that Nietzsche himself had adopted from Schopenhauer. Such willing has no determinate object beyond itself. Rather, the will to power is like an object-less urge for creativity that wants to apply itself continuously to whatever materials, be it ideas or lumps of clay. Cutting across any mind-body dualism, the will to power belongs to monist metaphysics, and as such it refers to an insatiable (limitless, abundant) drive that is as creative as it is destructive, for its only goal is to keep going. This means every arrangement (physical, ideological, spiritual) will have to be torn down and rearranged to avoid atrophy. The one thing that the will to power cannot tolerate is inactivity, and to ensure its own perpetual movement the will to power functions like a converter of experience, which turns everything into something representable, that is, something ready for creative remolding and recirculation. In this sense, Nietzsche’s metaphysics operates with a broader and more radical

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notion of representation, which exceeds that of Descartes’s cognitivism. In Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, it was the thinking subject that depended on ongoing thought and ipso facto on the persistent availability of distinguishable thought contents. Nietzsche, according to Heidegger, gets rid of Descartes’s psychologism, which anchored truth, construed as indubitable certainty, in the personal psyche’s self-assurance of its own existence by way of ongoing cognition. In this sense, Descartes’s cogito ergo sum formula (I think therefore I am) remained haunted by the notion that personal existence would instantly terminate, if thinking ever stopped. Nietzsche does away with this figure of the solipsistic individual thinker, but what he inherits from Descartes is the self-referential character of truth construed as an insatiable appetite for perception. As Heidegger puts it in a crucial passage: Hence Nietzsche does not understand the will to power psychologically, but rather the opposite: he gives psychology a new definition as the “morphology and doctrine of the development of the will to power” (Beyond Good and Evil, § 23). Morphology is the ontology of the ὄν, whose μορφή (which too was changed when εἶδος was changed into perceptio) appears as the will to power in the appetitus of the perceptio. (H 232/OBT 176)

This then is the homology, which ties Nietzsche to the Cartesian tradition of Western metaphysics. On the impersonal level of a strictly inner-worldly dynamism, Nietzsche’s morphology of the will to power and its insatiable perceptual appetite still mirrors Descartes’s epistemology of the thinking subject with its insatiable cognitive appetite. To be sure, Descartes’s thinking thing is not shackled to any particular thought content, but its very existence depends on the continued processing of epistemic data. In this sense, the personal act of thought, for Descartes, is self-authenticating. Of course, metaphysically, God is introduced in Augustinian terms (in Descartes’s Third and Fifth Meditation) as the transcendent sustainer of each person’s mental life, but neither for Nietzsche nor for Heidegger does this make any difference. God’s externality (i.e., God’s sovereign status as independent of the Cartesian inquirer’s personal thoughts) is still conceived firmly within Descartes’s cognitivist paradigm. For how can God sustain me in thought? Descartes’s initial answer is: by granting me the innate idea of Himself. However, since the immaterial “thinking thing” does not have a body of its own but is all thought (at least, in Meditation Two where the cogito formula is established), bestowing an idea on it cannot mean implanting an idea in some medium (brain matter or otherwise). In Holzwege, Heidegger does not stop to subject Descartes’s cogito formula to in-depth criticism. Still, his express

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comparison between Nietzsche and Descartes (see esp. H 241) does point to a line of argument, which allows us to apply Heidegger’s own provocative comments on Nietzsche’s metaphysics, in terms of the will to power’s ferocious perceptual appetite, back to Descartes’s analysis. From this vantage point, the Cartesian notion of God as the sustainer of my mental existence becomes the focal point for criticism. Approached from this Nietzschean angle, Descartes’s exposition of a person-like, divine power sustaining me in thought can only mean that God keeps “thinking me” into existence, so to speak, along with all other human minds He might have created. What is more, for God to impart cognitive life, that is, mental cohesion to me, He has to sustain Himself in thought as well. In the last instance, then, God has to keep thinking Himself, before He can shoulder the extra burden of thinking me. This, Heidegger seems to imply, is the real “circle” in Descartes’s argument. Rooted in personal mental existence, his cognitivist account of truth applies equally to Creator and creature. Here we are at the heart of Descartes’s subjectivism. Whether we think of a human subject, or a Divine Subject, certainty about existence is derived from a self-authenticating gesture of cognitive performance.24 Nietzsche, as Heidegger reads him in the 1943 essay, has a certain edge over Descartes, because he eliminates the psychologistic focus on individual thinking. However, in the end Nietzsche, too, succumbs to the subjectivist paradigm. So considered, Nietzsche is no less metaphysical than Descartes, even though Nietzsche’s thought helps throw in sharp relief the understated volitional aspect of such subjectivist metaphysics. In this sense Nietzsche’s thinking is “more fundamental” than Descartes’s without being able to overcome Cartesianism altogether (H 241). In the history of Western metaphysics, which for Heidegger is not simply a downward spiral but a movement of growing acuteness, the advance from Descartes to Nietzsche is indicated as the transition from “subjectivity” (Subjektivität) to “subjectity” (Subjektität). The latter expression is a neologism by Heidegger that he uses rather profusely throughout the Holzwege volume, signaled by our previous discussion of Heidegger’s 1942/3 essay on Hegel, and the term is just as prominent in the Nietzsche essay at hand. Within modern metaphysics the being of beings has been determined as will and thereby as self-willing [Sich-wollen]; however, self-willing is intrinsically already knowing-oneself [Sich-selbst-wissen] . . . Knowing-oneself becomes the quintessential subject. In self-knowing all knowledge and all that knowledge can know is gathered. . . . As a gathering of this sort the subjectivity [Subjektivität] of the subject is co-agitatio (cogitatio). . . . Yet co-agitatio is intrinsically already

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velle, to will. With the subjectity [Subjektität] of the subject, will comes to light as the essence of that subjectity. Modern metaphysics, as the metaphysics of subjectity, thinks the being of beings in the sense of will. (H 239/OBT 182)

Nietzsche for Heidegger, then, is not a cognitive subjectivist but a morphological subjectitist. To argue this case, Heidegger makes two rapid moves. First, he identifies Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power with Nietzsche’s conception of life. “Life means here the will to will” (H 233/OBT 177). Importantly, “life” is not taken in a narrowly physiological or biological sense. Instead, life traverses all areas of creative-generative activity, ranging from vegetative processes to metabolic circulation to cultural activity. Second, Heidegger posits that life, as will to power, always wants more life, which means that it is governed by an implicit imperative of growth that is not limited in scope. This imperative of open-ended creative expansion Heidegger swiftly interprets as life’s positing of a “highest value” (H 237). Since life is inherently bent on the continuation of its own creative activity broadly conceived, it calls for a stimulus or challenge, namely ever new materials it can arrange afresh. Just as the mental life Descartes’s thinking thing is completely dependent on—one is tempted to say, addicted to— freshly available cognitive data for it to process, so does Nietzsche’s conception of life as will to power not only welcome but require “art” (Kunst) as a necessary condition for the perpetuation of its creative-destructive dynamism (ibid.). In terms of value positing, Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s art-driven metaphysics of the will operates with a peculiar notion of impersonal agency, which is supposed to be more fundamental than subjectivity and which, we saw, Heidegger refers to as the “subjectity of the subject.” In the present context of Nietzsche’s metaphysics we can further clarify Heidegger’s meaning with a final cross-reference to his 1938 essay on “The Time of the World Image.” This text, considered jointly with the Hegel essay and the Nietzsche essay, is a key document within Heidegger’s oeuvre, conceived at the critical intersection of his anti-subjectivism and his career-long anti-historicism. The discussion in “World Image” begins with Heidegger’s thumbnail sketch of the dynamic essence of modernity as animated by several interrelated trends. The connection between Heidegger’s 1943 discussion of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of art and his 1938 critique of modernity is signaled by his opening remarks, in the earlier text, about art’s descending to the level of mere aesthetics. More precisely, one key characteristic of modernity is identified as the way art enters into the “purview of aesthetics” (Gesichtskreis der Ästhetik) (H 73/ OBT 57). As far as Heidegger is concerned, nothing good can come from this

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development. In fact, for him, this transformation of art is intimately linked to other, equally deplorable trends. Accordingly, the “aestheticization” of art goes hand in hand with the “de-deification” (Entgötterung) of people’s vision of the world (H 74/OBT 58).25 And these two trends tie in with an overarching third trend toward the humanistic reduction of culture, that is, a spreading view of culture as reducible to “human doing” (H 73–4/OBT 57).26 What these three trends of modern experience have in common is that they all subordinate the significance of the meaning-sponsoring power of artworks, religious revelation, and culture writ large to the paradigm of “lived experience” (Erleben) (ibid.). In the later pages of “World Image,” Heidegger will place these three trends under the umbrella of a modern “humanism,” which he writes off as nothing but a “moral-aesthetic anthropology” (moralisch-ästhetische Anthropologie) (H 91/OBT 70).27 In this context, Heidegger issues a statement that constitutes one of the most glaring examples of his double circumvention of the second half of the eighteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century, when he describes the modern “rise of anthropologies” (Heraufkommen der Anthropologien) as the greatest triumph of Descartes, who single-handedly laid the metaphysical foundation of modern anthropology in all its guises. In the same breath, Heidegger downgrades Dilthey’s work to a faint afterimage of this Cartesian victory. Accordingly, Dilthey eschewed metaphysical commitment only de dicto, not de re. Thus, Heidegger writes: With the interpretation of man as subiectum, Descartes created the metaphysical presupposition for future anthropology of every kind and tendency. In the rise of anthropologies he celebrates his greatest triumph. Through anthropology, the transition of metaphysics into the event of the simple cessation and suspension of all philosophy is inaugurated. That Dilthey disavowed metaphysics—that, at bottom, he no longer understood its question and stood helpless before metaphysical logic—is the inner consequence of the anthropological character of his fundamental position. His “philosophy of philosophy” is a leading example of anthropology’s doing away with—as opposed to overcoming—philosophy. (H 97/OBT 75)

Prominent commentators on Dilthey’s work are not likely to be satisfied with Heidegger’s glib estimate of Dilthey’s achievements or lack thereof, vis-à-vis Cartesianism.28 What is crucial for my purposes, however, is how Heidegger profiles Dilthey as a symptomatic representative of an anthropological trend that “does away” with philosophy rather than overcome its traditional metaphysical misconceptions. If we read this criticism of Dilthey’s anthropological

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strictures together with Heidegger’s related objections to Hegel’s historicism and Nietzsche’s metaphysical voluntarism, we can identify a common target at the intersection of these three critiques: a one-sidedly active conception of culture, which runs afoul of Heidegger’s account of active-as-well-as-passive witnessing as the properly reverential response to Being’s revelatory capacity for (un)concealment. In this constellation, Nietzsche’s case proves particularly intricate for Heidegger. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s art-centered approach is promising, since it does not locate creativity in the individual mind of any personal thinker or Cartesian subject. In this sense, Nietzsche’s approach is aptly anti-subjectivist. On the other hand, Nietzsche tends to model the dynamism of artistic activity on a drive theory reminiscent of Schiller’s. For Heidegger, this renders Nietzsche (like Schiller) guilty of second-tier psychologism, insofar as the workings of creative energy are assimilated to the presumed workings of psychic drives or desires. Unlike first-tier psychologism, which places too much emphasis on the cognitive acts of the individual psyche, second-tier psychologism posits an impersonal or prepersonal dynamism of drives, according to which ultimate reality is animated by the same impulses as the human mind. For Heidegger, this amounts to postulating an unwarranted parallelism between the real and the mental. In short, on the first level, Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will can be viewed as properly impersonal and anti-subjectivist. Yet, on the second level of analysis, Nietzsche’s aesthetic approach to ultimate reality in terms of a living, creatively active cosmos is still too mentalistic for Heidegger’s taste. Put another way, Nietzsche’s account of ultimate reality remains, to some extent, guilty of the same kind of post-Cartesian philosophical anthropology that still had Dilthey in its grip. Viewed from this angle, Nietzsche’s philosophy of art turns artistic activity into an unbound, potentially unstoppable cosmic force. In this manner, Nietzsche overtaxes the active participation of Dasein in creation and thus distorts the more modest indexical role which, according to Heidegger, Being has allotted to human ek-sistence. Creation is thus reduced to culture, insofar as Being’s “labor” at illuminating (or clouding) itself for Dasein is approximated to the cultural handiwork of humans, when they produce cultural artifacts, ranging from machines to edifying literary works. Such reduction Heidegger finds unacceptable. However, Heidegger’s alternative model for revelation raises problems of its own. Heidegger, we saw, appreciates how the early radical Hegel depersonalizes consciousness. Thus, consciousness was explicated as the Absolute’s divine light,

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which gets inflected by the Spirit into different epochal visions of the holy. This inflection issues the spiritual mandate for Dasein (as an era-bound, impersonal “we”) to reflect the divine light back into the original ground of Being from where it emanated. So understood, the Spirit’s inflection and Dasein’s reflection are two sides of the same prismatic process. Yet, one thing that Heidegger is hardpressed to explain is how the appellative character of ultimate reality or Being goes together with the impersonal quality of the holy, which remains thoroughly independent of any distinct figurations of the divine. This paradoxical tension is most palpable in Heidegger’s 1941 text “Wie wenn am Feiertage” (As if on Holiday), which takes its title from a poem Hölderlin wrote in 1800.29 There we read: “Thus ‘holiness’ is not at all a trait borrowed from a steadfast god. The holy is not holy because it is divine. Rather, the divine is divine, because in its own way it is ‘holy’” (GA4 59). But in the same text, Heidegger keeps referring to the “greeting of the holy” (der Gruß des Heiligen), which seems to confer some capacity for communication to the holy as it selectively seeks contact with humanity, by way of poetic inspiration.30 To be sure, speaking of inspiration does not mean that Heidegger endorses the genius cult of popular romanticism. Two years later, in “Remembrance” (Andenken) (1943), Heidegger thus characterizes poets as those whose mental-spiritual disposition (Gemüt) has to be attuned ahead of time so that they will be ready to receive the “soundless voice of a greeting” (lautlose Stimme des Grußes) which meets them like the “appeal of a sending” (Zuspruch des Zugeschickten), that is, like fate (GA4 124). Poets are fated to receive what Heidegger in several other places designates as the “call” or “summoning” (Anspruch) of Being.31 In “As if on Holiday,” the fatalistic overtones are even more pronounced. Here Heidegger almost enters into a chant, when describing the call of the holy in terms of fateful decision-making: “The holy decides initially in advance for humans and for the gods, whether they are and who they are and how they are and when they are. What is to come is said in its coming through the call” (GA4 76).32 This ominous remark anticipates integral parts of the philosophical rhetoric Heidegger will further develop and finesse in his two zero-hour texts, “Why Poets?” and the Letter on Humanism. Taken together these writings constitute Heidegger’s most sustained attempt at redelivering his philosophy of revelation as a new and subversive form of artisan thinking, according to my interpretation. Before we attend to the provocative and sometimes disconcerting qualities of Heidegger’s style in these two texts, we can bring out the lingering tension in Heidegger’s conception of ultimate reality’s holy call with a little comic relief. It

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is as if Being admonishes us: “Above all else, remember that I am not anything like a person.” Of course, we immediately want to reply: “Who said that?” Yet, for Heidegger, asking this question is already a breach of spiritual protocol, a symptom of religious indecency.

Part Three

Poetics at the “Zero Hour”

6

“Why Poets?”: Cultural Rebirth and the Poetic Inception of Piety

The main thesis of this chapter is that in order to estimate Heidegger’s abiding influence on the field of philosophy from which he emerged in the late 1920s, we must look at some of the recurrent motifs in Heidegger’s later thought, most notably his various comments on the mission of poets in “destitute” (dürftige) times. In this regard Heidegger’s ranking of Hölderlin over Rilke in “Why Poets?” (1946) will prove of special interest. In this meditation on the spiritual task for poets in times as bleak as the mid-1940s in war-torn Germany, the religious overtones of his exposition are more pronounced than they are in the Letter on Humanism composed the same year. What is more, in “Why Poets?” Heidegger sketches an alternative approach to language, which points back to rival projects among some of his prominent contemporaries, including the religious philosopher Martin Buber and his seminal work I and Thou (1923) and the first volume on Language (1923) in Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. These earlier works, in turn, have their sources in late nineteenthcentury language theory, a research area that had become more and more interdisciplinary by the time Nietzsche wrote his Untimely Meditations in the 1870s, when Ernst Haeckel’s monist movement was on the rise. In keeping with this focus on language use, Heidegger singles out Hölderlin as a poet who is “more daring” than other lyrical writers, whose works remain closer to the experiential level articulated in everyday speech. As will be detailed in the following subsections, what renders Heidegger’s poetics particularly intricate is his account of how first-rate poets like Hölderlin move from the level of “saying” (Sagen) to a more foundational level of “saga” (Sage). The topos of saga signals Heidegger’s engagement with the theme of cultural rebirth, which was broached previously in Nietzsche’s Wagner triplet, as we might call it: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), the fourth of his Untimely Meditations (1876), and The

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Wagner Case (1888). What is at stake in this string of texts is the role of the artist as a social reformer or even healer of a people’s stymied culture.1 In Heidegger’s essay, this role is assigned to the poet as the transmitter of “holy song.” Regarding this poetic calling, Heidegger places Hölderlin above Rilke, who is criticized for his proximity to Nietzschean metaphysics. As we shall see, one of the most intriguing but also baffling features of “Why Poets?” is that Heidegger’s treatment of the Nietzsche-Rilke connection focuses on Rilke’s poetic figuration of an angel’s “bodiless” being. In light of our previous findings in Chapters 4 and 5 about Heidegger’s objections to Nietzsche’s volitional metaphysics, one would expect Heidegger to criticize Rilke for a Nietzschean overemphasis on embodiment, especially in the form of concrete communicative gestures as the carrier of holy meanings. Yet, in “Why Poets?” Heidegger’s assessment seems to point in the opposite direction. To make sense of this peculiar change in orientation, it is useful to briefly recount the prevalent trends toward monism, which influenced Nietzsche’s metaphysics and, according to Heidegger’s essay at hand, Rilke’s poetics as well. Considered from this vantage point, the following section can serve as an intellectual-historical preface to our close textual analysis of Heidegger’s account of the poet’s special task in desolate times.

Culture critique and the monist movement The first thing worth noting is that Ernst Haeckel’s immensely successful book Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe) (1899) had been out for nearly thirty years by the time Being and Time was released, with over 300,000 copies in print before the First World War. Few scholars accepted Haeckel’s attempt at a monistic reconciliation of religion and science in toto, but some of the theoretical staples of his compendious inquiry across various research areas gave thinkers of Heidegger’s generation, including Buber and Cassirer, a lot of food for thought. Of special importance for the purpose of illuminating Heidegger’s work on philosophical poetics during the mid-1940s is Haeckel’s notion of living matter in tandem with his evolutionary account of ascending levels of “soul life” (Seelenleben). In this context, Haeckel drew as much on Goethe as he did on Schopenhauer, and integral parts of his periodic-process cosmogony were echoed in Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. For Haeckel though, eternal recurrence was not so much a philosophical thought experiment as it was a scientifically legitimate postulate, based on his acceptance of Antoine Lavoisier’s

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version of the law of conservation of mass (formulated in 1789) and Julius Robert von Mayer’s and Hermann von Helmholtz’s statements of the law of conservation of energy (in 1842 and 1847, respectively). It is easy to overstate the overlap between Haeckel’s monism and Nietzsche’s naturalism, if by the latter we mean the theoretical frame that Nietzsche gave to his genealogical method for tracing the emergence of social formations (including political structures, religious institutions, and cultural practices) out of the materiality of certain physiological processes broadly conceived.2 Probably under the influence of his former colleague at Basel, the anatomist Wilhelm His, Nietzsche was by no means an uncritical follower of Haeckel’s monistic evolutionary theory, as Christian Emden notes.3 Such reservations notwithstanding and in keeping with his own genealogical method, Nietzsche was certainly sympathetic to Haeckel’s general idea of bodily evolution as a process of “uneven growth” (to borrow one of His’s expressions).4 In the course of such growth new modes of consciousness emerge correlative to sudden changes in the increasingly complex organization of organic matter. One of the strongest suits of the monistic approach to life was that it made room for novelty, without recourse to anything like a disembodied Cartesian subject. The latter had become philosophically suspect, since dualists of Descartes’s ilk were never able to offer a compelling solution to the puzzle of interaction, that is, to the question of how a nonspatial intelligent subject could interact with (or perceive, transform, and be affected by) spatially extended objects. According to monism, thinking was no longer to be construed as a disembodied suprasensible phenomenon. Instead, mental-spiritual (geistig) activity resulted from heightened complexity in organic formations. At a clear distance from the kind of vitalism that would ascribe consciousness to atoms or grant souls to pebbles, Haeckel located soul life at the higher levels of material evolution. In short, spiritual sensibility was dynamically intertwined with organic complexity. Spirit was just as material as matter was creative. Here we can see how Haeckel was deeply indebted to the 1780s discourse on hylozoism and pantheism, which we previously considered in tandem with Herder’s role in the anthropological revolution in continental philosophy.5 For cultural diagnosticians like Nietzsche followed by Heidegger and Buber, Haeckel’s monist project raised the question whether such spiritual materialism was best understood in popular or in elitist terms. On a more specific note, the question became whether “great art” could claim any emancipatory potential within the ongoing spiritual evolution of society and human civilization

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writ large. Did monism with its lingering overtones of social Darwinism and social engineering leave any room for artistic intervention in the service of cultural reform? Could the creativity inherent in matter be harnessed in any programmatic fashion, and if so by whom? What schema for the division of cultural labor would serve society’s evolution best? Despite its overt political and pedagogical orientation, the public ethos of monism (carried in particular by the Monist League founded in 1906) did not directly answer any of these questions.6 Instead, the monist movement became a fertile breeding ground for rather different forms of social experimentation with community life or Gemeinschaftsleben. Grouped loosely under the rubric of society as organism, such “utopian” experiments ranged from Bruno Taut’s and Walter Gropius’s forays into social(ist) architecture to Otto Ammon’s idiosyncratic blueprint for a rigidly stratified Christian society, next to the sinister territorial politics of the Nazi settlements. In a succinct formulation that helps underscore the relevance of the monist movement for both Nietzsche and Heidegger, Jeanette Redensek summarizes the discursive situation in Wilhelmine Germany as follows: Haeckel’s Monism, with its overtones of universal consciousness, rose to meet the yearning for a sense of home and belonging in the modern soul that had been set adrift in the anomie of Gesellschaft. The use of organic metaphor here telegraphed the possibility of greater authenticity, a return to a kind of Gemeinschaft. It dovetailed with the era’s popular notions of Volksgeist and what was seen as a typically, even uniquely German orientation toward the social collective. [italics added]7

This characterization, Redensek adds, should be taken in all its ambivalence and not as a one-sided dismissal of monism as a protofascist cause. The movement’s motley aftermath bespeaks a deep political ambivalence, which attracted a variety of socially progressive thinkers as well as several conservative political theorists. Compared to the more egalitarian views of his former student and later detractor, Oscar Hertwig, for example, Haeckel’s own views have a strong elitist streak, while both thinkers show nationalist leanings.8 In this regard, Haeckel’s turn from an initial endorsement of war as a means for “social selection” to his subsequent lament over the massive loss of society’s “best, bravest, and healthiest” during the First World War casts a less-than-flattering light on his approach to social stratification in the context of “eugenics.”9 Heidegger, to his credit, was not given to biologistic notions of social hygiene. Yet, there survives in his later poetics an air of Haeckel’s elitism, now recast in terms of “pure” language. To

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detect the signs of such elitism in the workings of Heidegger’s hook, that is, in the rhetorical efficacy of his writing style, let us take a closer look at his commentary on the challenge for poets in destitute times, which Rilke apparently is not quite able to meet.

Examining Rilke’s angel In the last third of the essay “Wozu Dichter?” we find an important reference to Pascal’s “logic of the heart” (H 302). Here Heidegger intimates a connection between this Pascalian “logic” and the figure of the angel in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923) (H 302, 307–11). Heidegger is at his most intriguing when he further signals a possible parallel between Rilke’s angel and the figure of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (H 308). While Heidegger remains somewhat elusive on this point, the rest of the essay suggests that his substantial poetic merits notwithstanding, Rilke’s final limitations (compared to Hölderlin) have to do with Rilke’s proximity to Nietzsche’s metaphysics as Heidegger sees it.10 Thus, he speaks of Rilke’s poetry as “overshadowed by the attenuated metaphysics of Nietzsche.”11 Of course, we already observed how Heidegger commented in much greater detail on Nietzsche’s way of “completing” rather than overcoming metaphysics, in his Nietzsche volumes (1936–1940/1) followed by the long essay “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’” (1943) composed three years before “Why Poets?” Incidentally, 1943 was the year the Nazis declared a “Hölderlin Year,” which also marks the time when the Hölderlin Society was founded in Germany.12 What is more, in “Why Poets?” Heidegger presents Pascal’s “logic of the heart” as the inversion of “the logic of reason” (H 307). In “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’,” he generalizes the present juxtaposition of these two logics, when he submits that any logic remains under the sway of metaphysical thinking (H 256). To my knowledge, and aside from the aforementioned remark about Rilke’s angel, Heidegger never offered a thorough exposition of how Rilke’s poetry remained burdened by Nietzschean metaphysics. A sustained examination of Heidegger’s ranking of Rilke vis-à-vis Hölderlin falls outside the compass of my study as a whole. Yet for the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to trace a particular train of thought in “Why Poets?” which will shed some light on the supposed link between Rilke’s angel and Nietzsche’s metaphysical thought. To this end, one can begin with a prima facie sketch of Heidegger’s account of Rilke’s lingering poetic limitations. Heidegger’s main objection seems twofold.

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First, there is the aforesaid charge that Rilke’s poetry is guided by the Pascalian logic of the heart. As we shall see, the second objection is surprising, for it implies that Rilke’s poetry is somehow too hopeful or too optimistic. In my reading, these two criticisms are closely related. To clarify the first charge, one has to unpack how Rilke’s Pascalian logic, though commendable in some of its aspects, is still deemed too logical in the end and thus proves but the mirror image of the logic of reason. This hint at two logics mirroring each other is quite puzzling, but we receive a further clue in those formulations where Heidegger suggests that both logics lay claim to offering an overly integrated account of human existence. If so, Heidegger’s speaking of an inversion (Umkehrung) in this context points to a structural homology. On a provisional note, one may say that the logic of reason integrates human existence into an account of reality, which is governed by scientific inquiry and its ideal of rational cohesion. For Heidegger, such reasoning subscribes to an overarching standard of cognitive closure, which, if achieved, would render the human subject self-transparent and the world around her scientifically accessible without residue. So understood, the logic of reason amounts to an epistemic control mechanism of sorts. By comparison, the logic of the heart does not put the subject of scientific inquiry in charge of an epistemically manageable environment. Instead of focusing on the relation between a human thinker and an external world, the logic of the heart is confined to an inner sphere that Heidegger designates as “heart space” or Herzraum (H 302, 304–5). Turning to this spiritual center of a person’s life shifts the emphasis from cognitive, cerebral activity to the affective aspects of human existence, including volitions and passionate commitments. In other words, the logic of the heart has to do with what we care about the most, for example: “[our] ancestors, the dead, one’s childhood, future generations” (H 302). These entities, to use a neutral term, are not objects open to scientific inquiry. However, there is one quality they have in common with scientific objectivity: they function like signposts that allow each of us to make sense of a certain domain. Specifically, these focal points of our passionate care mark an inner sphere, at the center of which is the heart. Put in these terms, the heart can tentatively be characterized as a person’s spiritual compass, and for Heidegger that constitutes a problem. What he takes issue with is the concomitant sense of integration and security. Even though the logic of the heart does not spell cognitive domination over an “outer” world, it does hold out the promise of integrating a person’s “inner” sphere. Considered from this angle, the logic of the heart is equally guilty of

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integrating human existence too much. For the same reason, the heart as a person’s spiritual center remains distinct from what Heidegger at the beginning of his essay called the “middle” of the “night of the world” (Weltnacht) (H 266–7). As Heidegger knew—though he does not pause to mention it here— the expression Weltnacht goes back to Luther and was later adopted by Hegel.13 The phrase “night of the world” refers to destitute times as a spiritual affliction that can engulf an entire people or era. In this capacity, it exceeds the sphere of individual psychological struggle. Thus, the Weltnacht’s “middle” designates the epicenter of a cultural crisis marked by the absence of Being. Such absence consists in our forgetfulness about Being, that is, about the genuine character of ultimate reality. Put in Hegelian language, the crisis intimated by the night of the world refers to a darkening of the Spirit, which Heidegger translates into his own philosophical idiom and thus construes as a socially and culturally pervasive condition of being oblivious to Being. At the core of such oblivion, spiritual blindness is at its maximum where times are so destitute that people no longer recognize their blindness as a spiritual lack, but merely experience it in terms of material deprivation. Instead of caring about Being, they become spiritually numbed to the point where they only care about their personal needs. In the middle of such darkness, which Heidegger calls the “midnight” (Mitternacht), the “very desolation of the time” is now mis-experienced merely as the tangible plight of individuals within dire historical circumstances (H 266). In 1946, at the outset of the so-called “Rubble Years” (Trümmerjahre) in the immediate aftermath of the destruction during the Second World War, poverty was tangible indeed. Yet Heidegger implies that such concrete instances of personal “need” (Bedarf) are superficial compared to the crisis of Being which is a “destiny” that unfolds “this side of pessimism and optimism” (H 267). Rhetorically, Heidegger is walking a thin line here, because de-emphasizing the significance of people’s concrete needs can be taken as an expression either of arrogance or of encouragement. It would be arrogant, if it suggested that people living in damaged towns or cities that saw heavy bombing (like Dresden, Cologne, Aachen, Kassel, Hamburg, and Berlin) should just get over themselves and not complain about trifling matters like food shortage, lack of proper accommodation, and no heating. Yet, it could also ring out a note of somber hope in asking people to look past these calamities, since this-worldly troubles can neither reveal nor undermine the ultimate standard for human existence. Our houses may be shattered, but our spirit can still soar, if only we adopt the

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right spiritual perspective. Here Heidegger’s choice of words in the sentence just quoted is rather subtle, when he refers to the crisis of Being as coming into its own “this side of [diesseits von] optimism and pessimism.” Usually one would expect the phrase “jenseits von” in reference to something that lies “beyond” optimism and pessimism. Yet Heidegger, I would argue, is concerned to avoid any overly religious connotations that could be taken as a statement of Christian doctrine. He does not mean to issue otherworldly promises about salvation in the name of God. Instead, he invites people to follow certain poets on “the tracks of the fugitive gods” (H 267). Only then may we reach and possibly pass through the midnight of the night of the world, which, I submit, functions like a purgatory in Heidegger’s spiritual diagnosis. Rilke’s poetry, for its part, puts too much emphasis on personal heart space and thus constitutes a distraction from the real crisis in progress, which takes place on a spiritual plane that transcends the sphere of the heart. However, this line of criticism calls for further inspection, especially with respect to Heidegger’s hint that the presence of Pascal’s logic of the heart in Rilke’s poetry prompts a false sense of security and integration. At first glance, this is a curious charge, as if Heidegger objected to people having more peace of mind than they should. Is the target of his criticism some form of spiritual complacency? There is a central passage that seems to point in this direction, when Heidegger suggests that the angel in Rilke’s Duino Elegies is a figure of balance and “rest,” whereas human existence is inherently imbalanced and restless. In this passage (see next block quote below), Heidegger maintains a somewhat forced locution, when he keeps blending the terms “wagen” (to dare; take a risk) and “Waage” (scales) into the term “Wage.” To be fair, what we have here is not the kind of questionable etymology that Heidegger is known for when it comes to translating select gnomic passages from ancient Greek into German. The noun Waage in contemporary German can be traced back to the noun wāge in Middle High German. Along these lines there is a fairly straightforward link between weighing and risking, which relates the contemporary verb wagen back to cases where somebody puts something on the scales not knowing how they might tip. In English, too, one can say of a risky or dicey situation that a lot is “hanging in the balance.” In this sense, the image of a scale or the closely related image of a tightrope are familiar metaphors for potentially dangerous endeavors or balancing acts. What is more, Rilke himself used the noun Wage instead of Waage in a late fragment (not in the Duino Elegies!), as Heidegger documents (H 310). This

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already raises a red flag, because based on his ad hoc claim that “the angel” is the name of a founding word (Grundwort) in Rilke’s poetry, Heidegger seems to assume that the meaning Rilke gives to the figure of the angel remains constant across his entire oeuvre (H 308). In principle, such constancy is possible, but Heidegger has not shown that it applies to Rilke’s case.14 As it turns out, some of the details that Heidegger extrapolates from Rilke’s isolated use of the term Wage, in this instance, do not match the contours of the angel in the Duino Elegies at all. To see this, consider the following passage, in which Heidegger stretches the metaphorical connections between Wage and Waage considerably, when he compares the existential conditions of animals, humans, and angels: Their physicality [Leiblichkeit] does not confuse them. . . . Plant and animal lie upon the balance [Wage] in such a way that the balance always plays out in the calm of a safebeing.  .  .  . The balance upon which the angel is risked also remains outside the uncalmed; . . . In accordance with the angel’s incorporeal essence [leibloses Wesen], potential confusion through what is visible to the angel’s senses has been transformed into the invisible. The angel essences from the calmed quiet of the equilibrated oneness of both realms within world inner space [Weltinnenraum]. Man, on the other hand, as one who deliberately asserts himself, is risked into defenselessness. The scales of danger are essentially uncalmed in the hand of the man who has been so risked. (H 309/OBT 234–5)

Even in light of this more extensive statement, the charge against Rilke is still opaque. Usually angels (unlike fellow human beings) do not serve as direct role models for people, since the ambition literally to become an angel appears either blasphemous or pompous. On occasion, certain individuals may be perceived as saintly, but claiming angel status for oneself would seem offensive or laughable. Alternatively, angels can be viewed either in the traditional sense of God’s messengers, who can also operate as guardian angels, or, more abstractly, the angel can become a symbol for a special spiritual condition, namely a state of alignment with God’s will (except for one fallen angel, of course). Considered as a symbol of spiritual steadfastness, it is not clear what exactly Heidegger finds inappropriate or misguided about such iconography. After all, religiously inclined people could envision angels as a standard of spiritual integration, to which they aspire without anticipating that they will fully reach it. Short of using angels as role models for direct or complete emulation, the figure of the angel can thus be inspiring and humbling at the same time, insofar as it tends to accentuate rather than conflate the difference between angelic existence and human existence. Besides its implicit call for humility, such an

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angelic vision may even retain an element of terror. In fact, there is a famous passage in the Duino Elegies where Rilke emphatically states that “Each angel is terrifying,” though Heidegger does not mention it. This is a glaring omission. Not only does this line stem from the very first of the Duino Elegies, which makes for a captivating, even dramatic opening. Also, if this line is considered in context, one is likely to get a very different impression of the poetic atmosphere that Rilke creates, an atmosphere that is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s exposition of Rilke’s angel as an overly serene figure that might make us forget about the risky nature of human existence. It is difficult not to judge this as an instance of willful distortion, because upon scrutiny the beginning of Rilke’s poem emphasizes exactly those things that Heidegger brings into play against Rilke’s angel. In other words, Heidegger’s exposition turns Rilke’s angel into its opposite and then usurps Rilke’s actual poetic statement as a basis for criticizing Rilke. Speaking of willful distortion is not an overstatement, I think, if we consider that the above block quote from Heidegger’s essay features a contrast between humans and animals, which is a theme that is also engaged in the first of the Duino Elegies. In Rilke’s words: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure and are awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Each single angel is terrifying. And so I force myself, swallow and hold back the surging call of my dark sobbing. Oh, to whom can we turn for help? Not angels, not humans; and even the knowing animals are aware that we feel little secure and at home in our interpreted world.15

Clearly, Rilke does not present angels as a harmless or spiritually soporific presence. Instead, his poetic language speaks of their terrifying beauty. Far from being equal to them, humans cannot bear the angels’ “stronger existence” (stärkeres Dasein). Their very presence and proximity makes us want to cry, and yet we choke because we are not only frightened by their strength, but awed by how they abstain from using their strength on us. In light of their sublime

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might, then, we cannot keep angels company, since we are nearly shattered by short-term encounters with them already. On the other end of the spiritual spectrum, so to speak, we encounter animals. Here Rilke nicely turns the tables on humanity, when he suggests that it is animals, not us, who would be taken aback by this encounter. They would immediately sense that there is something wrong with us, that we are not reliable. Specifically, that we are not reliably “at home” in our world, which is always filtered by our own interpretations. If one read these lines by Rilke and did not know who the author was, one could easily mistake them for one of the gloomier passages from Being and Time (e.g., §§ 29–30). Of course, Rilke’s own poetic remarks on the tense relation between angels, humans, and animals are also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and its famous metaphor of man as a “rope” spun between animal and overman, across an abyss.16

“Bodiless being” and representational thinking Up to this point, none of Heidegger’s objections to Rilke’s angel withstood close inspection. Regarding Heidegger’s reservations toward Rilke’s Pascalian logic of the heart, it is still not apparent how Rilke’s angel, as a symbol or otherwise, is guilty of integrating our inner “heart space” too much or of making us feel overly at home in the outer world. Aside from the implicit hint at Nietzsche’s “rope” metaphor, the connection between Rilke’s poetry and Nietzsche’s metaphysics has not been illuminated either. However, there is one more important clue in our last quotation from “Why Poets?” that might help clarify the main target of Heidegger’s criticism of Rilke’s angel, namely Heidegger’s characterization of the angel as a “bodiless being” (leibloses Wesen). In German, the terms “Leib” and “Körper” are distinct, while in English their different meanings are folded into the single term “body.” “Körper” is the more technical term of the two. It is commonly used to refer to physical bodies, which may include human bodies, but only if they are considered from a scientific or medical standpoint, for example in anatomy. The term “Leib” has more personal connotations. For instance, the colloquial phrase “jemandem auf den Leib rücken” is used for situations where someone invades someone else’s personal space or even lays a hand on them. Similarly, the phrase “mit Leib und Seele dabei sein” refers to someone being fully devoted to an ongoing event, with all her body and soul. That is why in Zarathustra, Part One, Nietzsche purposely chose

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the term “Leib,” when he lets his title character inveigh against the despisers of the body, in the speech titled “Von den Verächtern des Leibes.” Written in 1883, this important speech also contains formulations that point back to our previous observations about Haeckel’s monism, its notion of living matter, and the conception of different levels of “soul life”: “Body am I, and soul”—thus speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body. The body is a great reason [Vernunft], a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a shepherd. . . . I shall not go your way, O despisers of the body! You are no bridge to the overman!17

Comparable to Haeckel in this regard, Nietzsche subscribes to a version of spiritual monism that gainsays any ontological separation of mind and matter. In particular, someone’s soul is not separable from his or her body. One’s soul is an aspect of one’s body, or as Nietzsche puts it here: “Soul” is only a word for something pertaining to the body (ein Etwas am Leibe). Recalling some details from our earlier commentary on Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, the characterization of soul in terms of bodily aspects can be construed as a reference to material complexity. From a monist point of view, all matter is spiritual, but only if matter reaches a certain level of organic complexity does it become “ensouled,” so to speak. Hence, not every speck of dust possesses a soul. Also, humanity’s present “soul level” may not be the last one. Signaled by his controversial figure of the overman or Übermensch, Nietzsche holds out the possibility that humanity may rise to higher levels of experience and cultural sensibility. Witnessed by Haeckel’s disconcerting gestures at eugenics, such visions of ascending humanity traversed a broad political spectrum and were not immune to racist politics. Admittedly, the spiritual materialism promulgated by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra does not explicitly rule out experiments associated with, say, genetic engineering. However, methodologically and metaphysically it would not have made much sense for him to put his hopes in such forms of physiological manipulation. Such an orientation would conflate the aforesaid distinction between Leib and Körper. This, in turn, would contradict Nietzsche’s conviction that human corporeality or Leiblichkeit is interactive, which means it is not simply physiological but also communicative. In this regard Nietzsche, as I read him, was very much in agreement with Buber’s thesis that it is through communicative gestures—and not primarily through genetic codes—that “the person is built up in the world.”18

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The material complexity of personal life remains enmeshed in communicative interactions within a historically evolving cultural environment. The “uneven growth” (Wilhelm His) that animates cultural evolution is not reducible to biochemical processes. Accordingly, the material contours of personality remain dependent on shifting cultural formations that include not only social institutions but also language habits and the kind of collective memory that is handed down in a people’s folk songs or sagas. If we bring such considerations to bear on the present quote from Zarathustra, it becomes less and less clear how the poetic shortcomings of Rilke’s angel could result from his proximity to Nietzsche’s monist metaphysics. Our final attempt at clarifying Heidegger’s criticism of Rilke led us to the issue of bodily nature in the sense of Leiblichkeit. Following Heidegger’s own formulations about “the angel’s incorporeal essence” (OBT 235), we surmised that it was the status of Rilke’s angel as a bodiless being that prompted Heidegger’s critique. But now it seems that the closer Rilke’s angel is to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the more embodied his essence would be. In fact, in light of our findings in Chapter 4 it would make more sense for Heidegger to criticize Rilke’s proximity to Nietzsche in terms of overstated embodiment rather than incorporeality. Thus, Heidegger could have confirmed his anti-monist outlook over against Nietzsche’s “anthropomorphial” metaphysics of the will. Curiously, in “Why Poets?” Heidegger does not pursue this line of critique familiar from his Nietzsche lectures. Instead, in the last pages of “Why Poets?” Heidegger adds yet another wrinkle to his meditation on the spiritual mission of poets. At this stage in his discussion Heidegger argues that the ultimate limitation of Rilke’s poetry, in general, and of the figure of the angel, in particular, has to do with representation. In short, Rilke’s poetry remains mired in representational thinking. To see this, we have to read the following two passages together. The first passage occurs right before Heidegger’s central claim mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, according to which the logic of the heart is but the inversion (Umkehrung) of the logic of reason. The second passage can be found near the very end of “Why Poets?”: For Rilke’s poetry, the being of beings is determined metaphysically as worldly presence, a presence which remains attracted to representation in consciousness, whether this has the character of the immanence of calculating representation or that of inwardly turning to the open made accessible by the heart. (H 307/ OBT 233) In the invisibility of world inner space, as the unity of which [weltische Einheit] the angel appears, the wholeness of worldly beings becomes evident. Only in the

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widest compass of the whole is the holy able to appear. Because they experience unwholeness as such, poets of the kind who risk more are underway on the track of the holy. Their song sanctifies over the land. Their song celebrates the unbrokenness of the globe of being. The unwhole [Unheil], as the unwhole, traces for us what is whole [das Heile]. What is whole beckons and calls to the holy. The holy binds the divine. The divine brings God closer. (H 315/OBT 240)

Jointly, the first passage along with the first sentence of the second passage indicates that the problem with Rilke’s angel is to do with integration. This much we noted before, but here Heidegger adds another facet to his commentary, when he states that the angel appears as the “worldly unity” (weltische Einheit) of our inner heart space, which he now describes in terms of the “invisibility of world inner space” (das Unsichtbare des Weltinnenraumes). Since the angel, in Heidegger’s rendering, is construed as bodiless, it is not clear whether one could form any mental image of it. But then, what could it mean for the angel to appear and represent the worldly unity of an invisible domain? Does the representative of an invisible sphere have to be invisible, too? In this regard, Heidegger’s account becomes more and more elusive and abstract. Perhaps, the angel is construed as a poetic index of overall unity with respect to the invisible world of representational thinking, independent of any particular representational content. In fact, what Heidegger really seems to be saying here in the above-quoted first passage is that Rilke’s angel or Engel is the poetic analogon to what Heidegger himself characterizes as Gestell, which is an ominous “horizon of disclosure.”19 That would explain why the angel is not a thought image proper. Rather, “angel” is the poetic name (what Heidegger also calls a “basic word”)20 for a representational modality: it designates an overarching mode of representation instead of any particular representational object. In other words, the angel does not simply belong to the “logic of the heart,” but is the logic of the heart. That is to say, the Engel stands for an “inner” power of organization, which arranges all of our passional thought contents, while Heidegger’s Gestell stands for an “outer” power of organization. Indicated by my use of scare quotes, this “inner/outer” distinction does not apply within visible space, but separates the domain of the visible from the invisible. Gestell organizes the visible components of our experience (i.e., perceptual objects that can be located and calculated in physical space). Recalling the table for twelve categories in Kant’s First Critique,21 Heidegger’s Gestell could be seen as an ominous thirteenth meta-category of sorts. Kant’s twelve categories (including substance and causality among others) were meant

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as so many cognitive parameters which together guarantee the rational structure and epistemic coherence of our experience of the world. Strictly speaking, Gestell as a meta-category for Heidegger is not as formal as Kant’s categories. Instead, it imposes a qualitative limit on the way we can encounter things in our worldly surroundings.22 Similarly, on Heidegger’s interpretation, Rilke’s angel not only organizes but also restricts the invisible elements of our experience (i.e., passions, volitions, emotional bonds). Hence, neither Gestell nor Engel is neutral, in that each puts a special revelatory twist on how humans experience the outer and the inner domain. As two worldopening powers, they are both reductivist and totalizing, which Heidegger intimates in the first passage under consideration, when he attributes to Rilke’s angel-guided metaphysics the same “character of immanence” (Character der Immanenz) that he does to “calculative representation” (das rechnende Vorstellen). In other words, Engel and Gestell both cancel transcendence. Neither the inner logic of the heart, nor the outer logic of calculative thought allow for any higher order beyond themselves. Thus, they both convert the wholesome potential of human experience (das Heile) into something unwholesome (Unheil). In this manner they both “kill,” that is, permanently block what Heidegger in the second passage of the last double quote calls “the holy” (das Heilige) (H 312, 314–5). So considered both “logics” stand for ultimate orders of organization that sterilize our experience of the world. Here Heidegger tweaks the German language yet again by creating a neologism that blends two familiar words into a peculiar hybrid expression. As a case in point, the noun phrase das Heile is an unusual amalgam of the adjective heil or the verb heilen, on the one hand, and the noun Heil, on the other hand. The adjective heil normally refers to something intact or unbroken (e.g., a toy), while the verb heilen refers to acts of healing (both in the intransitive sense of a wound’s healing, or in the transitive sense of a doctor healing a patient). The adjective is also frequently used in combination with the generic action-verb machen (to make or render). As an alternative to “repairing” toys or other use items, one can also speak of “heil machen,” that is, putting them back together. In the context of repairing things, using the verb heilen instead of heil machen would be awkward, since toys and tools can be mended but not healed. Next, the noun “Heil” has clear religious connotations and generally refers to some beatific condition or salvation. In literature or poetry, one frequently finds the expression Seelenheil as a reference to someone’s personal salvation, namely the saving or redemption of their soul. These religious connotations received

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a sinister twist in the Hitler greeting “Heil Hitler” (Blessed be Hitler). I do not think that Heidegger meant to revive the Hitler greeting in the concluding pages of “Why Poets?” Still, in 1946, it would have been hard for most German readers to read such passages about “Heil” and “Unheil” without the Hitler greeting entering into their general association space, irrespective of their political or moral attitude toward the Hitler regime right after its demise. The main effect brought about by Heidegger’s blending of heilen and Heil into das Heile is that the religious connotations of the original noun phrase are attenuated but not fully extinguished. Accordingly, das Heile can refer to a state of experiencing the world in wholesome ways, without using any heavy-handed, doctrinal language about salvation. In this sense, das Heile is a typical entry in Heidegger’s growing semireligious dictionary. The terminological distance from any official creed becomes even more pronounced, when he layers the relationship between humans and personal deities (God or gods) by inserting various intermediate stages on the way to full-fledged religious experience. In his later volume, Identity and Difference (Identität und Differenz) (1957), Heidegger seems sympathetic to a god before whom we can “bend the knee, . . . make music and dance,” in sharp contrast with the philosophers’ god, who has been turned into the formal husk of a causa sui.23 In “Why Poets?” Heidegger is much more tentative. People living in times as desolate as the immediate postwar years are not ready for actual worship yet. Their efforts, aided by poets, have to be more modest and must go through a drawn-out series of multiple preparatory stages. This view comes to the fore, when Heidegger in somber language talks about how the wholesome “callingly waves forth the holy.” The holy, in turn, “binds the divine”; and the divine “brings near [the] God” (nähert den Gott) (H 315). In the last sentence, Heidegger’s use of the definite article in German exemplifies another subtle verbal balancing act. If one wanted to refer to the Christian God of Scripture, one would usually do without any article here. Yet, since Heidegger uses the definite article (den) instead of the indefinite article (einen), the present formulation still rings monotheistic rather than polytheistic. This single god, then, is not announced as Jehova, but it does not preclude that identification either. Especially so, since the surrounding text conjures a crusade-like scenery in which the “more daring ones” travel “across the land,” singing a “holy [lit. sanctifying] song” (heiligendes Lied). Heidegger’s more daring poets are clearly profiled as crusaders of the spirit, except that they are not headed for Antiochia or Jerusalem. Instead of progressing in the tracks of clerical imperialism, they regress as they trace their way back to the pure source from which god(s) came.

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They are templars of pure, holy language. This observation about pure language brings us to one of the most provocative claims in “Why Poets?” couched in an illustration about wells and trees. After writing the famous line about language as “the house of being,”24 which also occurs in the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger elaborates as follows: If we go to the well, if we go through the woods, we are already going through the word “well,” through the word “woods,” even if we are not saying these words aloud or have any thoughts about language. By thinking in terms of the temple of being, we can imagine what it is they risk, the ones who risk more than the being of beings. They risk the precinct of being. They risk language. All beings, the objects of consciousness and the things of the heart, the self-asserting men and the men who risk more, all creatures, each in its own way, are (as beings) in the precinct of language. (H 306/OBT 232–3) [translation modified]

At first glance, this is a baffling assertion, because Heidegger places very different entities in the same “precinct of being,” which gets quickly equated with the “precinct of language.” In the last sentence, Heidegger does add the qualifying phrase “each in its own way,” but this does not change the main proposition that all the listed entities, which include not only human thought contents but also humans themselves, can only be encountered in and through language. According to the aforementioned quote, before someone encounters a tree or another human being, they have to go through a “word” first. It is not immediately clear what this could mean.

Risking language In the most general sense, Heidegger seems to be saying that all our experience is language-filtered or language-mediated. This may look like a defensible claim, which one could tentatively spell out as follows. All human experience has an interpretive element in it. Interpretation, in turn, is dependent on language use, if language use is construed as linking certain experiential contents to certain symbols and their linguistic expression. According to this rough account, I cannot experience a forest or a well unless I process information (received data) in such a way that I can talk about them, at least in principle. That is, if a “forest experience” were not communicable to others, it would not even be communicable to myself, which means it would be inherently inarticulate

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and thus not qualify as a distinct experience at all. So understood, Heidegger seems to proffer a variant of Wittgenstein’s argument against private language: Whatever I could not in principle communicate to others, I could not mentally spell out to myself either, which means it is experientially opaque and so doesn’t qualify as a full-fledged experience.25 However, Heidegger makes it clear that considerations of the sort just mentioned, which we might loosely subsume under the rubric of articulation theory, are not his present concern. This can be shown, if we attend to another key passage in “Why Poets?” five pages later. Here he shows himself aware that the very generality of his statements makes him vulnerable to the following criticism. If all of us have to go through a “word” (I maintain the scare quotes for the moment) in order encounter something like a forest, then why do we need poets, at all? Indeed, considered from this angle poets seem to be utterly superfluous, since no one can help but “risk language.” Such risk-taking seems to be inevitable for every language user, which would leave no special mission or spiritual task for poets to accomplish. To parry this objection, Heidegger makes a crucial but problematic move, when he transitions from claims about speech, in the broad sense of articulating experience, to claims about something he calls legend or saga. This transition is supposed to tell us how poets do not just “dare” or risk language like the rest of us, but how they are more daring. Terminologically, this move is much smoother in German, when Heidegger moves from “Sagen” to “Sage”: “But is not man, then, the one who has language by his essence and constantly risks his essence with language? Certainly. . . . Then, however, those who risk more cannot be those who merely say. The saying [das Sagen] of those who risk more must specifically risk the saga [die Sage]” (H 311/OBT 236–7).26 The last sentence is the decisive one, for it is here that Heidegger for the first time in this essay performs the terminological slide under consideration. The weightiest mistake in Kenneth Haynes’s widely received translation of “Why Poets?” is that he renders “Sage” merely as “what is said,” which doesn’t bring out the important shift in meaning over against “Sagen,” which he renders as “saying.” For the German native speaker “Sage” clearly has narrative overtones like those reverberating in Die Nibelungensage, the title of the epic tale of dragon slayer Siegfried and his adventures. By way of illustration, this reference to the Nibelungen Saga is not arbitrary, since the reception history of this fluid and evolving text engages several aspects that are echoed in “Why Poets?” where Heidegger weaves a terminological net, in which he first moves from “Sagen” to “Sage” and then expands on “Sage” in terms of “Gesang” (song). In the context of the preceding quote Heidegger confines himself

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to meditations on an isolated line from Rilke’s Sonnettes to Orpheus, “Gesang ist Dasein” (Song is Dasein) (H 312). However, the connections between saga and song that are most likely to spring to the minds of Heidegger’s readers pertain to the Nibelungen Saga. The latter originated in the fifth century as a multifarious tradition of thematically linked folk songs, which were united in written form (as an epic in stanzas) by an unknown author or authors as the Nibelungen Song (Das Nibelungenlied) in what is now Austria, as late as the twelfth century. For Heidegger’s generation, this saga was a fresh memory after Richard Wagner’s cycle of four operas, The Nibelungen Ring, had turned this epic into a Gesamtkunstwerk (holistic or collective artwork) intended to proclaim Germany’s cultural renewal or rather reconvalescence at the Bayreuth festival. The most famous philosophical commentator on Wagner’s Bayreuth project was, of course, Nietzsche, whose increasingly critical attitude toward the ingenious composer went through different stages, which are reflected in the “Wagner triplet” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. For the members of the next generation after Heidegger, that is, for those who went to German high school in the 1930s and were old enough to fight in Hitler’s army (voluntarily or otherwise), the Nibelungen tale was renarrated by Gotthold Klee in a very popular edition under the title German Hero-Tales (Deutsche Heldensagen) (1930).27 Thus, it is no stretch to say that, when Heidegger wrote his essay on the presumed mission of poets in the mid-1940s, among the first things that German readers would associate with the term “Sage” was this Nordic mythic tale of heroes, gods, dragons, and dwarfs. Importantly, when one speaks of the Nibelungen Saga, the term “saga” usually refers to the basic narrative content, that is, the main thematic building blocks around which the overall story is organized. Such constitutive elements, which in German literary scholarship are sometimes called “Grundstoff” (basic matter), would include the most prominent figures (like Siegfried or the dwarf Alberich) and events (such as Siegfried’s battle with the dragon). These figures and events remained relatively stable, while the narrative arrangement, specific formulations, and select textual embellishments changed over the centuries, especially in light of numerous additional layers of Christian-knightly experience that were incorporated during the time of the Crusades. The main problem with Heidegger’s adoption of Sage in “Why Poets?” is that he exploits the narrative (heroic, mythical) overtones of this term, when he describes the “daring” poets’ mission in a language that creates a literary atmosphere of danger and adventure. Yet the philosophical commentary that accompanies these formulations empties Sage of its traditional narrative content

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and turns it into an unspecified message that emanates from the “precinct” of language as such. Making statements [das Aussagen] remains a way and a means. In contrast, there is a saying [ein Sagen] that is especially engaged with saga [die Sage] without, however, reflecting on language and thereby turning it too into an object. To enter into saga [die Sage] characterizes a saying [ein Sagen] that pursues what is to be said solely in order to say it. What is to be said would then be that which, in accordance with its essence, belongs in the precinct of language. (H 311–12 / OBT 237) [translation modified]

This creates a major tension in Heidegger’s text and, I would argue, renders his conception of the daring poet’s calling less than viable in the end. The central problem consists in the fact that Heidegger engages Hölderlin as an exemplary poet who mentions holy or sanctifying songs without actually singing them. This allows Heidegger to set up a series of postponements. Heeding the poet’s call, people are expected to listen to special songs, which would put them on a path of spiritual ascension leading from the wholesome source of pure language to the holy, over the godly, up to the worshipful encounter with some god—in the distant future (300 years or more, according to the Spiegel interview). In people’s actual religious lives, however, this is unlikely to work. Usually holy songs already make reference to deities, angelic messengers, and human agents pinning their hopes on some higher power, as they struggle to overcome this-worldly adversity. It is not clear how the lyrics of a “sanctifying song” could be restricted to the invocation of pure language or unscathed Being without becoming vacuous and uninspiring. Robbed of all saga-like traits (in the accustomed Nibelungen sense of saga) such holy song, it seems to me, would have to deteriorate into a repetitive one-word hymn that forces the singer into chanting “Being, Being, . . .” or “Language, Language, . . .” At the most, the lyrics could be extended to “pure kindness, pure kindness, . . .,” if we recall the conclusion of Heidegger’s later essay “. . . Poetically Men Dwells . . .”28 In other words, Heidegger’s apparent stratagem for avoiding the twin danger of totalizing representation posed by the Engel’s inner logic of the heart and by Gestell’s outer logic of calculating thought, respectively, is to do away with the specification of spiritual content altogether. If so, the holy songs that Heidegger mentions cannot actually be sung. The entire theoretical apparatus of Heidegger’s meditations on poetry applies only to the general idea of singing or listening to songs, not to the actual performance of them. The reason why this is difficult to see is that Heidegger’s series of postponements holds out the promise that there

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will be or, at least, could be sanguine worship at some point in the remote future. But then, to be consistent, the series cannot start with song. Song would have to come last. All that could be had at the very outset is a meditative state purified of any content: an indistinct form of Andenken, which is Heidegger’s attenuated term for Andacht (commemoration or meditation, especially in the context of worship). All in all, the essay “Why Poets?” proffers a mesmerizing mix that shows how Heidegger invented a new genre in philosophical-religious writing for himself. The set-up, in the dual sense of setting the stage and setting a trap, is brilliant. By applying his theoretical analyses to a poet’s references to religious experience rather than to actual, historically embedded instances thereof, he was able to vest a meditative posture of anodyne asceticism with an aura of spiritual combat. The underlying theme of Heidegger’s philosophical poetics is struggle toward worship, never struggle in worship. Upon scrutiny, it amounts to a false promise. The trouble is not that we may have to wait for several hundred years until the god(s) return and authentic worship becomes possible again, though this would already be a bitter pill to swallow. The real problem is that holy song as the supposed spiritual catalyst for “pre-preparing”29 such return can never be sung, in keeping with Heidegger’s own purist criteria. Equally problematic in “Why Poets?” is Heidegger’s account of Rilke’s angel as the main symptom of Rilke’s proximity to Nietzschean metaphysics. This critique proved unconvincing in several ways. Heidegger, we saw, criticizes the angel as a figure of spiritual anesthesia or sterilization. As such, “angel” became the name for a paradigm of revelation governed by the representational logic of the heart. In the last analysis, I argued, this turns Rilke’s Engel into the obverse of Heidegger’s Gestell. To use a medical metaphor (which the Nietzsche of the Fourth Untimely Meditation might have appreciated), we can say that, in Heidegger’s account, Engel and Gestell become the designations for two similar kinds of experiential cancer: one metastasizing in the perceptual realm of visible objects and the other in the passional realm of invisible affective attachments. However, once we looked at the first of the Duino Elegies, this diagnosis did not seem to match Rilke’s poetic account of the angel’s “terrible beauty.” Moreover, viewed against the intellectual-historical background of Nietzsche’s monist thought, it was not clear how Heidegger’s interpretation of Rilke’s angel as a “bodiless being” would go together with such metaphysics. My discussion did not aim to settle the question whether the figure of Rilke’s angel ought to be characterized as embodied rather than bodiless. Instead, I focused on the gaps in Heidegger’s exposition of the angel’s bodiless status, which he explicated in

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terms of a totalizing “immanence” associated with representational thinking. In this vein, we may conclude with one more observation concerning Heidegger’s idiosyncratic selection from Rilke’s writings, in “Why Poets?” Not only did Heidegger’s commentary omit the captivating opening of the Duino Elegies, one also wonders why there is no engagement with Rilke’s Book of Hours (Stunden-Buch) (1905). Especially for the purposes of comparing Hölderlin and Rilke, this volume would seem to be a prime candidate, for here Rilke presents a very engaging, nontriumphalist characterization of God as deus absconditus. God remains wholly Other, but His glory shines through in moments of vulnerability and in confrontations with poverty among humans and other sentient beings. Whether or not we accept Eugen Drewermann’s label for Rilke’s poetry as a theologia negativa, in the Book of Hours we find a piety for which religious experience is deeply rooted in creaturely communication within the painful fabric of this world. In one of his recent publications, Drewermann offers some very instructive and nuanced comments on Rilke’s Stunden-Buch, which are framed by his rich account of “how God passes through Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”30 From the perspective of this chapter, this is very fitting, since the tales collected by the Grimm brothers may well be seen as yet another form of literary saga. To be sure, these tales are not epic in character like the Nibelungensage, but they do display a comparable quality as a motley assembly of historically transmitted cultural treasures. In these tales Drewermann discerns various religious sensibilities, some of which he finds hospitable to the kind of “secular piety” we encounter in Rilke’s poetry, beyond “creed-bound forms of faith.”31 Even a small subset of the verses that Drewermann selected from the Book of Hours should suffice to glean a poetic voice from Rilke’s writing, which is markedly different from the one that is granted to him in Heidegger’s essay. A far cry away from Heidegger’s “logic of the heart” analysis, this is how Rilke addresses his God: You are the pure destitute, the beggar driven to hide his face, the great rose of poverty, the eternal metamorphosis of gold into the sun’s light. You are the mild refugee who has finished travelling the world, too cumbersome to be of use. You wail in storms. You are the harp on which the player breaks in pieces.32

7

The Letter on Humanism: Modulations of the German Poet in a Demonic Text

Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (Brief über den Humanismus; hereafter also referred to as Humanismusbrief) may well be seen as one of Heidegger’s most controversial writings, for at least three related reasons. First, like the essay “Why Poets?” it was conceived and delivered within the politically tense atmosphere of the immediate postwar years. Against the jagged landscape of wreckage and debris, Heidegger’s Brief constitutes an eminent instance of philosophical “rubble literature” (Trümmerliteratur), which stands out from the body of literature that was later subsumed under the name of this genre.1 Second, at this crossroad between the numbing effects of political catastrophe and the first stirrings of cultural reconstruction, the Letter on Humanism turns to the question of human dignity in a provocative and seemingly paradoxical manner, as Heidegger objects to humanism in the name of humanity. Third, within the corpus of Heidegger’s writings, the present text marks one of the few instances where he expressly addresses the possibility and limits of “ethics” in relation to the project of “fundamental ontology” familiar from Being and Time.

A cross section of four discourses Considering the time when Heidegger originally put the Humanismusbrief on paper, in 1946, it appears significant that the Letter was conceived simultaneously with several other eminent, philosophical commentaries such as Karl Jaspers’s study on Die Schuldfrage (The Question of [German] Guilt), Max Picard’s Hitler in uns selbst (Hitler in Ourselves), and Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State, all of which appeared in the same year. Put forth in the shared social climate of

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political upheaval and moral disorientation, these philosophical statements offer different perspectives on the postwar situation. In this vein, they offer different approaches to what was later called Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past), focused on the problem of regaining a political and cultural identity after twelve years of intellectual isolation and the trauma of the death camps. As is well known, the main thrust of Jaspers’s book consists in his rejection of the notion of collective guilt, in favor of an account of individual responsibility, a statement that was going to fuel the discussion well into the 1960s.2 Cassirer’s book proffers a cultural semiotics that stresses the political implications of his earlier work in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), which he now examines under the title “The Technique of Modern Political Myths.”3 Picard’s text, finally, sets forth a specific kind of phenomenological ethics, a Dasein analysis concerned with the dangers of political idolatry.4 In this analysis, Picard draws on a conception of the demonic, which strikes me as directly inspired by Paul Tillich’s 1926 essay by the same title, although Picard does not acknowledge Tillich.5 Considering how the Davos disputation pitted Cassirer and Heidegger against one another as two of the most famous philosophers at the time, it is worth noting that Cassirer does not criticize Heidegger as harshly as one might expect. Instead of declaring him a Nazi philosopher, Cassirer characterizes Heidegger as an advocate of philosophical fatalism, which easily lends itself to being utilized by the propaganda machinery of the National Socialists, without being reducible to their ideological perversions.6 Picard is less subtle in his philosophical distinctions, when he aligns Jaspers and Heidegger under the general rubric of Existenzphilosophie and jointly charges them with nihilism.7 Such oversimplification notwithstanding, Picard’s book remains relevant in his account of the “Nazi world” as a “world of discontinuity.” As long as we recognize his theoretical debt to Tillich and Cassirer, Picard’s characterization of “Hitler’s face”8 provides one of the most gripping phenomenological analyses of the violent manifestations of political idolatry, a disturbing description of idolatrous “physiognomy.”9 Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, then, differs from the statements of these authors in some obvious and some not so obvious ways. To begin with, Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi regime remains the subject of extensive debate, and over the last twenty-five years it has dominated Heidegger scholarship, especially in an Anglophone context. Sparked in large part by the publication of Victor Farias’s book Heidegger and Nazism (1989) [French orig., 1987], this focus on Heidegger’s politics actually marks the fourth wave of a recurrent criticism since

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the end of the Second World War, as Hugo Ott has pointed out.10 Meanwhile, Emmanuel Faye’s controversial book on the same subject has fanned the flames yet again, followed by Holger Zaborowski’s extensive study.11 At the heart of this ongoing controversy lies the fact that Heidegger never recanted. More specifically, in the widely discussed Spiegel interview (conducted in 1966, but not published until Heidegger’s death in 1976), Heidegger did not seem to add significant qualifiers to his notorious remark about National Socialism known from the Introduction to Metaphysics 1953 (1935) in terms of “the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and contemporary man).”12 In 1946, needless to say, one could not openly make such pronouncements. However, pointing to his lingering attachment to what he once might have seen as the “philosophical resources” of National Socialism does not capture the complex texture and the rhetorical finesse of the Letter on Humanism, which comprises a vibrant mixture of at least four different debates about cultural meaning. Heidegger effectively intertwines these debates to appropriate the resulting amalgam as a philosophical stance of his own: a humanism debate, a debate about the status of philosophy as a science, a debate about literature, and a critical aesthetics debate. Heidegger had inherited the humanism debate from the writings of Karl Jaspers and Ernst Cassirer, prior to the Second World War. This first debate concerned the options for negotiating the tension between human individuals and the social mechanisms of crisis-ridden modern society. One of the most instructive accounts of this cultural context is given by Bourdieu in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger.13 It is crucial to notice that this debate was inherently linked to the upheavals in the field of historical science. In this sense, the humanism debate was always already a science debate. The controversies over scientific methodology during the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular, threatened to disintegrate the disciplinary landscape of the academic organization of culture (including, above all, the German university system). Jointly, these disputes became part and parcel of the “modern crisis” in human self-understanding and thus constitute the second debate in my list of four. One of the focal points in these protracted exchanges was philosophy’s status as a “science,” which was still contested by the time Heidegger embarked on his philosophical career. The classical reference in this regard is Fritz Ringer’s Decline of the German Mandarins.14 The third plane of discourse laid out by the Humanismusbrief, the debate about literature’s role in reclaiming cultural territory after the Nazi abuse, was intensified by Alfred Andersch’s delivery

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of his famous essay “Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung” (1948) (German Literature at the Point of Decision). This essay was intended as a statement by a publicist—not a literary scholar or critic, as Andersch himself hastens to point out—on the possible pitfalls of Germany’s cultural reconstruction during the immediate postwar years. After deserting the German forces in Italy in 1944, Andersch had been a prisoner of war and went through a series of US internment camps, most notably Fort Getty, where he underwent “re-education in a test tube,” before he was sent back to Europe and released in Darmstadt near the end of 1945.15 The particular importance of Andersch’s aforementioned public(ist) intervention pertains to his affiliation with the so-called Group 47. This group comprised a motley crew of literary and culture critics, whose visibility, under the auspices of Hans Werner Richter, dominated the intellectual postwar scene throughout the 1950s. Finally, associated with the writings of Siegfried Kracauer, Max Kommerell, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, there is a fourth debate at play. This debate about critical aesthetics is geared toward questions concerning new paradigms of artistic expression. The latter include, for example, film, the so-called epic theater, and “puppet shows for adults” (Kasperle-Spiele für große Leute). Note that the first edition of Max Kommerell’s book by the same title appeared posthumously in 1948, thus roughly coinciding with the publication of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. The focus of inquiry in this debate is the political import of such aesthetic paradigms, each of which hoped in its own way to provide novel patterns of social perception for their respective audience.

Dialectical twists in a demonic text For present purposes I shall confine my inquiry to the first debate on humanism, the complex nature of which deserves separate treatment. Most importantly, in this arena of cultural discourse Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric creates a tension between religious and political meanings, resulting in a polyvocal message flexibly tailored for different factions among his (German) postwar audience. Due to its deployment of what I will refer to as strategic ambiguities, different parts of the Letter on Humanism can be read variously as an expression of stoic acquiescence marked by “proper silence” (W 344) or as an agitating call for “open resistance” (W 346) to the allied forces. To be sure, these initiatives are not plainly delivered in the context of political action but presented as possible modes of thought. Accordingly, the Humanismusbrief cannot be decoded conclusively

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so that it would yield a uniform message. Heidegger’s language keeps hovering between connotations of comfort, combat, and conspiracy. This textual situation notwithstanding, one can extrapolate a thematic strand from Heidegger’s essay as exemplary of the kind of political idolatry that Tillich, Cassirer, and Picard tried to expose and obviate in their respective works. In this respect, Heidegger’s Letter emerges as a “demonic” document, in Tillich’s sense of the term: “These demonic realities contain the same tension everywhere . . . an overarching form that unites a form-giving and a form-destroying element, which amounts to . . . a form-creating obstruction to form [formschaffende Formwidrigkeit]. . . . This tension between the creation and the destruction of form sets it apart from the satanic, which is construed as destruction without creation.”16 For Tillich, the demonic cannot be conceived as pure evil, since it may approach the satanic but can never reach it. The satanic stands for sheer destruction or absolute negation, but as such it does not exist. “This is because the satanic does not have existence the way the demonic does. In order to have existence it would have to be susceptible to form [Gestalt], that is, it would have to carry in itself a remainder of creation.”17 The demonic, on the other hand, maintains a hybrid nature, it is creatively destructive, and, above all, it is dialectical.18 In Heidegger’s text, this dialectical feature assumes a special twist. Mindful of the dire circumstances of his readers during the “rubble years” (Trümmerjahre)19 of the immediate postwar period, Heidegger opts for austere dignity as his rhetorical alternative to guilt or shame, in the first round of discussion over “coping with the past.” Here Heidegger is at pains to keep his writing style from sliding into an idiom of either pride or humiliation. Walking such a thin line, stylistically, Heidegger surrounds the Würde motif with an array of strategic ambiguities, setting off a dialectic according to which certain qualities keep collapsing into their opposites: The human being is not the lord of beings. The human being is the shepherd of Being. Human beings lose nothing in this “less”; rather, they gain in that they attain the truth of Being. They gain the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth. The call comes as the throw from which the thrownness of Da-sein derives. In his essential unfolding within the history of Being, the human being is the being whose being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being. The human being is the neighbor of Being. (W 342/P 260–61)20

Within a few sentences, Heidegger establishes a network of surprising connections by swiftly combining what would appear to be mutually exclusive.

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To begin with, dignity is linked to poverty. Regardless whether one detects some religious overtones here (e.g., poverty as a Christian virtue epitomized by St. Francis), this relation does not yet involve polar opposites. Poverty may make it hard to maintain dignity; or, if ex hypothesi wealth increases the chances of moral corruption, the opposite may be the case. At any rate, these two attributes are generally compatible. The actual twist occurs, when Heidegger turns poverty into gain, in the image of the shepherd who becomes dignified through the calling of Being (W 331). Spiritual wealth compensates for material poverty and so yields a state of dignity, as man dwells in the nearness of Being. Notice that, in the real-life poverty of 1946, the theme of dwelling would have taken on a very tangible meaning for Heidegger’s audience. Since accommodations were sparse and shelter was not a matter of course in several parts of Germany at the time, the concept of neighbor (Nachbar) gained new importance and perhaps even a ring of local solidarity.21 Analogously to the dialectic between poverty and wealth, Heidegger mollifies the contrast between activity and passivity, which gets condensed into the befuddling phrase “accomplishment” of “letting” (see next block quote). Humans achieve letting themselves be claimed by Being, and they do so in thinking. Thinking is thus presented as a unique kind of action, the efficacy of which defies the usual distinction between active and passive mode: Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time the highest because it concerns the relation of Being to humans. But all working or effecting [Wirken] lies in Being and is directed toward beings. Thinking, in contrast, lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplishes this letting. (W 313/P 239)

Embedded in this passage we find yet another merger of opposites in Heidegger’s characterization of “the act of thinking” as “the simplest and at the same time the highest.” Perhaps most pertinent to the immediate postwar situation in the aftermath of political catastrophe, Heidegger appears to turn tragedy into triumph, when he construes “failure” (Scheitern) as success—even as a “gift” (Geschenk). The importance of this equivocation, in particular, is indicated by the fact that Heidegger resorts to more violent and more dramatic language than he does in the other instances of dialectical pairs, which we examined thus far. However, as long as philosophy merely busies itself with continually obstructing the possibility of admittance into the matter for thinking, i.e., into the truth of Being, it stands safely beyond the danger of shattering against the hardness

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of that matter. Thus to “philosophize” about being shattered is separated by a chasm from a thinking that is shattered. If such thinking were to go fortunately for someone, no misfortune would befall him. He would receive the only gift that can come to thinking from Being. (W 343/P 261)

To be sure, not all of the foregoing strategic ambiguities are equally mysterious. In keeping with our interpretation of Heidegger’s poverty-wealth relation in terms of material poverty and spiritual wealth, for example, some of these dialectical dichotomies are not necessarily paradoxical. Whenever the terms of the relation under consideration allow for a further distinction, the initial tension can be resolved. What renders the Letter on Humanism one of Heidegger’s most conflicted writings, though, is the fact that the most central ambiguity he engages does not allow for any such solution, namely the relation between the human and the inhuman(e). What renders the Letter such a provocative piece is Heidegger’s way of turning humanity against itself or, more precisely, of turning humanity against humans. In this case, no variation or subdivision on either side of the relation is available. To be clear, we must not hastily assume that being human is a monolithic quality. For if we did, Heidegger would rightly point out that we were making a metaphysical commitment that he does not motivate in his text. This much can be granted, irrespective of the more general question as to whether Heidegger manages to deliver an alternate notion of humanism that is no longer metaphysical at all, which he puts forth as his declared goal in several passages of the Humanismusbrief. The need for “overcoming humanistic metaphysics” is stated most directly as follows: Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. Every determination of the essence of the human being that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical. The result is that what is peculiar to all metaphysics, specifically with respect to the way the essence of the human being is determined, is that it is “humanistic.” Accordingly, every humanism remains metaphysical. (W 321/P 245)

This statement appears strikingly circular. Heidegger begins with the claim that every humanism is either based on some metaphysics or becomes the foundation of one. In the middle of the argument, he relies on a non sequitur when he infers from the purported fact that what is peculiar about all metaphysics is its being “humanistic,” the obverse claim that any humanism is metaphysical. Logically, this does not follow. Even if it were true that all metaphysics is “humanistic,” it is still possible that one or several kinds of humanism are not metaphysical—unless,

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of course, we already assume that they all are, as Heidegger seems to do with his first sentence in the above quote. In this case, however, the argument simply turns back to its initial claim and thus proves circular. By itself this observation does not immediately discredit Heidegger’s overall agenda. That is to say, the concern that Heidegger’s alternative form of “humanism”—if we still want to keep this term22—is inhuman(e), cannot be dealt with merely in light of the fact that Heidegger has not sketched a consistent route for overcoming metaphysical humanism thus far. At least, there is no obvious link between being metaphysical and being inhuman, and it is yet another question under what circumstances the label “inhuman” assumes the meaning “inhumane.” These intricacies are often left unaddressed by prominent commentators on the Humanismusbrief, although the complications do not stop there.23 While Heidegger’s commentary about old versus new understandings of humanism does not claim, much less establish, that there is a necessary connection between metaphysics and inhuman(e)ness, he does hint that being human might be a matter of degree. Differently put, Heidegger implies that some forms of humanism are less human than others, insofar as they are “less essentially human”: It [= the word “humanism”] has lost it [= its meaning] through the insight that the essence of humanism is metaphysical, which now means that metaphysics not only does not pose the question concerning the truth of Being but also obstructs the question, insofar as metaphysics persists in the oblivion of Being. But the same thinking that has led us to this insight into the questionable essence of humanism has likewise compelled us to think the essence of the human being more primordially [anfänglicher]. With regard to this more essential humanitas of homo humanus there arises the possibility of restoring to the word “humanism” a historical sense [geschichtlichen Sinn] that is older than its oldest meaning chronologically reckoned. (W 345/P 262)

Here, Heidegger speaks of a “more essential humanitas,” with the potential to pull traditional metaphysical humanism out of its forgetfulness of Being. In this passage, then, metaphysics is associated with being oblivious of Being. Such forgetfulness, in turn, signals an inferior level of being human. These allusions to humanity as a stratified phenomenon strike many critics as discriminatory and have prompted the frequent charge that Heidegger’s gestures at a post-metaphysical humanism amount to no humanism at all. Instead, he seems to promote a philosophical division of humanity into A- and B-class citizens, all the while usurping the name of a humanist cause. At this point, the textual situation in Heidegger’s Letter becomes

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increasingly demonic. Upon scrutiny, Heidegger does not subscribe to ethnic discrimination as rooted in racist biology. Instead, the last sentence of the preceding block quote intimates that the qualitative distinction between “essential” humanity and “forgetful” humanity is in some sense “historical” (geschichtlich). Yet, getting to the precise meaning that Heidegger intends with this expression requires us to step back for a moment. In our previous discussion in Chapter 2, we already noted that Schelling’s philosophy of revelation posits a basic distinction between two senses of history, for which the German language furnishes different terms: Geschichte versus Historie. Recall that, in the context of how God participates in His creation, Schelling explicates Geschichte as an inherently communicative process, which bears witness to the ongoing exchange between the divine and the human. Historie, by contrast, refers to a formal, linear sequence of historical happenings that can be registered in calendric time. Heidegger eschews such overtly theistic language, but in the second volume of his Nietzsche lectures we find a comparable distinction, which vests Geschichte with revelatory qualities as opposed to the “journalistic” record-keeping associated with Historie. History [Geschichte] as Being—indeed, as coming from the essence of Being itself—remains unthought. . . . Meanwhile, following the claims and demands of the age, the effective completion of academic history [Historie] has advanced from being a scientific discipline to journalism. If it is understood correctly, and not in a disparaging way, “journalism” identifies the metaphysical securing and establishment of the everydayness of our dawning age, . . . . At the same time, it reflects the self-completing objectification of beings as a whole. (NII 350/N4 241) Thinking in terms of the history of Being [Das seinsgeschichtliche Denken] lets Being arrive in the essential space of man. Because the essential domain is an abode with which Being as such provides itself, thinking in terms of the history of Being lets Being occur essentially as Being itself. (NII 353/N4 243)

Certainly, Heidegger’s diction is difficult to decode, but the general tenor is relatively clear. Geschichte holds the key to Being, and in the first line of the quotation at hand Heidegger nearly identifies the two. History in the sense of Geschichte is not an archive of past events. Rather, the history-of-Being (Seinsgeschichte) designates a form of essential communication between Being and humanity, a form of revelation. In this regard, the crucial phrase in the aforementioned passage consists in Heidegger reference to “an abode with which Being as such provides itself.” Stylistically, this is vintage Heidegger,

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because he chooses his words carefully to convey a supple sense of revelation, which transcends the usual active/passive distinction as routinely applied to human action. At the same time, Heidegger places the accent on Being and not on humanity. That is, even though Being does not “do” things in human fashion, throughout the process of revelation the initiative lies with Being. Differently put, for Heidegger revelation refers to the event of Being opening itself up for communication with humanity, where “communication” means that a new spiritual vision becomes available to humanity, if humans are ready to receive it. In being ready to receive, humanity is not altogether passive (just like Being is not straightforwardly active) in this communicative transaction. Yet humans are more on the receiving end, while Being remains the primordial source for spiritual initiation, that is, for the “im-parting” (Mit-teilung) of novel spiritual vision (cf. NI 348). These observations point back to our earlier discussion of Schelling’s network model vis-à-vis Heidegger’s punctuation model for revelation. In keeping with the diction of “historical abode” characteristic of the Letter on Humanism, we can restate the distinction between these two basic approaches to revelation as mapped onto two different conceptions of communicative space, in which holy meanings can travel from Being to humanity. One approach understands revelation in terms of intra-historical sharing, whereas the other approach construes revelation as supra-historical im-parting. According to the former conception, holy meanings become accessible through concrete, inner-worldly interaction among human agents (which Max Scheler highlighted under the rubric of cult and liturgy). According to the latter conception, holy meanings emanate from a transcendent source, whose message burns like lightening from above into the fabric of history. Such message is not delivered like a regular human command in the form “Do X!,” “Praise Y!,” or “Value Z!” Rather, what is conveyed or im-parted is a new spiritual vision, which under favorable conditions can grow into a new historical orientation for humanity. But what kind of orientation is this, and how does it generate its guiding effect? This question leads into the heart of Heidegger’s Letter, particularly those segments where he expounds a complex notion of linguistic destiny, even though Heidegger himself does not use this expression. The vital element in this kind of destiny is the task of the poet as the transmitter of holiness. In this regard, the Letter is similar to “Why Poets?” but in the case of Heidegger’s rethinking of humanitas his rhetorical maneuvers will prove even more complex.

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Communicative space and linguistic destiny Heidegger realizes from the first that language is the key to understanding the human condition (W 323). In making his case for a post-metaphysical, “more essential,” and “more historical” humanism, Heidegger is also aware of the immediate danger of falling into a rhetoric of the inhuman. As noted earlier, the special difficulty in this context springs from the fact that the human/inhuman relation does not easily lend itself to the dialectical twists we saw Heidegger generate in his treatment of the relations of wealth and poverty, activity and passivity, even success and failure. Each of these conceptual couplets offered sufficient leeway for making a more or less plausible case as to how one could be poor in one regard, but rich in another, and so on. Yet, for humanity and its opposite no such dialectic is readily available, which would seem to drastically restrict the quest for alternative humanisms. Heidegger quickly lays his finger on this pivotal issue: But if the human being is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks the human being must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. . . . But in the claim upon human beings, in the attempt to make humans ready for this claim, is there not implied a concern about human beings? . . . Thus humanitas really does remain the concern of such thinking. For this is humanism: meditating and caring [Sinnen und Sorgen] that human beings be human and not inhumane, “inhuman,” that is, outside their essence. But in what does the humanity of the human being consist? It lies in his essence. (W 319/P 243–4)

This passage is absolutely crucial for appreciating the complexity of Heidegger’s hook at work in the Humanismusbrief. Here we find one of the few clear indications of the actual task a new kind of humanism has to meet, irrespective of whether we label it “metaphysical” or “post-metaphysical.” The task is to determine a mode of human communication that can give meaning to people’s lives, beyond the confines of any preconceived opposition between public versus private existence. The main challenge is to articulate a novel understanding of communicative spatiality, as Heidegger intimates at the very beginning of the Letter in his famous line about “language as the house of being.” This line is followed by a statement about the relation between revelation or “revealed-ness” (Offenbarkeit in Heidegger’s wording) and preservation in language: “Language

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is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the revealed-ness of Being insofar as they bring this revealed-ness to language and preserve it in language through their saying” (W 313/P 239).24 This passage ought to be read together with another one, in which Heidegger explains that such preservation of the revealed-ness of Being in language is exclusive, insofar as each language community has to receive and preserve the “claim” of Being in their own language, not in foreign languages.25 Thus, Heidegger stakes the following claim: “‘German’ is not spoken to the world so that the world might recover through the German essence; rather, it is spoken to the Germans so that from a destinal belongingness to other peoples they might become world-historical along with them (see remarks on Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance” [“Andenken”] . . .). The homeland of this historical dwelling is nearness to Being” (W 338). Proffered right after the Nazi nightmare, the very idea that the world might “recover” [or “convalesce”; genesen] with the help of “the German essence” would seem absurd. It is easy to imagine an outraged reader who would wish to reply that, if anything, the world has to recover from, not through, the German essence. Of course, Heidegger, too, immediately negates the suggestion that the world should take its bearings from the German essence on the course to recovery. However, the fact that he puts this idea on the table at all, by way of disclaimer, is already provocative. After mentioning and then promptly disavowing this absurd proposal, Heidegger’s actual recommendation is still ominous, because he seems to propose an insular strategy. That is, in order to recuperate from the recent political catastrophe Germans ought to focus on their own cultural heritage, especially on poetic works in their mother tongue, for which Heidegger recommends Hölderlin’s writings, above all. The preceding pronouncement in the last quote remains elusive though, because the exclusivist statement “‘German’ is spoken to the Germans” is accompanied by remarks that sound nearly cosmopolitan, in terms of Germany’s “destinal belongingness to other peoples.” At this point Heidegger’s rhetoric becomes most delicate, since the present reference to such “belongingness” is further specified in terms of equal world-historical importance rather than in terms of a cosmopolitan ethos that would favor the sharing and mixing of cultural goods from different traditions. In other words, Heidegger’s hint at Germany’s “destinal belongingness to other peoples” does not by itself show that he is sympathetic to cultural mingling among different nations. More likely, in 1946, his statement can be read as an uneasy reminder to his audience of initiatives like the Morgenthau Plan, which

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(though already dismissed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944) remained a scare notion in the German political imaginary. Henry Morgenthau, the US Secretary of the Treasury at the time, had proposed to reduce postwar Germany to an agrarian state cut off from advanced industry and technological innovation. Even after his plan was rejected, he confirmed his leaning toward “harsh peace” with a book published under the unequivocal title Germany is Our Problem (1945). To be sure, positing an associative link between lingering worries over initiatives like Morgenthau’s, on the one hand, and Heidegger’s remark about Germany “becoming world-historical” again, on the other hand, remains somewhat speculative. The concomitant claim about Heidegger’s persistent reservation toward cultural syncretism, however, is not. This can be gleaned from Heidegger’s select references to Hölderlin’s works, which he recommends to the readers of his Letter. In the immediate context of the exclusivist claim that “‘German’ is spoken to the Germans,” Heidegger directs his audience to two of Hölderlin’s works, in particular, the elegy “Homecoming” (Heimkunft) and the poem “Remembrance” (Andenken). If we follow Heidegger’s lead and turn to these works via his 1943 commentary on each, we find that they contain formulations that are just as exclusivist with respect to the cultural “German essence” as the previous quotation from the Humanismusbrief. In Heidegger’s interpretation of “Homecoming,” we read: “The elegy ‘Homecoming’ is not a poem (Gedicht) about homecoming. Instead this elegy as the poetic work (Dichtung), which it is, constitutes homecoming itself. Such homecoming is still taking place, as long as the elegy’s word resounds like a bell in the language of the Germans.”26 Five pages later, Heidegger concludes: “This homecoming, though, is the future of the Germans’ historical essence.”27 Read together with the following lines from his interpretation of “Remembrance,” Heidegger’s language-based cultural exclusivism becomes even more apparent: The poetic work of the poets is, then, the founding of a staying. The essence of such staying comes forth as remembrance in its origin. . . . This staying prepares the historical abode where the human-ness of the Germans [das Menschentum der Deutschen] still has to learn to feel at home; so that, when the time is right, it will be able to remain for a while in the span of a balanced fate.28

This last formulation anticipates Heidegger’s historical-destinal diction in the Letter on Humanism, with a distinctly insular emphasis on German essence and its “fate.” It is with these statements in mind that we can now proceed to examine more closely how the rhetorical figure of the German poet gets modulated in

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Heidegger’s Letter. This will also provide an opportunity to clarify the meaning of two related motifs in Heidegger’s text, which we already mentioned in passing: “guardianship” (W 313/P 239) and “exist[ing] in the nameless” (W 319/P 243). As we shall see in the next section, Heidegger encourages his fellow Germans to properly dwell in their language and thus maintain proximity to Being, by “guarding” Hölderlin’s poetry as their cultural treasure. Due to the subtle movements of Heidegger’s hook, neither the communicative space in which such guarding is supposed to take place nor the quintessential persona of the German poet (as opposed to Hölderlin’s mere biographical self) can easily be named.29 It remains to be seen to what an extent a genuine appreciation of the full revelatory power of Hölderlin’s poetry will require Heidegger’s readers to learn how to “exist in the nameless.”

Three modulations of the German poet Elevated to iconic status as the quintessential German poet, Hölderlin’s poetic voice is featured as the gateway to Being, which is reserved for native speakers of German and ipso facto for members of Germany construed as a culture nation rather than a geopolitical territory.30 That is to say, the body of German poetry exemplified by Hölderlin’s work becomes the communal surface on which the “guardians” of the German language may gather—a site from which they can emerge with a renewed sense of austere dignity. In this setting, Hölderlin is assigned the double role of a transcendent poetic-prophetic authority and of a concrete cultural exemplar.31 To negotiate the resulting tension between the supra-historical and the intra-historical aspects of prophetic poetry, the three components constitutive of the figure of the German poet get modulated so that the rhetorical emphasis travels from “the” to “German” onto “poet.” To avoid unnecessary confusion in analyzing these modulations, I will italicize the phrase “the German poet” and then capitalize the component on which Heidegger places the rhetorical accent in each case. This is meant to trim away excessive circumlocution in tracking these shifts and to make it easier for the reader to follow along. According to the first modulation, THE German poet stands for Being, an anonymous authority, a mere “the” that is not even specifiable as anything like “the poet,” “the king,” or “the God.” All of these qualifiers are already too restrictive. This paradoxical enunciation of a definite article without an

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accompanying noun is Heidegger’s Being as such, which lacks any distinct meaning. It is a grammatical promise that is not kept. According to syntactical convention, a definite article incites a certain expectation of concretization, which is not met in this case. Being as the “The . . .” is a rhetorical gesture of infinite postponement, which never semantically fills in what has syntactically been delayed. It is a grammatical sleight of hand that turns the gift of language into a sparkling but empty shell. What is crucial to notice about such featuring of THE German poet is that the figure of the poet loses its personal (and national) identity, as it morphs into an indistinct transcendent source of revelation, from which holy meaning may emanate. In this capacity, THE German poet is no longer a historical individual that could be identified through a proper name or a family name (be it Hölderlin or any other). In keeping with our exposition in previous chapters of Heidegger’s staunch impersonalism with respect to revelation, Being as the dispenser of holy signification is nameless. Importantly, such namelessness does not turn Heidegger’s invocation of THE German poet into a completely vacuous gesture, since this invocation still generates a rhetorical effect by stimulating certain expectations on the part of the audience. Even if the transcendent placeholder “The . . .” cannot be filled with concrete historical meaning, it can still engender a tantalizing curiosity in the reader of Heidegger’s Letter. Rhetorically speaking, a grammatical promise which cannot be kept is still a promise. As long as “The . . .” is presented as one aspect of the threefold amalgam THE German poet, the mere mentioning of the other two aspects may well suffice to create a reading experience animated by the expectation, or even hope, that Being qua “The . . .” is more than a bland index of the thoroughly ineffable. Within the text of the Humanismusbrief, this first modulation is noticeable in all those passages where Heidegger emphasizes the supra-historical dignity of Being over the intra-historical significance of human beings and their cultural achievements: What still today remains to be said could perhaps become an impetus for guiding the essence of the human being to the point where it thoughtfully attends to that dimension of the truth of Being that pervades it. But even this could take place only to the honor of Being and for the benefit of Da-sein, which the human being ek-sistingly sustains; not, however, for the sake of the human being, so that civilization and culture through human doings might be vindicated. (W 329/P 251)32

Here Heidegger underscores that, ultimately, humans’ “being-there” or Da-sein unfolds for the sake of Being, and not for the sake of themselves. By itself, this

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may not sound objectionable to the religious sensibilities of many readers, including outspoken theists. We already acknowledged several times throughout this study that Heidegger remained reluctant to directly identify Being with God. Still, “Being” as his term of choice for ultimate reality retained divine qualities broadly conceived, insofar as Being was illuminated as the transcendent source from which holy meanings enter into human history and thus spell different “destinies” for different peoples. If Being, then, is divine in this elastic sense, it seems more pious than impious to say that humans exist not for themselves but for the sake of answering to some divine calling, which has a higher origin than their this-worldly concerns. At the same time, the idea that Being speaks to different peoples via prophetic poetry in qualitatively different ways, by assigning separate fates to them, raises the specter of cultural nationalism. This brings us to the next modulation on my list of three. According to the second modulation, the GERMAN poet designates a particular cultural essence which, we saw, Heidegger explicates as the “destinal belonging” of Germany as a culture nation. Here, Heidegger’s linguistic exclusivism looms large, culminating in the previously cited dictum that “‘German’ is spoken to the Germans” which, per Heidegger’s own recommendation, we considered in conjunction with like-minded passages from his 1943 commentaries on “Homecoming” and “Remembrance.” To this we might add that the way a national accent is placed on the GERMAN poet shows an important relation to our analysis of “Why Poets?” in the preceding chapter. There we observed how Heidegger attenuated the historical embeddedness of sagas through an equivocation of “saga” (Sage) and “saying” (Sagen). On the one hand, actual sagas like the Nibelungensage belong to a historical plane of centuries-long development across different countries and language communities. On the other hand, Heidegger transposes such sagas onto the supra-historical plane of a “pure” saying, which a single language community like Heidegger’s Germans may receive from Being, at the exclusion of other languages. This move from concrete historical transmission of narrative content to the higher level of pure language allowed Heidegger to reconstrue saga in terms of a poetic revelation uniquely coded for a specific culture nation. Similar to the de-historicizing of saga in “Why Poets?” Heidegger’s Letter invokes Hölderlin as the GERMAN poet and so turns a historically grown poetic work into a culture-national treasure, or sanctuary, which is not meant to be shared with linguistic outsiders. If this were the end of it, one would have a good case for dismissing the Humanismusbrief as a document of thinly veiled

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cultural nationalism, with all its discriminatory overtones. Yet, Heidegger adds one more wrinkle to the story. According to the third modulation, Heidegger’s casting of the german POET goes to off-set the cultural nationalism we just diagnosed for the second modulation, at least to some degree. Terminologically, the third modulation is arguably the hardest to detect in the text of Heidegger’s Letter. Yet if we take our bearings once again from comparing the Letter to the contemporaneous essay “Why Poets?,” we receive an important clue. In this sense, Heidegger’s equivocation of saga and saying sheds light not only on the second modulation of the GERMAN poet, as explained earlier, it can also clarify the third modulation of the German POET. In fact, shifting the accent back from saga onto saying in “Why Poets?” is equivalent to shifting the emphasis from the GERMAN poet to the German POET, in the Letter on Humanism. Terminologically and rhetorically, the Humanismusbrief is more subtle though, because here Heidegger does not operate with two distinct terms like “saga” and “saying” (never mind that, in German, the difference between Sage and Sagen is already quite elusive). Instead, he adheres to one expression, namely “being there” (Dasein), which he stretches in different directions, as he moves from the second to the third modulation. At a critical juncture in the Letter, we saw how Heidegger hinted at two different senses of human existence: the higher meaning of human Dasein understood as being there for the sake of Being and the lower meaning of human Dasein interpreted as being there for the sake of advancing human civilization within the course of history (W 329/P 251). This distinction tends to subordinate humanity’s intra-historical existence to the supra-historical dignity of Being. At the same time, this account leaves higher Dasein strangely suspended between Being as transcendent and lower Dasein as immanent to history. Viewed from this interpretive angle, higher Da-sein appears to occupy the interstice (hence the hyphen) between transcendence and immanence. Not only do these remarks by Heidegger split up human existence by driving a wedge in between interstitial Da-sein, on the one hand, and Dasein within history, on the other hand. They also leave the reader wondering what kind of dependence relation, if any, obtains between Being and interstitial Da-sein with respect to revelation, that is, the release of holy meanings into history. Rhetorically, we noted, the overall significance of human existence remained subordinated to the “dignity of Being,” but philosophically this appeared to be a loose end, given the alternate characterizations of interstitial Da-sein versus immanent Dasein.

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In another section of the Letter, Heidegger touches on this issue, but here the accent is placed differently: The human being occurs essentially [west] in such a way that he is the “there” [das “Da”], that is, the clearing of Being. The “being” of the Da, and only it, has the fundamental character of ek-sistence, that is, of an ecstatic inherence in the truth of Being. The ecstatic essence of the human being consists in ek-sistence, which is different from the metaphysically conceived existentia. (W 325/P 248)

The first sentence identifies the essence of human being with the clearing of Being (not with Being itself). Moreover, Heidegger’s present formulation considerably softens the contrast between interstitial Da-sein and historyimmanent Dasein, which brings us back to the difference between the second modulation of the GERMAN poet and the third modulation of the German POET. In those statements where Heidegger separates interstitial Da-sein from history-immanent Dasein, he leans toward the second modulation. In fact, the poetic-prophetic work of the GERMAN poet reaches its audience from within the interstice between Being and history. Accordingly, revelation travels directly from Being through the poetry of an elect German poet, whose work becomes Being’s “conductor” for addressing a particular cultural community of language users, at the exclusion of other cultural traditions and languages. Conversely, in those statements where Heidegger narrows the interstitial gap between Being and history, the origin as well as the transmission of poetic ideas emerges as a history-immanent phenomenon that traverses different languages and cultures, witnessed by the long-term poetic evolution of the Nibelungen Saga or the variegated history of how the Grimm Brothers’ tales were received over time. Accordingly, the third modulation of the German POET points away from cultural nationalism and toward historically embedded forms of sharing cultural goods, including poetic expressions of the holy. The latter outlook does not necessarily amount to an endorsement of multiculturalism or anything like a “poetic Esperanto,” but it clearly gainsays the exclusivist tendency of a nationalist language cult, which echoes through large portions of Heidegger’s Letter.

Trust in “vital anecdotes” Taking stock of the strategic ambiguities effected by Heidegger’s treatment of dialectical pairs (like active/passive; poor/wealthy; success/failure; and especially human/inhuman) next to his threefold modulation of the German

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poet, the text of the Humanismusbrief seems to leave us with an uneasy mix of different interpretive frames for understanding the modes of communication between Being and humanity. Those readers, who believe that poetic works like Hölderlin’s are not the exclusive “fateful” possession of a single language community, may be interested to know whether the Letter on Humanism already provides some textual resources for resisting the insular rhetoric that is driving the first and second modulation of the figure of the German poet, carved out by Heidegger’s hook. Going against the grain of numerous contributions to Heidegger scholarship, which either condemn or exonerate Heidegger, I suggest that the text under consideration provides a possible remedy to its own demonic tendencies, without eliminating these tendencies altogether. A potential safeguard of this sort can be found in the anecdote of Heraclitus near the end of the Humanismusbrief. The anecdotal structure of this segment stands out, because it proves largely immune to Heidegger’s rhetorical ruses like the equivocation of Sagen and Sage in “Why Poets?” or the over-coding of human existence in terms of interstitial Da-sein versus historical Dasein, in the Letter. The resistant quality of the Heraclitus anecdote is quite remarkable, if one considers that Heidegger does not deliver this portion of his text in a neutral manner. On the contrary, he immediately engages in spurious etymology, when he prefaces the anecdote (to which we will turn momentarily) with the Heraclitus Fragment 119, which consists of only three words: ἦϑος ἀνϑρώπῳ δαίμων. The standard translation, Heidegger assures us, would render this short sentence “the character peculiar to humans is their own demon” (Seine Eigenart ist dem Menschen sein Dämon). In preparation for his alternative translation, he then interpolates a mini story about Heraclitus as related by Aristotle in De partibus animalium: The story is told of something Heraclitus said to some strangers who wanted to come visit him. Having arrived, they saw him warming himself at a stove. Surprised, they stood there in consternation—above all because he encouraged them, the astounded ones, and called to them to come in, with the words, “For here too the gods are present.” (W 355/P 269–70)

Heidegger zeroes in on the last sentence in the original Greek: εἶναι γὰρ καὶ ἐνταῦϑα ϑεοὺς, which he brings to bear on Fragment 119, now translated as: “The (familiar) abode for humans is the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)” (W 356/P 271).33 As his decisive etymological move, Heidegger, first, translates ἦϑος as “abode” rather than “character,” thereby substituting a spatial term for a psychological or attitudinal one; second, he renders the overt

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demonic connotations of δαίμων parenthetical and so effectively approximates δαίμων and ϑεός, which changes the religious overtones and intensity of the more common translation of Fragment 119. However, in drawing attention to the Heraclitus anecdote in conjunction with this fragment, I am not primarily interested in Heidegger’s etymological extravagance. At the very least, one can say that Heidegger’s (re)translation of the fragment is highly unorthodox. What strikes me as more relevant for a comprehensive assessment of the philosophical and rhetorical complexity of Heidegger’s Humanismusbrief is the difference in semiotic resilience, displayed by the anecdote in comparison with the three-word fragment. That is, despite Heidegger’s etymological onslaught, which he levels against both textual items, the anecdote about Heraclitus by the stove and his discombobulated visitors is less vulnerable to Heidegger’s conceptual slides. While it is relatively easy for him to select and highlight a concept like ethos and reinterpret it in isolation, he cannot dissociate and reshape an anecdote in the same way. This is due to the fact that, for the most part, anecdotes do not snuggly fit conceptual grids or hierarchies, nor do they have a clear plot structure like full-fledged narratives. Anecdotes resemble open scenes more than they do integrated stories. Certainly, the general notion of story does not necessarily imply structural closure. Within the genre of short stories, for example, open-ended plots may be a fairly frequent occurrence. So, confronted with a philosophical rhetoric as powerful as Heidegger’s, I am using the expressions “narrative” and “story” in a deliberately restrictive manner, to bring out a general contrast between open and closed structures of meaning formation. In keeping with my working notion of semiotic resilience, open structures show a higher degree of resistance toward rhetorical manipulation than closed ones do. For instance, the personae featured in the anecdote at hand are interwoven with its open-ended structure in such a way that they cannot directly be emulated. In this sense, “Heraclitus by the stove” does not name a person. Instead, this phrase designates a scene-like sample of a historically delimited, experiential context. In other words “Heraclitus by the stove” refers to a (small) possible world, not to a mental state or moral character trait. To be sure, in the context of the Letter on Humanism, and after Heidegger spent about forty pages modulating the different aspects combined in the rhetorical figure of the German poet, the Heraclitus anecdote could easily be read as a mini-parody of the postwar situation of occupied Germany. Viewed through this interpretive lens, the freezing Heraclitus would represent the torn culture nation of German thinkers, while the nosy visitors stand for the Allied powers and their ignorant

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“dictatorship of the public.” However, even if this reading cannot be excluded, “Heraclitus by the stove” persists as an open-ended site for meaning formation. As such, it invites different audiences to construct their own exegetical frames and produce their own morally charged concepts, at a clear distance from traditional ethical theory building. In this manner, the scene at the stove could be interpreted variously as an event of hospitality, philosophical mockery, or perhaps a certain form of cheerful paganism. Above all, one cannot directly identify with the philosopher or his visitors, since neither party has a clear profile in isolation from the material setting that binds them. Because of these features of semiotic resilience, Heidegger’s Heraclitus scene could be viewed as a vital anecdote of the sort described by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, with a nod to Nietzsche: Nietzsche said that philosophy invents modes of existence or possibilities of life. That is why a few vital anecdotes are sufficient to produce a portrait of philosophy, like the one Diogenes Laertius knew how to produce by writing the philosophers’ bedside book or golden legend—Empedocles and his volcano, Diogenes and his barrel. It will be argued that most philosophers’ lives are very bourgeois: but is not Kant’s stocking-suspender a vital anecdote appropriate to the system of Reason?34 . . . These anecdotes do not refer simply to social or even psychological types of philosopher (Empedocles the prince, Diogenes the slave) but show rather the conceptual personae who inhabit them. Possibilities of life or modes of existence can be invented only on a plane of immanence that develops the power of conceptual personae.35

The examples listed by the authors are quite comparable to Heidegger’s depiction of “Heraclitus by the stove.” None of Deleuze and Guattari’s anecdotes have a clear moral story to tell, nor do they deliver an explicit defense of the human against the inhuman. Instead, their open-ended structures invite the reader to produce new evaluative concepts, which may combine into a novel, unabashedly utopian vision of human sociality. Neither the promulgators nor the recipients of such vital anecdotes are given to the ambition to furnish a complete edifice of ethical reasoning over and above the concrete texture of historical experience. In this regard, their history-immanent approach to moral questions has a lot in common with Scheler’s and Simmel’s objections to Kant’s formalist ethics as they saw it.36 Heeding both the demonic and the vital-anecdotal elements at work in the Humanismusbrief allows for a more evenhanded assessment of the ethical stakes that underlie Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric, when he sets out to turn a more

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primordial humanitas against humanity. The declared task of this project is to outline a new paradigm of communication in the sense of “im-parting” (Mitteilen), which was prefigured in Heidegger’s Nietzsche volumes already (cf. NI 348). This new paradigm would surpass the traditional distinctions between private and public modes of human speech, in order to open new vistas for religious meaning formation. In this sense, the Letter retains its strong seductive qualities, as Heidegger keeps traversing two fundamentally different approaches to sacred language: one via concrete exchanges among historically situated language users, whose solidaric gestures give a personal shape to the holy—in a sense that Schiller, Nietzsche, Buber, and Scheler would have appreciated; the other via one-directional dispensations from a transcendent source, called Being, which assigns different historical destinies to different peoples. The former conception of sacred language remains indebted to Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, based on the central tenet that history as a communicative process is pervaded throughout by the Divine’s potential for personality. Hence, God’s personality manifests itself and grows in the course of worshipful human interaction. By contrast, the second conception of sacred language is adamant that Being as the ultimate ground of revelation must not be cast in analogy to human personality, lest we become guilty of “anthropomorphial” distortion. What remains mysterious about this second approach, however, is that Being is ascribed communicative powers in “summoning” humanity, while Heidegger insists that we must never think of it in personal terms. Throughout his long philosophical career, Heidegger will stay faithful to this impersonalism in matters of revelation. Compared to his numerous other writings, the Letter on Humanism stands out as an ingenious rhetorical balancing act, because in this text Heidegger proffers an intricate blend of two rival accounts of sacred language as essentially personal versus essentially impersonal. Heidegger’s rhetorical hook is at its most seductive, when he holds out the promise of a new vision of ultimate reality accompanied by new articulations of the holy. Within this atmosphere of promise, the Letter may well be viewed as a demonic prayer guide. As if reading Heidegger’s text could teach us a new way of communicating with the sanctifying ground of ultimate reality. Yet in the attempt to pray to Being, all we can say is: “The . . .”

CODA

Being and Time as an “Old-Fashioned” Book?

8

Freedom for Death and Prussian Resolve

In this chapter, my analysis of Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric in Being and Time draws on the work of Karl Löwith, Dolf Sternberger, and Isabel V. Hull. Specifically, the following commentary on Heidegger’s Dasein analytic is meant to show an elective affinity between his provocative conception of “freedom for death” and the archetypical figure of the Prussian military officer construed as a conceptual persona, a term I adopt from Deleuze and Guattari.1 Such a persona does not stand for a particular individual, nor does it refer to an abstract ideal. On a provisional note we can say that it marks a nodal point of different cultural trends within a society. Some of these trends are recognized, others go unnoticed while still affecting and directing people’s lives. In this sense, a conceptual persona is neither a concept nor a person. Instead, it constitutes a historically embedded, cultural referent around which people organize their expectations and ambitions, their values and virtues. As a case in point, the figure of the Prussian military officer is not itself a value. Rather, it is with respect to this figure that certain values like discipline, devotion, and self-sacrifice gain their concrete meaning within a distinct association space of social, economic, and military activities. In this sense, a conceptual persona can be seen as a stimulant for generating evaluative concepts, but not as a regulative ideal bound by the theoretical structures of a moral theory. Prompted by Karl Löwith’s critical discussion of “resolve devoid of content,” my approach scrutinizes the ways in which Heidegger’s early thought tends to convert political initiative into a cult of death, which ontologizes violence in the name of spiritual combat constitutive of human essence. Insofar as they put their finger on these unsettling tendencies operative in Heidegger’s immensely popular breakthrough work, the early observations provided by Löwith and Sternberger have lost nothing of their relevance for a critical assessment of Heidegger’s philosophical beginnings as my subsequent criticism of a recent interpretation by Iain Thomson will bring out. In his

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essay “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” first published in French translation in Les Temps Modernes in 1946,2 Löwith highlights the following statement which, in his judgment, contains the fundamental thesis of Being and Time: “Only an entity which . . . is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical ‘there’ by shattering itself against death . . . can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision for ‘its time’” (BT 437).3 In the German original, Heidegger already set this passage apart through paragraph breaks, italics, and cursive letters. For reasons that are not immediately apparent, Löwith omits the last sentence of Heidegger’s thesis statement. It translates: “Only authentic temporality, which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say, authentic historicality” (BT 437). Keeping this last sentence does not change or subvert the point Löwith wants to make, when he notes that “[f]or Heidegger, death is the nothingness that reveals the finitude of our temporal existence; or, as he put it in one of his first courses in Freiburg, death is historical ‘facticity’.”4 According to some of his earliest critics (including Cassirer and Sternberger), this equation of “fate” and “authentic historicality” underscores the fatalistic aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy. While we already touched on Cassirer’s nuanced commentary on Heidegger in the previous chapter,5 Dolf Sternberger’s interpretation calls for special attention, insofar as he points to some revealing details in Being and Time that have gone largely unnoticed. To the best of my knowledge, Sternberger has not received any sustained attention among Anglophone Heidegger scholars.6 Among German-speaking philosophers, the situation is not very different, while historians of literature or cultural theorists will still remember Sternberger as the author of the Dictionary of the Inhuman (Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen), a collection of essays originally published between 1945 and 1948 in the journal Wandlung, which appeared later in book form during the 1950s.7 What is even less known is that Sternberger authored a slim but highly instructive volume on Heidegger’s conception of death in Being and Time under the title: Der verstandene Tod: Eine Untersuchung zu Martin Heideggers Existenzialontologie (Understanding Death: An Investigation of Martin Heidegger’s Existential Ontology) (1934).8 After highlighting Heidegger’s summary statement (in BT, § 74) in much the same way as Löwith would do about ten years later, Sternberger immediately points to another formulation, which is supposed to undermine Heidegger’s account of death as the gateway to “authentic historicality.” The crucial passage

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occurs three pages earlier in Heidegger’s text, and is quoted by Sternberger in abbreviated form.9 To quote the segment under consideration in full: In this [anticipatory resoluteness], Dasein understands itself with regard to its potentiality-for-Being, and it does so in such a manner that it will go right under the eyes of Death in order thus to take over in its thrownness that entity which it is itself, and to take it over wholly. The resolute taking over of one’s factical “there,” signifies, at the same time, that the Situation is one which has been resolved upon. (BT 434) [emphasis added]

At first glance, this passage seems to contain precisely the kind of statement that generates concerns over nihilism, flagged by Löwith’s comments on “resolve devoid of content.”10 In fact, as Heidegger states in the very next sentence by way of methodological disclaimer: “In the existential analysis we cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves in any particular case” (BT 434). For Löwith, this understanding of “anticipatory resoluteness” as a “situation” that “has been resolved upon” constitutes one of the fundamental principles of Heidegger’s existential thought: “This principle—existence reduced to itself and resting on itself alone in the face of nothingness—is by no means a gratuitous invention. It corresponds, on the contrary, to the radical character of the real historical situation with which Heideggerian existentialism, understood temporally and historically, explicitly identified.”11 Before attending to Sternberger’s additional insights, one can bring out the political import of such resoluteness through an illustration proffered by Hull in her study on German military history, titled Absolute Destruction. As part of her examination of the often surprising irrationality in military procedure rampant during Germany’s colonial occupation in Southwest Africa, Hull points to the “myth” of Captain Klein as symptomatic of the ideological underpinnings of German military culture at the time. By the same token, I submit, this myth is exemplary of Heidegger’s philosophical promotion of resolve devoid of content. Since this is the sort of story that many Germans, before and after the Second World War, would associate with “facing death,” it is worth spelling out in some detail. As Hull tells the story, “Captain Klein’s patrol (26–31 October 1904) occurred under the aegis of Trotha’s October proclamation, before Berlin had rescinded it. Exercising his own initiative, Klein decided to attack a band of Herero reported to be at the last waterhole before the Omaheke Desert, a place dubbed by the soldiers ‘Orlogsende’—war’s end.”12 However, the pursuit yielded no results, and a captive Herero woman actually told Klein that the clan they were after had already died of thirst. Still, Klein continued the chase for another eighty

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kilometers into the desert, with hardly any water and many men and horses falling behind. Finally, he reached a plateau offering “an unobstructed view toward the east and the south. He saw nothing.”13 At the brink of utter exhaustion, Klein and the two remaining companions by his side somehow made it back. Yet, like many of his soldiers he died only a few weeks later in a ramshackle desert hut, for he had contracted typhoid at waterholes contaminated by animal carcasses. Despite the obvious futility of the whole endeavor, the official report by the General Staff showered Klein with praise turning him into a near mythic figure of uncompromising tenacity and valor: “The daring pursuit [Verfolgungszug] of Captain Klein, which went to the outermost limit of human capacity, put the crown on everything that German soldiers had suffered and accomplished in the war against the Herero.”14 As Hull aptly summarizes: It is hard to avoid concluding that it was the very extravagant uselessness of Klein’s action that merited such praise. For Klein had accomplished nothing, except his own suffering and death and that of many of his men. He was told at the beginning that his quarry had died, a message confirmed again and again by the bodies of people and animals he discovered along the way. . . . But Klein nonetheless exemplified the virtues necessary to hopeless endeavor: “restless energy,” boundless initiative, inordinate capacity for suffering, and blind selfsacrifice, matched only by the willingness to sacrifice others. He had gone literally and figuratively beyond “war’s end.” (Absolute Destruction, 145) [italics added]

For the purpose of examining the potentially nihilistic implications of Being and Time’s decisionism, the myth of Captain Klein shows two things: First, the official post facto glorification of Klein precludes a merely psychological interpretation in terms of personal obsession and delusion. While Klein was clearly obsessive, the public response to his demeanor indicates that reverence for “the virtues necessary to hopeless endeavor” were already deeply engrained in the military culture of his day. Otherwise, the story of his pursuit at the “limit of human capacity” could not have wielded the symbolic power that it did. Second, the Klein incident grippingly illustrates that “resolve devoid of content” does not equal inaction. Accordingly, upon reading Heidegger’s remarks on “anticipatory resoluteness,” we must not imagine a peculiar individual ready for anything but doing nothing. Rather, what makes resolve without content à la Klein so disturbing is the detachment from content (concrete goals, tangible success) in the course of an endeavor that is already in progress. So understood, Klein’s comportment (rather than his psyche or attitude) is indicative of a

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militaristic habitus where a subordinate element of action takes on a life of its own, thus eclipsing what used to be overriding motives. In the scenario under consideration, finding the missing members of the Tetjo clan trumped what was supposed to be the more important objective, namely securing certain strategic positions (e.g., near waterholes) and, more generally, winning the war against the Herero in order to buttress Germany’s colonial power in this part of Africa. Differently put, Klein’s enactment of “extravagant uselessness” gains its momentum from within a preexisting action context rife with political and moral risks. Similarly, Heidegger’s aforementioned insistence that “existential analysis . . . cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves in any particular case” (BT 434) does not cancel the fact that human decisionmaking always takes place within some social reality where certain agendas, civil or military, are already in full swing. These agendas determine the practical vectors along which meaningful actions can be carried out. In fact, Heidegger’s central notion of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) says as much. As the case of Klein tragically underscores, the aimlessness associated with “resolve devoid of content” is a matter of detachment from existing aims, not a condition of tense inactivity due to the complete lack of any agenda. Klein found himself “thrown” into a situation of military conflict with rather clear directives, when he decided to detach his action from the official purpose of the German campaign in favor of some “hopeless endeavor” carried out with a vengeance. To be sure, in Being and Time Heidegger doesn’t directly suggest to his readers that they should emulate somebody like Klein, though one might argue that his subsequent “Schlageter” speech on May 26, 1933, comes fairly close to that.15 However, delivered in terminologically involved language his conception of “authentic historicality” qua fateful action certainly provides the philosophical blueprint for this pattern of behavior, that is, for a culturally embedded habitus of useless sacrifice. With Hull’s illustration in mind, Being and Time does present a nexus that links facing death, fate, and “taking over one’s factical ‘there’,” which can plausibly be interpreted in nihilistic ways. Yet when it comes to facing death, in particular, Sternberger discerns one more wrinkle in Heidegger’s diction, as he zeroes in on the claim cited earlier to the effect that “Dasein understands itself with regard to its potentiality-for-Being, and it does so in such a manner that it will go right under the eyes of Death in order thus to take over in its thrownness that entity which it is itself, and to take it over wholly” (BT 434). In Sternberger’s reading, much turns on the phrase “right under the eyes of Death.” For one thing, Heidegger’s metaphorical wording tends to figure death as an agent-like

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entity with a vision of its own. For another thing, in “taking over itself ” Dasein comes under death’s perspective which, however, it cannot claim or adopt for itself. Death here becomes a presence or an “other,” similar to the figure of the “Skeleton Man” (Knochenmann) in Sternberger’s text16 or “Godfather Death” (Gevatter Tod) in the Grimm brothers’ story by the same title. In this tale, Death is anthropomorphized. He becomes available for conversation and even participates in human rituals like baptism. Yet the moral lesson of the story is that nobody is death’s equal and nobody can cheat death. Sternberger doesn’t refer expressis verbis to the Grimm brothers’ featuring of death, but he makes a similar point, when he comments on the preceding sentence in Heidegger’s text as follows. Notice that in this place Sternberger puts single quotes around figurative or proverbial expressions, while the double quotation marks indicate phrases he takes over from Being and Time: In this formulation, ‘Death,’ thoroughly comparable to the old Skeleton Man, occupies a position that is wholly exterior, and the gaze of his gaze-less eyes cannot be “taken over” in any way, however “radical” the attempt may be. In the ‘Memento mori’ allegory, the contingency of death gains visible appearance [sichtbare Gestalt], without becoming any more familiar or obedient at all: Rather, it resists existential interpretation and explication all the more, notwithstanding the fact that such interpretation and explication in its need for articulation is bound to make linguistic use of this contingency and even of allegory.17

Sternberger’s point is that throughout Being and Time, whenever Heidegger invokes the notion of death, the idiom of his existential ontology of Dasein occludes the allegorical character of his featuring of death. Once this allegorical character is revealed, as it is in the critical passage about “Dasein . . . go[ing] right under the eyes of Death,” it becomes clear that death is not philosophically manageable in Heideggerian fashion. Specifically, the more the allegorical aspect in Heidegger’s references to death comes to the fore, the less convincing his concomitant claim will sound, when he speaks of Dasein as “let[ting] death become powerful in itself ” (BT 436; cf. next block quote). This suggestion is precisely what Sternberger gainsays, when he insists that death cannot be incorporated into our vision and historical self-perception. The eyes of Godfather Death are not our eyes. Differently put, Sternberger wants to resist Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric whenever it intimates death as the key to clarifying our sense of historical destiny or fate. Based on Sternberger’s preceding observation about Heidegger’s tendency to downplay the allegorical character of death, the following passage would have to count

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among the most misleading ones in the second half of Being and Time, where death looms large: If Dasein, by anticipation, lets death become powerful in itself, then, as free for death, Dasein understands itself in its own superior power, the power of its finite freedom, so that in this freedom, which “is” only in its having chosen to make such a choice, it can take over the powerlessness of abandonment to its having done so, and can thus come to have a clear vision [hellsichtig werden] for the accidents of the situation that has been disclosed. (BT 436 / SZ 384)

As we did in examining the Letter on Humanism, we witness here how Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric creates dialectical swirls among opposites, including the pair of “superior power” (Übermacht) and “powerlessness” on the brink of fainting (Ohnmacht), or the contrast between having a choice and being delivered over to contingency. In this back-and-forth movement among opposing poles, disaster seems to turn into triumph, while the anticipation of death seems to spell empowerment and freedom. Following Sternberger’s lead, the most problematic aspect of this passage is that death is dialectically linked to free choice-making, on the one hand, and to uncontrollable contingency of circumstance, on the other. Due to this unresolved oscillation, it remains unclear how the anticipation of death affords humans (individually or collectively) a heightened transparency of vision or even clairvoyance (Hellsichtigkeit) with respect to their historical situation. In fact, Heidegger appears aware of this non sequitur. However, instead of correcting it, he immediately shifts gears by moving the emphasis from the notion of revelatory death toward that of fate as beingin-the-world with others. This is vintage Heidegger: He uses “fate” (Geschick, Schicksal)18 as a bridge term that allows him to go back and forth between death as a “fate” that we all have in common (simply by being mortals) and “fate” as historical destiny shared by a particular community or generation of language users, who jointly explore the meaning-sponsoring horizon of their era. Thus, in the very next sentence, right after loosely associating death with historical self-transparency, Heidegger doesn’t give the reader much time to wonder about this spurious connection, as he swiftly moves on to considerations of “fate” now understood in terms of sociohistorical belonging rather than individual mortality: But if fateful Dasein, as being-in-the-world, exists essentially in being-with others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual

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fates, any more than being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite 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 historizing of Dasein. (BT 436/SZ 384–5)

In this place, we are confronted with what I take to be one of the most central strategic ambiguities in Being and Time.19 The full extent of this ambiguity can be brought out, when we compare the above passage from § 74 with the following passage from § 47: Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time. By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it “is” at all. And indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the very being of one’s own Dasein is an issue. In dying, it is shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death. (BT 284)

This is, of course, the much-quoted passage in which Heidegger’s existentialism appears rather similar in outlook to Sartre’s subsequent writings in that both authors stress the solitary qualities of human existence, culminating in the mantra that in the end everybody dies alone. However, in Heidegger’s case, the present quotation from § 47 stands in stark contrast to the statement we found in § 74. In § 47, Heidegger presents death unmistakably as an individual phenomenon. While there are other passages in his text, where the unusual noun Jemeinigkeit creates additional complications, in the passage at hand there is no doubt that “dying” (Sterben) is described as something each of us has to face alone: “By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it ‘is’ at all” (Der Tod ist, sofern er “ist,” wesensmäßig je der meine). The possessive pronoun at the end of the sentence leaves each reader no choice but to think of death in terms of “my” mortality. With this formulation in mind, Heidegger’s subsequent formulations in § 74 about Dasein “anticipating” and “becoming free” for death would then lead the reader to believe that “death” still refers to individual mortality. If so, the accompanying remarks about “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) and the pleonastic hint at “having chosen to make such a choice” (Gewählthaben der Wahl) put the reader at a high risk to associate “freedom for death” with something like Captain Klein’s “virtues necessary for hopeless endeavor” (Hull). In this sense, Heidegger’s text is strongly suggestive of celebrating nihilistic performances guided by the dangerously solipsistic motto: sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake! As we saw with Klein, nihilistic action is not completely without content.

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Instead it becomes fanatical, insofar as it isolates a subservient element in the course of action (like finding a few more Herero warriors) and elevating it not only above the original purpose (strengthening Germany’s colonial power) but above everything, including one’s own life and the lives of one’s companions. But then, after these gestures at nihilism, the continuation of § 74 points in a different direction, when Heidegger engages a theme we previously discerned in the Origin essay, in “Why Poets?,” and in the Letter on Humanism, namely the idea of a people’s world-historical mission as the “historizing of the community, of a people” (das Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes), which is “already guided in advance” (im vorhinein schon geleitet) as he puts it here. Using the bridge term of “fate” thus allows Heidegger’s philosophical rhetoric to keep sliding between nihilistic gestures, which link the significance of death to spectacles of self-referential sacrifice, and alternate gestures that link the significance of death to epochal belonging. Death in the former sense cannot be shared (§ 47), whereas death in the latter sense can (§ 74). Of course, having examined some of Heidegger’s most influential later writings from the 1930s and 1940s, we know that Heidegger will remain ambivalent about what exactly can be shared across generations, as he keeps obfuscating the difference between the projective “saying” of Urpoesie, on the one hand, and the “sagas” transmitted in actually spoken or written language traditions, on the other hand.20 These important difficulties notwithstanding, we can say that § 74 in Being and Time relates death to modes of social interaction framed by historical destiny, whereas § 47 relates death to modes of solipsistic action framed by individual mortality.

Critique of Iain Thomson The preceding criticism with its focus on Heidegger’s mingling of two fundamentally incompatible conceptions of death is contrary to Iain Thomson’s interpretation in his recent essay “Death and Demise in Being and Time.” In this essay, Thomson is at pains to distinguish his account from Carol J. White’s and John Haugeland’s, respectively, but his own alternative proves problematic.21 Thomson presents his central thesis as follows: Authenticity, as anticipatory resoluteness, names a double movement in which the world lost in anticipating or running out into death is regained in resolve, a (literally) revolutionary movement by which we are involuntarily turned away from the world and then voluntarily turn back to it, in which the grip of the

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world upon us is broken in order that we may thereby gain (or regain) our grip on this world. [emphasis added]22

The present notion of “double movement” serves a conciliatory purpose. As Thomson points out at the beginning of his discussion, his ambition is to chart a way beyond the exegetical deadlock between two camps among Heidegger commentators. On the one hand, there are those who propose to take Heidegger’s reference to “death” literally, namely in terms of humans’ physiological demise, that is, the termination of their biological life, which entails the termination of their conscious existence qua lived experience as well. On the other hand, there are those who interpret Heidegger’s speaking of “death” metaphorically such that the end of one’s life refers to complete loss of meaning or “the global collapse of significance” rather than to the cessation of biological or cognitive functioning.23 While Thomson professes that his own account remains closer to the second camp, he doesn’t want to reduce Heidegger’s conception of death to something either plainly literal or altogether metaphorical; especially so, since a merely metaphorical reading routinely prompts the familiar criticism that using the expression “death” (when he could have just said “total loss of meaning”) makes for an unwarranted stretch of language, a misleading dramatization on Heidegger’s part. As a third way out, Thomson introduces his alternative as a balancing act of sorts, which is meant to keep the commonsense notion of death as “demise” (loss of life) and the philosophically intricate notion of death as world collapse (total loss of meaning) both in play. Only then may we “transcend these longstanding hermeneutic controversies and begin to grasp the full existential-ontological significance of ‘death’ in Being and Time.”24 In making this case, Thomson grants that we cannot literally experience our own death all the way. For such a phenomenology of death would have to posit an afterlife stance, so that we could report on our own demise from beyond the grave, as it were.25 To be sure, believers and theologians are free to speculate about an afterlife as a “metaphysical possibility” (to borrow William Alston’s phrase),26 but for a secular phenomenologist like Heidegger, as Thomson sees him, such speculation is philosophically out of bounds.27 Given my general emphasis on Heidegger’s pervasive but understated debt to the late Schelling’s religious thought, I find Thomson’s featuring of Heidegger not only as secular but as “thoroughly secular” less than compelling.28 In this regard, Thomson’s juxtaposition of Heidegger and Kierkegaard provides the initial clue for my overarching criticism of Thomson’s interpretation of “death” in Being and Time.

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To begin with, Thomson acknowledges that some of Heidegger’s select references to the Christian mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) signal an affinity between Heidegger’s understanding of death and “the kind of ‘dying with Christ’ or ‘dying to the world’ familiar to Pauline Christianity, a spiritual passage through despair that Kierkegaard describes philosophically in The Sickness Unto Death.”29 As Thomson elaborates in a crucial passage: There are significant differences between Kierkegaard’s profoundly religious and Heidegger’s thoroughly secularized versions of conversion. Grasped in their broad outlines, however, there can be no mistaking the momentous influence on Being and Time of Kierkegaard’s view that confronting the despair intrinsic to the structure of the self can allow us to pass through a kind of salvific death and rebirth to the public world. [emphasis added]30

For Thomson’s account, I submit, everything turns on the personal index of “confronting the despair intrinsic to the structure of the self.” This phrase bespeaks the actual stakes of what he earlier intimated as the “full existentialontological significance of ‘death’ in Being and Time.”31 By the same token, Thomson’s speaking of a passage through salvific death and being reborn to the public world harks back to his central thesis that Heidegger’s phenomenological account of existential death is best captured as a double movement. Unfortunately, Thomson keeps obscuring the personal aspect as to when and how we confront existential despair in Heidegger’s Kierkegaard-inspired sense. This is the Achilles’s heel of his account, which can be shown if we attend to Thomson’s way of covertly reinserting historically and culturally coded ontic elements back into a presumably ahistorical ontological structure of the self. In Heideggerian terminology, Thomson intimates these ontic elements in terms of Dasein’s facticity and thrownness, that is, the “fact that each Dasein is, and has to be, as ‘thrown’ into a world and so already possessing a variety of ontic talents, cares, and predispositions.”32 These cares and concerns vary among different generations as they do among different cultural environments, and so one can speak of these ontic elements as historically as well as culturally coded. By itself this observation is not controversial, for it merely notes that human socialization and maturation, that is, our developing habits, interests, and value scales are context-sensitive. The ontological quality of the human self, in turn, refers to a transhistorical, transcultural, structural feature, namely a “fundamental lack of fit” between our general mode of existence and the particular projects and techniques through which we seek to find meaning in our respective lifeworld. In Thomson’s formulation:

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Heidegger’s insistence on the “uncanniness” or “not-being-at-home” in the world seems to be his way of secularizing—and so preserving the core phenomenological insight contained in—the Christian idea that we are in but not of the world. Heidegger’s basic idea here is that there can be no seamless fit between Dasein’s existing and the projects that allow us to make sense of our existing by giving content to our worlds, and thus no one right answer to the question of what we should do with our lives. Our sense of uncanniness or notbeing-at-home in the world derives from and testifies to this anxiety-provoking lack of fit between Dasein and its world.33

This formulation reveals the main difficulty with Thomson’s account of the ontological misfit between “Dasein’s existing” and “the projects that allow us to make sense of our existing.” For the diagnosed structural lack of fit to retain its existentialist sting in Heidegger’s death discussion, Dasein would have to count as personal both in its bare, that is, worldless mode of being there and in its worldly, project-governed existence. However, as Schelling and later Paul Tillich and Charles Hartshorne have argued with great acumen, whether we think of God-self or human self, the personal quality inherent in selfhood cannot be had without relationality.34 This basic tenet applies to cases where we consider the relation of Creator and creation just as much as to cases where we look at the relation between humans and their respective lifeworlds. In other words, relationality is constitutive of personality all the way down. Accordingly, speaking of a “worldless self ” as personal makes no sense. Whether we try to think of a human person prior to “world entry” or after “world exit,” it does not work, because at minimum a world is a relationship-enabling environment; and without such social surroundings there is nothing that would put any personal spin on our humanity. Without a world connecting as well as differentiating people from one another, there is absolutely nothing that would make you different from me. This is why, upon scrutiny, Heidegger’s individualizing idiom of Jemeinigkeit (mineness; lit. in-each-case-mine-ness) makes sense only on an ontic level, and not on an ontological level.35 In short, there is no person-like entity that could be called an “ontological self.” Of course, I can retrospectively abstract certain structural features of human conduct from particular cases. For example, after witnessing at least two different human couples falling in love, the phenomenological observer can abstract from these concrete personal instances the general human capacity for falling in love. But this is very different from positing the pseudo-notion of a worldless person, who hovers outside of all worlds in some kind of immaterial no-space, and who

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is full of anticipation to fall in love for the first time. Not only would there be no relationality allowing for any personal contours, there would also be no thought content (like the meaning of love) to keep this bodiless and spaceless individual mentally occupied. If you have never been in love or lived in any social context that would give you at least some preliminary clues about love, then you don’t know what you are missing or what the expression “love” designates at all. The great irony of Thomson’s reading of Heidegger is that, while insisting on Heidegger’s “neutrality” regarding the religious question of an afterlife, Thomson is implicitly bound to posit a “prelife” where immaterial person-like individuals await world entry. There are two reasons why this ironic feature is not immediately apparent in Thomson’s text, though it can be revealed through close reading. For one thing, some of Thomson’s illustrations (like his example of a pet owner mourning the death of his recently deceased pet)36 exploit the notion of remembering a world now lost to us. Only by carrying the memory of personal qualities (or “ontic elements”) of Dasein’s previous existence over into the presumably empty or thoroughly amorphous interstice between worlds, which Dasein is supposed to “pass through” upon suffering spiritual death, can Thomson maintain the appearance of world-deprived personality as opposed to impersonal vacuity. For another thing, at several junctures in his essay Thomson shifts from associating “death” with the complete absence of meaning (total world collapse) to associating “death” with the uncanny recognition of the contingency of our life-guiding projects or highest value attachments such that there is “no one right answer to the question of what we should do with our lives” (cf. above-mentioned block quote). These two associations do not dovetail and, in my interpretation, they amount to two very different conceptions of death. To substantiate this objection and to thoroughly assess the textual situation in Thomson’s discussion, let us consider each of these problems in turn: the problem of capitalizing on the residual memory of a world “totally” lost (the memory problem, for short); followed by the problem of conflating claims about the total absence of meaning with claims about the contingency of our lifeguiding projects (which I will simply call the contingency problem).

The memory problem Concerning this first problem, Thomson’s recurrent references to Dasein’s total “world loss” or complete “world collapse” tend to gloss over the distinction

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between a “pre-world self ” and a “post-world self ” as well as over the question whether either variant of worldless self can be upheld. Thomson may object that this is a false contrast, since the “passage” he wishes to highlight relates to human beings with the capacity to move in and out of different lifeworlds. Having lost one world without having gained a new one yet, the mode of such Dasein would count as both post-world and pre-world. This, I argue, is imprecise, however, for it sidesteps the central problem pertaining to the notion of world entry for the very first time. Once we attend to the fact that, prior to any dwelling in the world, human existence cannot be described in personal terms, it becomes clear that the notion of an altogether worldless self is vacuous. In this regard, the notion of interstitial Dasein as being-in-between-worlds is misleading, whenever sympathetic readers of Heidegger like Thomson start their analyses of Dasein’s different modes with “world exit” rather than with “world entry.” Or to make the same point in different language: in those previously cited passages where Thomson features Heidegger as a “thoroughly secular” phenomenologist, he insists that diligent phenomenological observation must stay away from theological or broadly religious speculation, which is why claims about a possible afterlife are neither dismissed nor endorsed. From this angle, we noted, Heidegger emerges as properly neutral. The general idea is that we can only work with the experiential material to which we have direct access, and since Heidegger in Being and Time tells us over and over again that we always already find ourselves “thrown” into one world or another, it seems fair—even necessary—to skip over the question of first-time world entry and quickly move on to the issue of possible world loss. This line of argument accompanied by the claim toward phenomenological neutrality is not persuasive. Upon scrutiny, the supposedly secular idea of a post-world self would be just as mysterious or speculative as the religious notion of a soul’s afterlife, if world loss were really construed as total, that is, without experiential residue. Thomson’s secular reading of Heidegger can avoid this conclusion only by smuggling memory gained under ontic (intra-worldly) conditions back into the ontological (transworldly) structure of a totally uprooted mode of existence beyond any historical or cultural coordinates. Accordingly, there is an attenuated sense of post-world self (viz. one with residual memory) which is not vacuous, though in this case one cannot legitimately speak of “total” world collapse. To see this even more clearly, it is expedient to consider different kinds of losses a person can suffer. Compare, for example, the loss of a loved one (be it a human partner, spouse, friend, child, or a pet) to losses

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effected by betrayal. Regarding the former, we may recall Richard Swinburne’s claim about a direct correlation between the capacity for loving attachment and the capacity for mourning in the case of loss. In Swinburne’s formulation, a mother’s mourning the loss of her child can be seen as a “proper tribute” by the bereft.37 The intensity of mourning thus mirrors the intensity of love felt in the relationship that is now severed by death. The more deeply we can love someone, the more vulnerable we are to the pain of mourning. Here it is important to note that such loss usually leaves the mourning person’s value system intact. To be sure, psychologically, she will feel as if she is coming apart, but in terms of value hierarchies, her mourning confirms that the kind of love she felt for the deceased still ranks very high in her world. By contrast, loss by way of betrayal works differently. Imagine a person going through an experience similar to the one described by Adrienne Rich.38 Here the loved one didn’t die. Instead, he turns out to be a vicious deceiver who was never lovingly inclined toward the sufferer, but has been playing her from the very beginning of their relationship. Even if both kinds of loss under consideration can be emotionally crushing, the second kind of loss based on betrayal is, in a sense, even more disorienting. From a first-person perspective, this is because it undermines the confidence in my ability to judge other people so profoundly that I am likely to doubt the ability to judge myself. If my radar malfunctioned so badly in judging the person I loved the most, how could I make sense even of myself? Under such circumstances my world is becoming utterly confused (or “absurd” in a Camusian sense) with the complete loss of meaning as its limit. At the breaking point of actually reaching this traumatic limit, the person’s sense of self would disintegrate, that is, her personality would be destroyed. Pace Thomson (and putting aside the macho antics of Camus’s literary Sisyphus-character) there is nothing good, redeeming, or illuminating about this condition, since the person’s self does not become more lucid.39 Here I am objecting to the following claim by Thomson, in particular: “Resoluteness is at least as complex a phenomenon as anticipation, but at its core is Dasein’s accomplishment of a reflexive reconnection to the world of projects lost in death, a recovery made possible by the lucid encounter of the self with itself in death.”40 Instead, it seems more plausible to hold that the closer an individual moves to the limit condition of worldlessness, the more her personality gets obliterated, comparable perhaps to a patient advancing through stages of aggravated Alzheimer’s. To be sure, as long as the patient shows any responsiveness to other people or to any changes in her environment, there is still some residual and rather tragic sense of being-

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in-the-world. Accordingly, we may still treat and respect the sufferer as a person, even if we find it increasingly difficult to identify the person in front of us with the friend or family member we used to know.41 Yet, if the last vestiges of worldly interaction and thereby of personality fade away, we might then say the person finally suffers—but does not “pass through”— spiritual death, even if the body of the spiritually dead person continues to carry out some metabolic functions.42 Thus, we can now restate our previous distinction between two species of loss more precisely. On the one hand, there could be cases of detachment from the world in the course of mourning the loss of a loved one, which are emotionally harrowing but not necessarily destructive of personality, since the individual’s basic value orientation may well remain intact. On the other hand, there may be cases of losing one’s grip on the world due to deep-felt betrayal or other kinds of extreme personal violation, the traumatic effect of which could be compared to the obliteration of self through Alzheimer’s. Across both species of loss, we can say that the minimal preservation of memory as a prerequisite for lived experience by way of worldly interaction implies that there is still a “residue” of world, and by the same token a minimal sense of self. Since cases where there is very little memory as well as interactive potential left deviate significantly from our ordinary sense of being-in-the-world, one might be tempted to speak of a post-world self, though such diction appears forced and ultimately inaccurate. It is more precise as well as more straightforward to speak of drastically “impoverished” selves and worlds under such circumstances. But whichever phrase we choose, the principle remains: Ultimately, a person’s self and world stand and fall together, and no human self can outlive the complete obliteration of her world and all personal attachments. What is more, there is nothing empowering or encouraging about the traumatic ordeal of highdegree world collapse. Against the backdrop of these considerations related to the memory problem, one wonders what could motivate Thomson to cast a positive light on total world collapse. The answer to this question points to the second problem mentioned earlier, namely the contingency problem. As we shall see, while there is nothing commendable about world-collapsing trauma, recognizing the contingency of our most cherished projects in life may appear attractive, even liberating. However, this creates further difficulties for Thomson. If Heidegger’s phenomenology of death turns out to be primarily or exclusively about such contingency, then his proposal for linking spiritual death to literal (physiological) demise wears thin. The more the notion of literal death recedes into the background of his interpretation, the harder it is to see

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the difference between Thomson’s third-way approach and the second camp of Heidegger commentators who read Heidegger’s reference to death as thoroughly metaphorical.

The contingency problem In a nutshell, the contingency problem amounts to the following. Genuine conversion experiences of the sort that worried Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death may impress us with a dramatic sense of how contingent our most deep-seated faith and value commitments are. Such awakening to contingency may be very disconcerting, at first. Yet this kind of shock could also have the salutary effect of reducing our self-righteousness, while increasing our epistemic humility with respect to our (religious) convictions. Differently put, experiencing and acknowledging our own “vulnerability” to conversion, as we leap despite ourselves from one creed to another, may make us more accommodating for people of other convictions. This line of thought may not charm die-hard fundamentalists, but it is certainly attractive to liberal thinkers interested in promoting a “pluralist” ethos like William Connolly, or Judith Butler and, with some qualifications, Charles Taylor.43 In fact, whenever Thomson defends Heidegger’s conception of death spelled out in terms of contingency rather than total loss of meaning, his points appear strikingly similar to some of the processtheological claims made in Connolly’s book The Fragility of Things.44 What is unconvincing about reading Heidegger in such a liberal way is that process thinkers like Connolly have repeatedly emphasized that the contingency dramatized in the event of conversion consists in one experiential paradigm being replaced by another paradigm, more or less suddenly. Such replacement is different from experiencing complete worldlessness construed as the pervasive unavailability of any experiential paradigm for taking our bearings in a world that we didn’t choose or create.45 A conversion activates some kind of world switch, for lack of a better term, which amounts to an abrupt and largely unpredictable change in one’s personal spiritual outlook. It does not involve “spiritual death” understood as complete “world collapse” without residue or replacement, much less does it require literal death in Heidegger’s sense of “demise.” Hence, for people to appreciate the contingency of their most fundamental attachments, all it takes is some genuine conversion experience. To be clear, such an experience may justly be called anything from shocking

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to humbling, but designating it as “death” would appear to be a misplaced metaphor. If death is linked to complete loss of meaning, then it collapses into loss of personhood. Alternatively, if death is linked to contingency, we are now talking about conversions in a properly Kierkegaardian sense. What is uncanny about conversions is the nontraceable leap which—like an optical gestalt switch—catapults us from one world into another, with no time to dwell in between these worlds. To be sure, there could be gradually increasing symptoms, which would signal that my present “world optics” is cracking, so to speak. For instance, a Catholic can experience different stages of corrosive doubt, as he gets closer to losing his Catholic faith commitment, which spiritually organizes and gives meaning to his world. But the pivotal moment when he converts to, say, Buddhism, must be construed as a sudden subversion. What is epistemically humbling is that the recent convert still remembers his previous existence and perspective, though he cannot rationally explain why he did not recognize the now-apparent shortcomings of his previous belief system all along. In this sense, there is a rational disconnect, but not a complete break in memory or experience. That is to say, there is no radical spiritual aphasia.46 Still, I don’t think that this is the last word, nor do I think that the Heidegger of Being and Time (or of the Letter on Humanism, for that matter) can plausibly be presented as a liberal process thinker of Connolly’s ilk. To see this, and to test my central thesis about Heidegger’s respective claims about death in § 47 and in § 74 of Being and Time as fundamentally incompatible, consider Thomson’s remarks concerning literal death. These remarks are made in the context of some of Heidegger’s most disconcerting statements, to which Löwith and Sternberger drew attention long ago. Here it is Thomson’s explication of “running out into death” in terms of “brute projection,” which gives away the game.

“Running out into death” and “brute projection” Under the section heading “The Possibility of Impossibility” Thomson examines an important line from Being and Time: “Higher than actuality stands possibility.”47 Heeding this statement, Thomson suggests, can help us “grasp what Heidegger means when he calls death the possibility of an impossibility,” and he elaborates: “Heidegger distinguishes between our ‘being-possible’ (Möglichsein) and our ‘ability-to-be’ (Seinkönnen) in order to mark the difference between our life projects, on the one hand, and our projecting ourselves into those life

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projects, on the other.”48 In this context, Thomson puts great emphasis on the notion of a “brute projecting”49 stripped of all actual content: projecting without a project. In fact, to some extent we can agree with Thomson when he draws on Steven Crowell to make the following point: To grasp what Heidegger thinks the self ultimately boils down to (in this existential version of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction), it is crucial to remember that when my projects all break down or collapse, leaving me without any life project to project myself into, projection itself does not cease.50 When my being-possible becomes impossible, I still am; my ability-to-be becomes insubstantial, unable to connect to the world, but not inert. My projects collapse, and I no longer have a concrete self I can be, but I still am this inability-to-be.51

On my reading, we can agree with the first half of this statement to the effect that bare projecting as a world-deprived activity may continue after the breakdown of all concrete personal projects, though it might be better to speak of some blind urge raging on rather than of an activity, since the term “activity” remains so close to the term “action” as to connote some lingering directionality. In fact, construed as blind urge such aimless movement is reminiscent of the fluctuations of Schopenhauer’s “Will,” which he described as a restless, inherently conflicted form of cosmic energy that is eternally at odds with itself.52 For Schopenhauer, there was nothing personal or “self-transparent” about this Will’s violent energy transfers, which he presented as characteristic of true, notyet-differentiated reality.53 Rather, Schopenhauer posited a daunting homology between the cosmic Will and the stirrings of our own personal wills. As long as our everyday perception of a world as populated by people and things is governed according to the categories proffered by Kantian epistemology, like substance and causality, we cannot achieve an unfiltered vision of the dynamic interconnectedness of everything, for such a vision could only be purchased at the price of losing our (mental) individuality. Fully partaking in the cosmic Will would spell mental dissolution, in which case any personal attachments or parameters would get removed from our experience. Schopenhauer’s account of how the restlessness of the cosmic Will is mirrored in our individual psyche remains relevant for fleshing out our present criticism of Thomson’s take on Heidegger’s phenomenology of death. More precisely, we can say that Schopenhauer’s exposition of the Will constitutes the metaphysical correlate to his pneumatic view of the human psyche. What Thomson described earlier as a fundamental “lack of fit” between self and world, Schopenhauer would describe in terms of nervous energy. Diagnosed on the level of everyday perception (i.e.,

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still within the confines of Kantian epistemology) we can already catch glimpses of the cosmic Will’s perpetual unease, whenever we detect the “will to will” in ourselves.54 It is this feature that, for Schopenhauer, explains why humans cannot handle long-term inactivity. We want to want something, whatever it may be. We need an outlet, lest the nervous energy in our mental pipe system gets “pent up” and drive us crazy in the end. Here Schopenhauer’s metaphysically framed psychology interlocks with the quintessence of prison wisdom: “A man will do anything to keep his mind occupied.”55 In Heideggerian terminology, one may restate this diagnosis concerning humanity’s inherent excess of nervous energy as one of Dasein’s ontological key traits, that is, as a structural lack of fit, which keeps announcing itself in human behavior throughout the ages and across all cultures. However, as an ontological characteristic above all ontic context, the fluctuations of such nervous energy have nothing personal about them. Considered independently of all lifeworldly (historical, cultural, epochal, generational) settings, your nervous energy is not distinct from mine. Hence, the more my life projects crumble, the more my activities deteriorate into fits of nervous energy. Whether we spell it out in metaphysical or psychological terms, such devolution does not make anybody’s experience of their personal state of being more lucid. Rather, it robs the self of his or her personal qualities underway to the traumatic destruction of selfhood. There is nothing enlightening about spiritual death, which terminates the lived experience of relationality. In fact, at times, Thomson’s diction appears to say as much, though his language becomes increasingly tortured in those crucial passages: Dasein can explicitly encounter its structure as the embodiment of a selfunderstanding when its projects all break down in death. Dasein, stranded (as it were) by the global collapse of its projects, can come explicitly to recognize itself as, at bottom, not any particular self or project, but rather as projecting into projects, that is, as a being who fundamentally takes a stand on its being and is defined by that stand.56

It is not clear what an “embodiment of a self-understanding” would amount to, once all meaningful social ties within a concrete lifeworld are severed, nor is it clear how any human being could count as sufficiently person-like under such conditions in order to “take[s] a stand on its being.” If someone’s being has been voided of all personal ties and social agendas, what is he or she supposed to take a stand on? If all the self has left is its own lack of content, its own void, then any personal index is canceled. At that point, the self has become an impersonal husk or, rather, a spasm. In terms of “brute projecting,”

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genuine agency has been reduced to bouts of nervous energy. As noted earlier in the discussion of the memory problem, Thomson’s text tends to sugarcoat the vacuity of such impersonal selfhood through the use of concrete examples, which vest the ontological self with ontic details recalled from a world now lost. In addition to the aforementioned example of a pet owner mourning a deceased pet, the last block quote is accompanied by further illustrations of feeling “stranded” (a student facing the crash of his computer’s hard drive “the night before a paper is due”; a carpenter’s hammer breaking “in the middle of a job” with no replacement in sight; a commuter’s car breaking down “on the way to an important meeting,” etc.).57 In and of themselves, these examples are not very helpful, as Thomson concedes. For to “see the phenomenon Heidegger has in mind” we have to “generalize from the case in which one project breaks down to the catastrophic collapse of them all.”58 What that really means is that these examples are too tame, in that they do not show the kind of existential despair that Thomson previously associated with death construed as total world loss. Tellingly, at the pivotal point in his essay where Thomson sets out to explain what might be deemed authentic about the kind of anticipatory resolution dramatized by Being and Time’s account of death, we are given an illustration from warfare tucked away in a footnote, which puts Heidegger in uncomfortable proximity to Ernst Jünger: “Heidegger’s heroic image of ‘charging forward into death [Vorlaufen in den Tod]’ seems to have been drawn from Jünger’s grim yet romantic description of German soldiers charging blindly from the trenches through clouds of poisonous gas meant to cover and aid the Blitzkrieg—gas attacks which Heidegger’s own ‘weather service’ unit helped plan.”59 As far as I can tell, in Thomson’s essay this is the only illustration of a despairinspiring situation where literal death (loss of life) and metaphorical death (total loss of meaning) go hand in hand. While this example of violent heroism would seem to be a prime candidate for Thomson’s analysis, which was introduced as a third-way attempt at combining death and demise, it is not explored any further. Moreover, it does not lend itself to the kind of liberal reading that Thomson offers for Heidegger’s phenomenology of death. For that reason there remains a basic disconnect between Thomson’s domestic examples of particular projects breaking down and the notion of complete world collapse, which was supposed to reveal the “full existential-ontological significance of ‘death’ in Being and Time.”60 This is not to say that these personal experiences are without significance. The student who irretrievably loses an important term paper or, worse, an entire doctoral thesis with no back-up copy may qualify as desperate in a weighty

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sense, even if the notion of “spiritual death” does not readily apply. Losing this important piece of work may, under certain circumstances, derail the student’s intended career and thus shake her entire perspective and self-perception. As she recovers from deep disappointment, she will have to consider other options. Doing so may alert her to the contingency of her previous life plan. If so, the real concern in such cases lies with contingency and conversion experiences, which involve rapid shifts of perspective but not the complete loss of our intra-worldly horizon. Thus, we are returned to the contingency problem discussed earlier. In light of these considerations, Thomson’s conciliatory interpretation founders on the following trilemma. First, those passages in his text where he talks about “death” as total loss of meaning cancel the personal index of Dasein. The ontological-structural challenge he spells out as a basic “lack of fit” between self and world points to a thoroughly formal, impersonal feature of human existence—comparable to Schopenhauer’s analysis of nervous energy as a metaphysical affliction. Second, in those segments where Thomson preserves a personal index for Dasein, his examples do not justify the dramatic diction of “spiritual death.” This is because they capitalize on residual memory carried over from previous life projects. Generally, they are better suited to facilitate an awareness of the contingency of our commitments, not an experience of global meaninglessness. Similar to religious conversion experiences, these scenarios may have the salutary effect of promoting the kind of epistemic humility that liberal process thinkers like Connolly favor. Yet the radical perspectival shifts involved in these scenarios do not illustrate complete world collapse. If Thomson’s account were to rest on these kinds of examples alone, it would remain unclear how Heidegger’s speaking of “death” could be defended against the charge of being willfully metaphorical. Third, to make good on his claim of offering a genuine third-way approach that would engage both the literal and the metaphorical aspects of death, Thomson would have to explore in more detail the ominous cases where Dasein transcends its world through a violent detachment of human agency from the official or accustomed dictates of worldly goals.61 Yet, then, we are returned to the eerie nihilism of Captain Klein. What emerges from Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, if we pursue this last option, is not a posture of epistemic humility, but a dangerous spiritual habitus that embodies certain fanatical tendencies within Prussian military culture—certainly not the kind of progressive profile that Thomson would like to promote on Heidegger’s behalf. Upon close inspection, Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time proves inconsistent, because § 47 and § 74 simply do not go together.

Conclusion: Faith and Fanaticism after Heidegger As we saw in the last chapter, what makes Heidegger’s language in Being and Time both puzzling and seductive is his refusal of commitment. He keeps wavering between two very different conceptions of death at the heart of his Dasein analytic, one that posits a link between death and modes of social interaction framed by historical destiny (§ 74) and another, which connects death to modes of solipsistic action framed by individual mortality (§ 47). The ever so brief hint at the figure of Godfather Death in the text, emphasized by Sternberger, can be read as a warning against pernicious forms of deadly “resolve devoid of content.” Such resolve, we observed, is embodied by figures like that of Captain Klein. Considered in the context of German colonialism in Southwest Africa, Klein’s readiness for useless sacrifice proved symptomatic of a militaristic comportment, in which a subordinate element of action assumes obsessive prominence, at the exclusion of any pragmatic considerations or social concerns. Certainly, the appearance of the old Skeleton Man in Heidegger’s most famous text is so minimal and fleeting that it does not readily qualify as a full-fledged vital anecdote of the same caliber as the one we found in the Letter on Humanism with “Heraclitus by the stove.” However, insofar as this personification of death tends to obstruct Heidegger’s own mobilization of death as a catalyst for historical clairvoyance, this short allegorical outburst does mark a salutary episode in his early account of being-in-the-world. Also, the passage under consideration (BT 434) indicates again a connection to Heidegger’s era, as expressionist art in all its forms often deployed such skeletons (see, for example, Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table ballet from 1932, where this technique is used to critique warmongering). The central insight to be gleaned from a joint reading of Being and Time and the two zero-hour texts, “Why Poets?” and the Letter on Humanism, is that the mesmerizing, even eerie character of Heidegger’s writing style is philosophically grounded in a “Wilhelminian conundrum,” namely “the necessity of the impossible,”1 which puts the individual in a very specific mindset and framework for understanding activity. This idea belongs within a particular horizon of Prussian military culture as characterized by various institutional, practical,

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and gestural vectors along which rational performance gets transformed into new patterns of thought and action, with a strong tendency toward unreality and self-destruction. In the 1920s just as in the 1940s, Heidegger’s philosophy strategically tapped the forces within this lingering cultural constellation, first to launch his career and later to project his professional renown past the zero hour for a German postwar audience that had been raised in the correlation between ideas and stark action. In the mid-1930s Heidegger does not “turn” away, but staunchly adheres to this outlook. Both in his Nietzsche lectures and in the Introduction to Metaphysics, as we have seen, he keeps denigrating “logistics,” and one of the most explicit criticisms of this “special science” can be found in his late lecture course “Was heißt Denken?” (What Is Called Thinking?) (1951/2).2 Yet he had already jotted down the formula for this dismissal of practical reasoning in the recently published Black Notebooks, in an entry dated from 1931: “Initiating disregard for the situation, but from out of the positive of the inevitable—disregard for the situation, and the entitlement to that. We only are our situation again, when we no longer ask about it.”3 This is thrownness into an arena of political struggle, wherein the individual commits to an existence that is more than practical but definitely part of a now which, inevitably, implicates Heidegger’s own German history and that of his readers. Yet Heidegger’s prose remains unconcerned about the practical and moral pressures we face in social life. Instead, he keeps invoking sacred Language, Language at a level above words and sentences, as his highest authority. He does not value human-onto-human communication for the sake of solving problems and sharing experiences across linguistic boundaries. Rather, he wants to foster veneration for the ultimate mystery of Language qua Being: “The character of mystery belongs to the essence of the origin of language. But this implies that language can have begun only from the overwhelming and the uncanny, in the breakaway of humanity into Being.”4 This last formulation is from the Introduction to Metaphysics. Recall that Heidegger, in the 1953 preface to the seventh edition of his magnum opus, recommended that his readers use the Introduction to Metaphysics as a companion to Being and Time.5 Not only had he not left his masterwork behind as an artifact of the interwar era, he wanted it to be received in conjunction with one of his most provocative texts from the mid-1930s. What is more, roughly for the same time when he delivered the Introduction to Metaphysics we find an entry dated 1934/35 in his Black Notebooks, in which Heidegger emphasizes the contrast between his thinking and Jaspers’s existentialism:

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In a first attempt the way to be Da-sein [Da-sein zu sein], to persist, was designated as “existence,” not least because with the differently interpreted word ex-sistere it was possible to indicate the disjoined character [Entrückungscharacter] of the Da. Accordingly, this attempt fell under the designation of a “philosophy of existence” [“Existenzphilosophie”] in the sense given to it by Jaspers, who placed Kierkegaard’s notion of existence, taken in a moral sense, at the center of his philosophical activity (communication and appealing). Fundamentally different from that is the orientation in Being and Time.6

To be clear, I do not mean to rest my interpretation of Heidegger’s thought on isolated remarks from the Black Notebooks. My textual evidence consists of the findings gathered throughout the chapters comprised in this study. However, considered in conjunction with the Introduction to Metaphysics from the same time period, the present remark in diary format is still indicative of Heidegger’s philosophical sympathies and antipathies. In this regard, Heidegger makes it clear that he wishes no truck with thinkers like Jaspers, who construe language in terms of human communication as a tool for moral reflection. Instead, he points to the need for individuals to find their higher Language and so to follow into a higher existence, no matter the seeming practicalities of any moment. Heidegger sees existence as a kind of all-engulfing struggle, which is won through utter commitment by each individual to Being. This again echoes the role prescribed for the German soldier in his military. What we receive in Heidegger’s writings, then, is markedly different both from traditional hero worship and from the “German” or “French” variants of other philosophies of existence, which are usually associated with the names of Jaspers and Sartre.7 Tillich saw this clearly. While he is aware that Sartre’s reading of Heidegger was in many regards much more on target than Heidegger cared to admit, Tillich also stresses how Heidegger’s philosophical extremism sets him apart from both Sartre’s and Jaspers’s respective brands of existentialist thought: “One of Heidegger’s historical functions was to carry out the existentialist analysis of the courage to be oneself more radically and, historically speaking, more destructively than anybody else.”8 As perceptive members of his own generation like the author Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) would have recognized, Heidegger’s philosophical habitus is distinctly Prussian, laced with subtle rhetorical gestures at the kind of fanaticism we find reflected not only in certain writings by Ernst Jünger, but also further back in the Prussian tradition, in Heinrich von Kleist’s excessive literary violence.9 In “A Dialogue on Language” (1959), for example, Heidegger assumes the role of “an

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Inquirer” who has a conversation with “a Japanese” about the essential nature of language.10 Nearly halfway through the essay, the Japanese looks back on a time when he was “translating Kleist’s Penthesilea and the Amphitryon.” In response, the Inquirer states melodramatically: “The nature of the German language must at that time have come over you like a waterfall.”11 This is how Heidegger also situates his project of Being: as transformative and positing an all-or-nothing relationship with the Da-sein “in” each of us, with the luminous moment-ofvision or Augenblick.12 Throughout his long career, Heidegger’s thought remains driven by a death-defying tenacity which Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) captured with poetic poignancy in his darkly humorous poem The Impossible Fact (Die unmögliche Tatsache) (1910). Like Morgenstern’s poetic character Palmström, Heidegger’s Da-sein transcends death in the name of spiritual discipline, since “what must not be, cannot be.”13 At this point our two-pronged inquiry into Heidegger’s opposition to philosophical anthropology and the complexity of his writing style has come full circle. The secret to his prickly charm lies in his stylistic ingenuity, as he traverses the genres of philosophy, theology, and aesthetics, in an ongoing effort to challenge the accustomed strictures of academic writing. The defining characteristic as well as the main effect of Heidegger’s style emerges as his attempt to incite a preprophetic discourse, which holds out the promise that it will prepare the participants for the possible reception of a new sense of the holy. The latter could over time bloom into novel forms of worship, if only we let ourselves be claimed by Being the right way, that is, without giving in to the arch-temptation of philosophical anthropology, namely to personify Being prematurely. The founding paradox, which accounts for the mystique surrounding Heidegger’s project, is that he vests Being qua ultimate reality with communicative powers, while insisting that Being is not a person-like speaker. Instead, Being is explicated as, and sometimes expressly equated with, primal Language, something that reveals itself beyond the chatter of everyday life. So construed, the Language of Being not only overflows the confines of everyday humanonto-human communication, it exceeds all traditional religious conceptions of divine-onto-human communication as well. Being is not (yet) a deity. Still, it can somehow assign different world-historical missions or “destinies” to different peoples and beckon them to embrace their fate. Heidegger delineates the main contours of this model for revelation as world-making during the decisive decade of his thought. From 1936 to 1946, he

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works out an increasingly nuanced programmatic sketch for a holistic practice of philosophical inquiry focused on the revelatory power of artworks. In the first three chapters, we elucidated this captivating alternative to institutionalized philosophy under the rubric of artisan thinking and traced its permutations through some of Heidegger’s most influential (or most underrated) texts, starting with his critical lecture on Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift as contemporaneous with his acclaimed Origin essay. Stylistically, Heidegger fashions artisan thinking into an exploratory mode of inquiry which seeks to rise above the stuffiness of academic studies and to invigorate philosophy with an animus of daring patience, as we might call it. Like the tense calm before the storm, artisan thinking à la Heidegger generates an atmosphere in which readers of his texts become apprentices, who are called upon to practice anticipation by honing their skills of active waiting. Spiritually straining as it may be, the perpetual task of thinking (in Heidegger’s sense of Denken) is to ready oneself for the advent of an unprecedented revelation. Such revelation, Heidegger contends, will grant those who prove themselves sufficiently receptive a new sense of the holy, which is more fundamental than any personal incarnation of the divine. In this regard, Heidegger adopts and radicalizes Rudolf Otto’s conception of the holy as a history-shattering power, but to today’s ears it also sounds demagogical. The individual’s experiential encounter with this power is not just independent of all other domains of human experience. In its true sense of fascinans et tremendum, the holy has the capacity to undo each and every parameter of humanity’s historical self-understanding, including any meaning we could possible attach to terms like “person,” “action,” or even “love.” Neither human essence (good, bad, or Janus-faced) nor any presumed timeless value (including Christian agape) is able to withstand the impact of the holy and its call. Since Being is the inscrutable fountain from which holy charges emanate, then, Heidegger had to dismiss any personification of ultimate reality as symptomatic of misguided philosophical anthropology, which he never tires of attacking. He is looking for messianic time, not a messiah who would alleviate the tension of waiting into fulfillment. This staunch impersonalism in matters of revelation puts Heidegger at odds with a distinct religio-philosophical movement that came into its own after the first “anthropological turn” in continental thought. This initiative gained momentum during the pan(en)theism controversy over Spinozism, with Kant and Herder among its protagonists. As we traced this lineage through the writings of Schelling, Schiller, Nietzsche, Simmel, and Scheler, it became clear

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that Heidegger acknowledges this trajectory of philosophical innovation only selectively. In terms of intellectual history, he routinely skips over the second half of the eighteenth century as well as over the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, he circumvents any theologically attuned thought that makes the purpose of philosophy an issue of a group finding a transformative goal. As I have stressed in the first part of this study (and again in the fifth chapter), Heidegger’s punctuation model of revelation allows for genuine group cohesion, the Volk effect, as we might call it, only after Being has “spoken” a new sense of mission into the Da-sein within each individual member of a “fallen” cultural collective, which until then was lacking in spiritual focus. Authentic social interaction may be prompted by, but never informs a joint reception of, Being’s call. In this vein, Heidegger tends to sideline precisely those thinkers, who opted for a network model of revelation, which construes hermeneutical creativity as inherently social, so that human communication is never simply overpowered or obliterated by sacred Language from above. Contrary to Heidegger’s vertical account of holy dispensations, the network model proposes that revelation always has to work horizontally, that is, through the historical texture of linguistic transactions among various, overlapping cultural communities. The most glaring omissions from intellectual history in this regard include Heidegger’s merely peripheral treatment of Herder in his first sustained Schelling commentary, the conspicuous absence of Schiller’s name from the Origin essay, the way Heidegger detaches Nietzsche’s legacy from the discourses of spiritual monism in the context of Haeckel’s immensely influential The Riddle of the Universe, and, finally, the way he keeps the works of Simmel and Scheler at arm’s length without acknowledging their indebtedness to Schelling. To be fair, when it comes to the Schelling-Simmel-Scheler constellation, not all of the confusion is Heidegger’s fault. As was highlighted in the second chapter, in particular, this four-author constellation (Heidegger included) confronts us with a layered case of mistaken identity. At first, Scheler and Heidegger appear shoulder to shoulder in their joint disapproval of Simmel’s subjectivism as framed by his monist metaphysics. At least, this seems to be the gist of their explicit comments on Simmel in the early 1920s. However, the textual situation proves more intricate. Upon close inspection, we found that Scheler’s religious phenomenology intersected substantially with Simmel’s philosophy of life, particularly in terms of their respective commitment to a notion of personality that bears a strong resemblance to Schelling’s.

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Above all, there is one central conviction that Simmel and Scheler took over from Schelling in somewhat modified form, while Heidegger kept rejecting it. As a matter of principle, Schelling maintains that creation (the rise of the personal from within the Absolute) and revelation (the disclosure of God’s loving personality to humanity) could not have happened independently of each other. To underscore one of the crucial observations proffered in this study, creation and revelation are essentially coextensive for Schelling. God can only reveal Himself as living, by creating away from Himself. Heidegger will contest this, and the way he goes about resisting Schelling’s coextension thesis accords him a rather unique position within the present author constellation. Heidegger agrees with the other three thinkers that human finitude can never confront the divine Absolute directly. At the same time, he staunchly rejects one central assumption that Schelling, Simmel, and Scheler all share. This is the broadly pan(en)theistic tenet that ultimate reality is infused throughout with the potential for personality, for if it were not, then the finite human spirit could never communicate with or feel addressed by the divine. For Heidegger, such a claim is “anthropomorphy” par excellence. Even though he appreciated Scheler’s account of religious ur-phenomena, which attest to the appellativeresistant character of being-in-the-world, he was not sympathetic to Scheler’s great principle of solidarity. According to Scheler, the moral pull we experience in facing the world as such is a testimony to God’s loving will for all of His creation. So considered, God’s personality pervades all reality indiscriminately. Heidegger aims to undercut precisely this egalitarian idea, which both Scheler and Simmel had inherited from Schelling, their lingering doubts about other details in Schelling’s philosophy aside. Heidegger’s outlook, by contrast, stresses preprophetic waiting for something more, something higher, something beyond the anthropological. For Heidegger, as we saw in the third and seventh chapters, Being allocates different fates to different peoples, each of which is distinct in its cultural essence. This axiomatic assumption finds its most sophisticated and rhetorically most involved expression in the Letter on Humanism, with the modulation of Hölderlin as the-German-poet as its centerpiece. Such fatalism (which worried Cassirer early on) creates an abiding tension in Heidegger’s writings during the decisive decade of his thinking. Thus, he remains hard-pressed to explain why and how the history-shattering power of the holy would spare cultural essences, while obliterating pretty much everything else worldly. Nonetheless, in keeping with his deeply entrenched opposition to philosophical anthropology,

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Heidegger traces how the holy emanates from Being like a flash that strikes into social life and effaces all standards of human meaning formation, including any hermeneutical guidelines for understanding what it means to be a person in a historical time and space. Nothing humanly recognizable will survive this semiotic apocalypse. But then, if the holy is no respecter of persons, why would it be a respecter of cultural essences? The way Heidegger’s version of artisan thinking evades this crucial question is intriguing. From 1936 forward, one of the most mysterious elements in Heidegger’s thought is the meteoric status of artworks, which defies ontological classification. Insofar as great artworks such as the body of Hölderlin’s poetry function like transmitters in Heidegger’s punctuation model of holy revelation, they receive Being’s subversive impulses and convey them to a particular historical setting or epoch. In doing so, they fall into our world without properly belonging to it and break down conventional understandings. Like alien entities from a richly opaque domain that lies beyond interpretation, works of art emerge as mysteriously interstitial. They enter into history without being either fully suprahistorical (which would place them on a par with transcendent Being) nor fully intra-historical (which would render them immanent to the universal-historical process of human cultural labor). This may sound fanciful, but the assumption lies well within the German tradition of understanding art as revelation. As Heidegger would readily point out, resisting the ontological nomenclature imposed by university philosophy does not mean that art has shortcomings. Just like the holy, which it channels, great art is under no obligation to cater to the expectations of philosophy as an academic discipline, since its goal is to point beyond any social and institutional limits. Even so, Heidegger’s account of how we may encounter meteoric art in the aforementioned sense remains problematic, because whenever he discusses a concrete body of artistic work, like Hölderlin’s poetry, he cloaks the apocalyptic aspect of the holy with overtones of cultural heritage. To protect the notion of heritage from complete erasure, Heidegger is forced to mitigate the historyshattering quality of revelation through subtle gestures at the continuity of a narrative tradition. However, this implicit concession to the historical embeddedness of art actually undermines much of the critique Heidegger had leveled against philosophical anthropology. Nowhere is this weakness more apparent than in Heidegger’s other zero-hour text, “Why Poets?,” where he weaves a terminological net, in which he first moves from “saying” (Sagen) to “saga” (Sage) and then expands on “saga” in terms of “song” (Gesang). As was

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flagged in the sixth chapter, the standard English translation of Heidegger’s text included in Off the Beaten Track is deficient in signaling these multiples, because it renders Sage merely as “what is said.” This phrase fails to bring out the important shift in meaning over against Sagen, which the translator renders as “saying.” In German, the term “Sage” clearly has grand-narrative overtones of compelling historicity like those associated, for example, with the Nibelungensage, the epic tale of dragon slayer Siegfried and his adventures. The main problem with Heidegger’s featuring of Sage in “Why Poets?” is that he exploits the narrative (heroic, mythical) association space of this term, when he describes the “daring” poets’ mission in language that creates a literary atmosphere of perilous voyage. Yet the philosophical commentary that accompanies these formulations empties Sage of its traditional narrative content and turns it into an unspecified, pure message emanating from the “precinct of language” as such (H 311–12 / OBT 237). This creates an irreconcilable tension in Heidegger’s text which, I argued, renders his conception of the daring poets’ calling less than viable in the end, because he reduces the specificity of poetic forms to something like prophetic utterances. Heidegger’s ruse in covering up this tension is nonetheless brilliant. By directing his signpost-like interpretive suggestions or Erläuterungen to a poet’s references to religious experience carried by holy song rather than to actual, historically concrete instances thereof, he performs an unlikely stylistic feat: to surround a posture of meditative asceticism with the charisma of spiritual combat. No wonder, then, that he uses the term “Erläuterung,” with its connotations of illumination and purification, to describe his own special kind of commentary. The signature trait of Heidegger’s preprophetic poetics is a double gesture. Under the auspices of artisan thinking, his tantalizing rewrite of philosophy invites struggle toward worship and, at the same time, forecloses struggle in worship. This preprophetic intervention is a far cry away from Scheler’s broadly Pascalian brand of ethical theism expounded in On the Eternal in Man, because Heidegger’s approach suspends not just ecclesiastical authority, but also the core meaning of church as the communicative body for joint, worshipful comportment. Not surprisingly, Heidegger’s proposal for engaging meteoric art to unleash the creative-destructive potential of the holy retains its appeal today under stifling social conditions, where it becomes more and more difficult to even imagine alternative forms of unchurched faith. Conceived as a technique for spiritual discipline, artisan thinking is meant to pave the way for an unheard-of piety that points toward transcendence and world-making. Nobody knows where and

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when Being will strike next. Still, Heidegger holds that we unflinchingly ought to anticipate this event, which, upon its occurrence, will explode our current horizon of social and religious preconceptions, so that, from this obliteration, new modes (or moods) of reverence and hence of being-in-the-world may be spawned. Yet, betting on the revelatory power of art, while isolating human individuals from the community-bound resources for critical feedback in the course of hermeneutical cooperation, harbors risks of its own and may well open the gates to fanaticism. Stylized as combative piety, Heidegger’s thinking remains a dangerous wager.

Notes Introduction: The Decisive Decade from 1936 to 1946 1 Included in Heidegger, Supplements, 111–45. 2 For one of the most instructive accounts of this encounter, see Peter Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Gordon’s study will be engaged in detail in the first chapter. 3 The designation of Scheler as Heidegger’s “fraternal rival” is adopted from David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy, 82. 4 As an aside: The phrase “infinite shadow figures” may seem to clash with the previous phrase “finite and living image.” Admittedly, there is some tension in Heidegger’s wording, though we should recall that Heidegger is giving a lecture and in spoken German “infinite” often connotes “infinitely many” or “countless.” 5 Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work, 76. 6 To be sure, one can find an occasional footnote like the one contained in a later segment of Being and Time (BT 494-95 n. vi/SZ 249 n. 1) where Heidegger spends two sentences to discard Simmel’s conception of death in The View of Life. Yet such rejection in passing hardly qualifies as substantial engagement with a complex thinker of Simmel’s stature. 7 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 242–3n. 138. 8 Indispensable for appreciating the significance of this anthropological turn is John Zammito’s study Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (esp. KHA 230–31). 9 Cf. Holger Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?” Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, 446. 10 See Wulf Koepke, “The Reception of Schiller in the Twenttieth Century.” 11 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 204/205, 218/219. Note: This 1983 dual-language edition juxtaposes the English translation with the original German. 12 Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band (NI 126). 13 See Frederick Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900. 14 Martin Kusch, Psychologism: The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, 229–30. 15 Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, 142. 16 For a good synopsis, see: Stephen Brockmann and Frank Trommler, Revisiting Zero Hour 1945: The Emergence of Postwar German Culture.

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17 Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, 63. 18 For Nietzsche’s proximity to Schiller’s (and Goethe’s) aesthetics, see Paul Bishop and R. H. Stephenson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism. Cf. Paul Redding, Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche. 19 For a provocative comment on how such indicating can border onto a posture of refusing communication, see Sean McGrath, “Formal Indication, Irony, and the Risk of Saying Nothing.” Cf. Allan Janik, Style, Politics, and the Future of Philosophy. 20 The “lightning” (Blitz) metaphor recurs throughout the different stages of Heidegger’s commentary on the revelatory power of Hölderlin’s poetic work. See Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 44, 68–69, 74, 161. 21 Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 90–115. Timothy Stanley, Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. 22 Cited from Heidegger, “Briefe Martin Heideggers an Julius Stenzel (1928–1932),” 12. 23 Dolf Sternberger, Der verstandene Tod. Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 25 Among his numerous publications, see particularly William Connolly, The Fragility of Things. 26 Iain Thomson, “Death and Demise in Heidegger’s Being and Time.” 27 Of special interest for gauging the Heidegger-Kleist connection is Stefan Zweig, Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (translated as The Struggle with the Demon), which was published two years before Heidegger’s Being and Time came out. 28 Benjamin Crowe, Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion, 10. 29 Crowe, Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion, 10. 30 See Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher. Sean McGrath, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction and his aforementioned essay “Formal Indication, Irony, and the Risk of Saying Nothing.” Christopher Yates, The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling. Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology and her follow-up volume Heidegger and Theology. Jason Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild. 31 Cf. David Brooks’s op-ed in The New York Times, “Huntington’s Clash Revisited.”

Chapter 1 1 Gordon, Continental Divide, 108. 2 Ibid., 70. 3 Here I am alluding to the title of Michael Friedman’s slim volume A Parting of the Ways, which preceded Gordon’s investigation as a seminal point of reference for recent inquiries into the Davos encounter. Friedman deserves credit for putting Davos back on the map of philosophical discussion, but his remarks about Scheler

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and Simmel remain rather cursory. Least satisfying in this regard, perhaps, is his comment in passing on “the ‘irrationalist’ tendencies of contemporary Lebensphilosophie, as expressed in the thought of Bergson, Scheler, and Simmel.” A Parting of the Ways, 155. Cf. also Vida Pavesich, “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer”; and Beth Cykowski, “In Pursuit of Something ‘Essential’ about Man: Heidegger and Philosophical Anthropology.” Pavesich and Cykowski offer interesting discussions, while their chosen approaches differ from mine, insofar as they attend neither to the religious side of Heidegger’s and Scheler’s projects nor to the relation between Heidegger’s critique of philosophical anthropology and his own philosophy of art. 4 Thus, Heidegger sets up a programmatic contrast between his project of fundamental ontological inquiry over against the merely ontic concerns of empirical sciences like anthropology, psychology, or ethnology (BT 75/SZ 49). 5 Cassirer was particularly worried about the fatalistic aspect of Heidegger’s thinking. See his The Myth of the State, 292–93. 6 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie, originally published as Volume 31 of the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works), first edition 1982; second edition 1994. This text has been translated into English by Ted Sadler: Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. 7 Heidegger’s full statement reads: “Man is not the image of a god conceived in the sense of the absolutely bourgeois, but this latter god is the ungenuine [sic] creation of man.” Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom, 94. 8 Heidegger’s concerns about idolatrous tendencies are not confined to the early 1930s but persist in his later writings, most notably in those texts where he expounds his conception of the “fourfold” (Geviert). Cf. Weidler, “Heidegger’s ‘Fourfold’ as a Critique of Idolatry.” 9 Heidegger, The Essence of Human Freedom, 94. 10 See Gordon’s section “A Theory of Confrontation” in Continental Divide, 258–61. 11 Ibid., 260. 12 Heidegger, Contributions, 199; italics in the original. 13 See Zammito (GKJ 407–8n.41). 14 Kant, Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, Akademie Ausgabe, volume 15; especially reflections no. 933, 934, 938. 15 On this point, cf. Zammito (GKJ 137). 16 Ibid., 228n. 4. Here Zammito acknowledges Beiser’s study, The Fate of Reason. 17 Zammito (GKJ 243). 18 The ambivalence of the term Schwärmerei is also apparent from its various uses in Herder’s God volume. See, for example, Herder, Gott: Einige Gespräche, 809, 817. 19 “Jacobi himself did not learn anything and did not want to learn anything from the new reflection on pantheism which he had inspired and to which Schelling contributed much that was essential” (ST 67/GA42 115).

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20 Cf. Paul Guyer, “Beauty, Freedom, and Morality.” 21 Herder, Gott, particularly a segment within the Fourth Conversation, 794–802. Here the discussion turns to the constant temptation for philosophers to give in to “anthropopathic” (anthropopathisch) (794, 797) reductions of God’s personal side. This temptation is said to factor most notably in attempts to clarify the ways in which God can be called “free,” and it is here that Herder’s God volume is thematically closest to Schelling’s Freedom essay. Also of special interest for discerning points of contact between Herder’s book and Heidegger’s Schelling discussion are the remarks, in Conversation Four, by Herder’s character Theophron on the essential meaning of Dasein as the quintessence (Inbegriff) of all forces. This prompts the other main interlocutor, Philolaus, to attempt a summary statement in Schelling-style language, which culminates in the suggestion that God’s Dasein is the “primordial ground” (Urgrund) of all forces, which is here associated with a cosmic joy (Genuß) that “transcends all concepts” or conceptual schemes. Theophron accepts this, for the most part, but cautions that God’s transcending of all concepts must not be construed in such a way as to turn God into a “blind force.” In other words, here Theophron seems eager to preserve a basic compatibility between God’s dynamic character (as the quintessential force of life) and God’s being transparent to Himself. Ibid., 796–97. This is the challenge taken up by Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, focused on the notion of an inherently plural God, who becomes personal. In this regard, one of the chief difficulties for Schelling is to clarify the meaning of such becoming without turning God into a creature whose development is bound by space and time. As an alternative, Schelling aims to explain God’s becoming as a process of qualitative ascension from God-ground to personal God-self. 22 For details on Schelling’s panentheistic thought, see the section “Schelling’s living God” in Chapter 2. One of the best interpreters of Schelling in German is Christian Danz. See his Die philosophische Christologie F.W.J. Schellings and “Die Philosopie der Offenbarung.” For a helpful introduction to Schelling’s thought in English, see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy. Next to Slavoj Žižek’s commentary in The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, Bowie deserves credit for his early attempt to alert an Anglophone audience to the relevance of Schelling’s thought for contemporary philosophy. Though this is not the primary focus of his study, Bowie already notes that “Heidegger . . . evidently owes much to Schelling” (118). More recently, Jason Wirth has helped take Schelling studies to another level. Against the backdrop of his earlier book, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time, Wirth has expanded his inquiry into Schelling’s philosophy in the volume Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination. Besides offering a plethora of rich ideas (including explorations of the complex relation between Schelling and Gilles Deleuze), this last work contains two important appendices that are directly relevant for the project

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24

25 26

27 28 29 30

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I am pursuing here. Appendix A proffers the first publication of an English translation, jointly done by Wirth and Christopher Lauer, of Schelling’s 1812 Letter to Eschenmayer, which contains Schelling’s reply to Eschenmayer’s critique of his Freedom essay. Appendix B comprises the comments by Lauer on Schelling’s letter. Lauer’s astute observations call for a more sustained examination of Heidegger’s assessment of Schelling. Thus, Lauer writes: “In his 1936 lecture course on the Freedom essay, Heidegger argues that one of the central axes on which the essay breaks down is in showing how human concepts are applied to nature and natural ones to human beings. To be fair, Heidegger remarks, the objection that the use of such human terms as ‘longing’ to describe God is improperly anthropomorphic misses the point because one of Schelling’s central aims in identifying the essence of human freedom is reevaluating what place the human can have in a philosophical system. . . . If the nature of the anthropic is put in question by Schelling’s anthropomorphisms, Heidegger is ultimately asking, then what is the form of this question, and how can a system of philosophy allow it to be asked?” Schelling’s Practice of the Wild, 205. In the present study, my suggestion for tackling this central issue is to take a closer look at the inception, the different stages, and the historical background of Heidegger’s long-standing opposition to philosophical anthropology. For an instructive synopsis of different philosophical strands that engage panentheistic motifs, see John Cooper, Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers, from Plato to the Present. For an accessibly written commentary on panentheism as a promising contender among contemporary theological outlooks, see Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew. In this regard, Zammito singles out the work of Ferdinand Schmidt, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject in 1888; next to Wilhelm Vollrath’s study Die Auseinandersetzung Herders mit Spinoza (1911); followed by J. A. Dieterle’s journal article on “Die Grundgedanken in Herder’s Schrift ‘Gott’ und ihr Verhältnis zu Spinozas Philosophie” (1914). See Zammito (GKJ 405n.88). Hermann Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, esp. 21–36; cf. also Michael Forster, After Herder, 46–47. See Heidegger (NI 129). Heidegger addresses this contrast under the subsection heading “The Grand Style” (Der große Stil). I will subject this interpretive move by Heidegger to close scrutiny in Part II, Chapter 4, below. The German phrase reads: “der transcendente, d.i. der über sich selbst steigende Philosoph.” Herder, Gott, 804. For Schiller’s mixed feelings about Herder’s God volume, see Zammito (GKJ 243, 246). This seminar is contained in volume GA84.1, which was published in Heidegger’s Collected Works in 2013, with one or two more subvolumes still to follow. “Eternity can only be thought truly, that is, poetically [dichterisch], if we understand it as the most primordial temporality [ursprünglichste Zeitlichkeit], but never in

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the manner of common sense which says to itself: Eternity, that is the opposite of temporality” (ST 113/GA42 197). 31 This is not a typo. The idiosyncratic spelling of “himSelf ” (with the capital letter in the middle) is meant to mimic how Heidegger, too, bends the orthographic rules in the original German, when he capitalizes the last “S” at the end of this passage. Thus, he finishes the last sentence with “noch nicht Gott eigentlich als er Selbst.” Usually, the last word should not be capitalized here. In fact, in the preceding sentence Heidegger still followed the rules, when he used the same grammatical construction without the idiosyncratic capitalization. Thus, he wrote in the preceding sentence: “Gott als der Existierende ist der absolute Gott oder Gott als er selbst; kurz: Gott-selbst.” Following Schelling’s lead, Heidegger’s use of hyphens and nonstandard spelling can be seen as a stylistic device, which is used to mirror in written language how God ascends from the nonpersonal to the personal, that is, how the God-ground rises to God-self. 32 Cf. Heidegger (NI 404; NII 349) and especially Vorträge und Aufsätze, 59–61. 33 See Zammito (KHA 336–7). 34 Ibid., 230. 35 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 356 and esp. 358. 36 Here I have altered Stambaugh’s translation, which renders Stufen as “stages.” In some cases that is appropriate, but in the present context it occludes the (metaphorical) vision of nature as the great “ladder of life,” where qualitatively different levels of soul life correspond to different “rungs.” Also, there is an unfortunate omission in Stambaugh’s text: “Accordingly, the aim is to construct the stages of history, that is, . . .” (ST 150). However, in the original German, this sentence starts with positing a correspondence relation between the “levels of nature” and the “levels of history”: “Es gilt jetzt, entsprechend den Stufen der Natur die Stufen der Geschichte, d.h., . . . zu konstruieren” (GA42 260). 37 Andrew Mitchell, “Heidegger’s Later Thinking of Animality: The End of World Poverty.” 38 Mitchell, “Heidegger’s Later Thinking of Animality,” 81. 39 A full-fledged treatment of the relation between Heidegger’s conception of poetic thinking and expressionist literature falls outside the compass of this study and will have to be reserved for a future article or book project. Yet, positing such a relation is by no means far-fetched, especially in the vicinity of Trakl’s work. Following Allan Janik’s lead, this connection can be traced in tandem with Heidegger’s abiding interest in (and long-term subscription to) the Austrian journal der Brenner, whose editor Ludwig von Ficker Heidegger held in high esteem. See Janik, Style, Politics, and the Future of Philosophy, 39 note 80. Thus, Janik relates: “To the extent that he was able to its editor, Ludwig von Ficker, strove to make the Brenner as open as possible to contemporary literary and ethico-religious currents, provided that the

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latter were committed to tolerance. His deep concern for linguistic innovation led Ficker to publish the expressionist poet Theodor Däubler in an early number of the Brenner. However, Ficker’s discovery of Georg Trakl must count as his greatest contribution to German literature” (Ibid., 32). 40 Here, as in several previous segments of this chapter, I am drawing from the magisterial work by John Zammito on the subject. While he does not engage Heidegger and Schelling in this context, my present remarks on the “medical enlightenment” are indebted to Zammito’s astute observations about the German “philosophical physicians.” See Zammito (KHA 242–53). 41 Ibid., 243. 42 Ibid., 225. 43 Ibid., 251, 253. 44 See Hans Küng’s seminal study Menschwerdung Gottes; and Gary Dorrien’s Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit. 45 Heidegger, Contributions, 167 (GA65 213–4). 46 Zammito (GKJ 266). 47 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 281. 48 For the general meaning of hylozoism, see Zammito (KHA 231), cited earlier. 49 Cf. § 67 and § 76, where Kant reiterates that the principles of nature-judgedteleologically are all regulative not constitutive. Jointly they provide an alternative guide (Leitfaden) for the reflective power of judgment (reflektierende Urteilskraft). See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 287. 50 Ibid., 281. 51 Ibid., 333. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 415; cf. 409–10. 54 Ibid., 394. 55 Ibid., 409. The German phrase is: “moralische[r] Welturheber.” 56 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 332–33. Cf. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 406. 57 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 9. 58 Ibid., 26. 59 Ibid., 34. 60 Ibid., 11. 61 The German title reads: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. 62 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 137. 63 In translating Stofftrieb as “sense drive” (rather than “material drive”), Beiser signals that Stoff for Schiller has a tangible quality which, however, cannot simply be

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subsumed under the notion of physical matter as deployed in the natural sciences. I will elaborate on this issue in the third chapter. 64 Ibid., 138–39. 65 For a critical examination of how Heidegger expounds Nietzsche’s aesthetics in this regard, see Chapter 4.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5

6

7

8

9

For the term “figuration,” see (GA49 93). Cf. Schelling (F 83, 85–86); Scheler (EM 19, 132, 146, and esp. 248 and 330–31). Schelling (F 35–36, 47–48, 52, 66–67). Cf. also the subsequent passage (GA49 103). See (GA49 73–5) where Heidegger distinguishes four different meanings the notion of “existence” can assume. The meaning most relevant for understanding Heidegger’s objection to Schelling’s resort to analogy, I submit, is the third one, which Heidegger spells out as follows: “Selfhood of personality from out of communication with others in relation to ‘transcendence’” (Selbstheit der Persönlichkeit aus der Kommunikation mit anderen in der Beziehung auf die “Transzendenz”) (GA49 73). Cf. the related remark two pages later: “Thus God is the All-One; according to the manifest forms [Gestalten] of his being he is not one, but several; only according to his Godhead is he necessarily One, due to his efficacy in all those manifest forms. Aside from his Godhead, God is not one, but several” (PO 191) [Schelling’s italics]. The German reads: “Wir sind nicht gleich beim persönlichen Gott.” Literally: “We are not at once with the personal God.” Or: “We don’t immediately arrive at [or start out with] the personal God.” As I understand him, Žižek points to the same complex issue in Schelling, when he writes: “This tension in the midst of the Absolute itself is, therefore, far more enigmatic than it may appear, since it is thoroughly incompatible with the oppositions which define the space of traditional ontology: the opposition between Ground and Existence does not overlap with the opposition between mere possibility and actuality (if it did, Ground could not corrode the selfidentity of actual Existence from within); it is not simply a new name for the duality of the Real and the Ideal in Schelling’s early philosophy—that is, for the symmetrical polarity of two ontological principles.” The Indivisible Remainder, 62. In the German original: “Die Existenz Gottes lässt sich nicht erweisen, sondern nur die Gottheit des Existierenden, . . ., und auch diese nur a posteriori.” There is

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11

12

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no fully satisfactory translation for Schelling’s use of “Gottheit” here, insofar as the present context invests it with three interlocked meanings: Godhead, Divinity, God-ness. I opt for the latter expression in this place, to retain the rhetorical force of Schelling’s inverted formulation in this sentence. For Heidegger’s distinction between Geschichte and Historie, see the previous reference in Chapter 1 to the following texts: Heidegger, (NI 404) and (NII 349); and especially Vorträge und Aufsätze, 59–61. As Schelling put it in the fragment Die Weltalter (The Ages of the World), included in volume 8 of the original edition of his complete works: “An eternal beingconscious (Bewusstseyn) cannot be thought because it would be the same as unconsciousness.” Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, Band 8, 262. In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann already drew attention to this crucial passage in his study Schelling’s [sic] positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer, 44. Andrew Bowie also highlights this passage in Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, 121–22. Here I have adopted the wording of Bowie’s translation. On pages 218 and 297, Augustine is not mentioned by name, but in these places Scheler’s remarks about God as “world sustainer” (Welterhalter) as opposed to mere “demiurge” (Demiurgos) are directly related to his subsequent statement in expressly Augustinian terms, on pages 374–75. This is further confirmed by Scheler’s acknowledgment of Augustine, in the Preface to the first edition. Here Scheler suggests that only a combination of Augustinianism and phenomenological philosophy will be able to prepare, if not achieve, a “natural (re)cognition of God” (natürliche Gotteserkenntnis) for contemporary society (EM 8). For Cassirer’s like-minded approach, see Weidler, “Undoing the Dialectic’s Philosophical Hypocrisy.” For this phrase, see Althaus, Die letzten Dinge, 317; cf. 250–51. For helpful comments on this leitmotif in Althaus’s eschatology, cf. also Fischer, Protestantische Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert, 50–1; and Gotthard Jasper, Paul Althaus (1888– 1966), 122. For Althaus’s thematic exposition of the timeless ideal of spiritual community, see Die letzten Dinge, 320–36, where he elaborates on eternal life as a community of love. In this place (322), he acknowledges Simmel’s essay-fragment on love, posthumously published in the journal Logos in 1921. What is more, Althaus’s conception of love, in the sense of agape, informs his declared “Christian personalism,” which he contrasts with those “mystical-pantheistic” accounts that construe salvation in terms of dissolution, such that human personality disappears into God’s vastness. Importantly for our purposes, the way Althaus articulates his critique of mystical pantheism clearly places him in the vicinity of those pan-en-theistic elements that are prominent in Scheler’s thought and intimate his philosophical proximity to Herder and Schelling. Thus, Althaus writes: “Love remains. That means: The foundational essence (Grundwesen) of our Dasein . . .

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Notes [namely] that we are in God and yet not [identical to] God, but rather with a life of our own, before and for God, [this essence] stays intact, even when God will be all in all. . . . That God has posited personal spirits (persönliche Geister), is not merely a phase of His life-process, which He seeks to exceed. Instead, this is the lasting form (Gestalt) of His life” (323). For Heidegger’s “estrangement from the Catholic Church,” see the second chapter in Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, esp. page 37, where Wolfe excerpts a telling remark from Heidegger’s famous letter to Engelbert Krebs (dated: January 9, 1919). Apropos Heidegger’s persistent aversion to “universal history,” see also Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 136. Cf. also (GA26 264). For Heidegger’s contrast between Geschichte and Historie, see note 10, above. The View of Life, 29–30. In this place, I have hyphenated the English term “ob-ject” to indicate that Scheler’s deliberate use of the German term Gegenstand (instead of Objekt) points to an active “counter-presence” and not to a passive “object” fully determined by the epistemic structures and strictures of rational cognition. As Scheler’s surrounding formulations make clear, a genuine religious act and its intentional ob-ject stand in a relation of dynamic reciprocity. Thus, a religious act is not an imposition. Instead of dominating its object, it can only be “fulfilled,” if its intended ob-ject accedes to the attempt. Aside from the important detail about “ob-ject” [Gegenstand] versus “object” (and some minor changes in wording), my present rendering of this crucial passage is based on Bernard Noble’s translation in: Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man, 253–54. The original German reads: “Religion [ist] ebenso sehr Übung als Erkenntnis.” In this passage, Scheler explicitly acknowledges Pascal. Cf. Frédérick Vandenberghe, “Immanent Transcendence in Georg Simmel’s Sociology of Religion.” Here I have adopted Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt’s translation. See Schelling, On the Essence of Human Freedom, 20. For the original, see Schelling (F 21–22). Cf. also the subsequent passage (GA49 172) where “anthropomorphy” is put in question rather than presented as a clear philosophical shortcoming on Schelling’s part. Here I disagree with John Cooper, when he surmises: “Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976), the most famous German philosopher of the century, wrote too little about God to be classified conclusively. But his occasional theological statements strongly suggest panentheism, and his philosophy is highly conducive to it.” Cooper, Panentheism, 214. Even with the disclaimer about Heidegger eluding conclusive classification in place, the present statement is misleading. Of course,

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part of Cooper’s overall endeavor is to show that there is a variety of panentheisms scattered across the Western philosophical tradition. Yet, having identified Schelling as one of the “godfathers of modern panentheism” earlier (in the fourth chapter of his study), he now juxtaposes Heidegger with Tillich in the passage just quoted. If we place Heidegger on the trajectory leading from Schelling to Tillich, next to Scheler and Simmel, then we have to conclude that Heidegger is not a panentheist, at least not in the same sense as these other thinkers are. Cooper’s study remains impressive in its breadth, and his seventh chapter in particular is very perceptive and helpful. These substantial merits notwithstanding, the short discussion on Heidegger ranks among the weakest segments of Cooper’s volume. 27 We already noted how Simmel tends to casually rank Spinoza above Schelling. As for Scheler, his overall estimate of Schelling appears strongly influenced by Eduard von Hartmann. Especially in those passages where Scheler comments on Schelling and Hartmann in tandem, he readily acknowledges Hartmann’s great merits as a historian of philosophy, who, however, lacked any “metaphysical originality.” Instead, Hartmann’s thought is judged to be an epigonal echo of Schelling’s gnosticism, as Scheler sees it (EM 128–29). Generally, Scheler groups Schelling’s and Hartmann’s versions of gnosticism among the “more noble” (edleren) instances of pantheism as opposed to its “baser” (gemeineren) versions, which he associates with Ernst Haeckel’s and Wilhelm Ostwald’s monism. To this one should add that, for Scheler, even the more noble examples of pantheism remain deficient. This is because, across any distinction between its “noble” and “base” variants, the “unmistakable sign of pantheism” remains the following: “Either the spiritual individuality of man is explained in terms of the confinement that the human body imposes on the knowing subject, which is otherwise identical in all humans; or this spiritual individuality is assigned to the merely contingent phenomenal content of empirical consciousness” (EM 109).

Chapter 3 1 For one of the most comprehensive and instructive surveys of the literature on this issue, see the third chapter in Laurence Hemming’s Heidegger’s Atheism. For independent reasons, which fall outside the compass of this chapter, I do not agree with the central thesis of Hemming’s book. Hemming argues that the religious aspect of Heidegger’s thought culminates in a conception of private religion which, paradoxically, issues a call for personal a-theistic piety. In short, Hemming places Heidegger close to negative theology and then proceeds to interpret him as a religious existentialist of sorts, for whom the most pious comportment consists in a staunch noncommitment to any definite God conception, which would restrict

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and concretize the divine unduly. Reading Heidegger as close to negative theology is generally credible. Yet Hemming’s philosophical individualism ignores how Heidegger remained adamant that we must not read him as an “existentialist.” Similarly, Hemming glosses over the fact that Heidegger repeatedly cautioned his readers that Dasein does not simply refer to persons or individual agents. These potential drawbacks notwithstanding, Hemming’s commentary on the scholarly evolution of different interpretations of Heidegger’s “turn” remains very useful. 2 Cf. Richard Wolin, “Introduction: ‘Over the Line,’” in The Heidegger Controversy. 3 Holger Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?,” 446. 4 In their first 1793 inception, Schiller’s Letters comprised a series of nine, which were destroyed in a fire. About two years later, he wrote and published the substantially expanded series that has been handed down to us. 5 Cited in Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?,” 452n.109. 6 Included in Heidegger’s Holzwege, this essay will be examined in Chapter 5. 7 Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?,” 492. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 493. 10 Presently, Heidegger’s Schiller seminar is only available as an unauthorized version published by the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft (German Schiller Society) in Marbach, in 2005. The authorized version of the Schiller seminar is projected to be included in Heidegger’s Collected Works as Volume 84, which will consists of two or three subvolumes, though the exact organization does not appear finalized at this point. The first subvolume GA84.1 appeared in 2013, but it does not contain the Schiller seminar. According to the author’s personal email correspondence with the Klostermann publishing house, work on subvolume GA84.2 has begun, though it is likely to take a few more years until publication. As of now, scholars have to rest content with the unauthorized Marbach edition. For the purposes of my present inquiry, this is not a significant drawback. Even though it will be interesting to compare the presently available version to the forthcoming edition by Klostermann, my primary focus of interpretation lies with Heidegger’s essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” To be sure, one cannot preclude the possibility that the Klostermann edition of the Schiller seminar will bring relevant new details to light, once it becomes available. 11 Here I am using the older and still useful translation by Wilkinson and Willoughby. My present reference to the “German tradition” roughly dovetails with Kai Hammermeister’s pithy survey of sources in The German Aesthetic Tradition. 12 Wulf Koepke, “The Reception of Schiller,” 278. 13 For two of the passages where one would have expected at least a short acknowledgment of Schiller, see Heidegger (H 11–12, 14–15). 14 Besides the title notion of “origin” (Ursprung) and the aforementioned notion of “strife” (Streit) and “play” (Spiel), the main entries of Heidegger’s analytical

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vocabulary in the Origin essay include “matter” (Stoff; das Stoffliche) and “form” (Form); “sensibility” (Sinnlichkeit), the nearly untranslatable Gestalt (for details, cf. main body of the text, below), and the multiple variations of “poetizing” and “poetry” (dichten and Dichtung). As I discuss in the second half of this chapter, Heidegger will morph Schiller’s dynamic pair of form and matter into the pair of world and earth. In this regard, the Origin essay emerges as Heidegger’s most sustained philosophical confrontation with the legacy of Weimar aesthetics. 15 Cassirer, Essay on Man, 167. 16 “Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck.” See § 15 in Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 79. 17 To be precise, the term “Ge-stell” actually does occur in the essay at hand, but it is clear that Heidegger had not yet vested it with the ominous meanings of his 1940s conception of das Gestell. Rather, in Origin, this term is used in a neutral or even positive sense in close proximity to Gestalt and Fuge—not in the specifically negative sense of an ungodly mode of revelation which objectifies nature. For this isolated and neutral use of “Ge-stell,” see Heidegger (H 50). 18 For Heidegger’s first mentioning of the “conceptual pair: matter—form” (Begriffspaar Stoff–Form) see H (11). Occasionally, Heidegger also refers to the “braiding of form and matter” (Verflechtung von Form und Stoff) (H 13). 19 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 132. 20 Cf. the translators’ “Glossary” by Wilkinson and Willoughby in Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 331. The Twelfth Letter contains Schiller’s famous account of two fundamental drives that animate our human nature: the form drive (Formtrieb) and the sense drive (Stofftrieb). Apropos this distinction, Frederick Beiser means to debunk a common prejudice in Schiller studies, namely the notion that Schiller’s drive theory was inspired by Fichte. Contrary to this lineage of influence, Beiser holds that Schiller’s actual source of inspiration was K. L. Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (1789). See Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 139n.39. For the relation of form drive and sense drive, in general, see: Ibid., 138–39. 21 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 188. 22 See, for example: “I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 17. 23 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 214/215. 24 Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 45–46. 25 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 39. 26 This important slide from “saying” (Sagen) to “saga” (Sage) recurs in Heidegger’s essay “Why Poets?” For details, see Chapter 6. 27 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 183. 28 Janae Sholtz touches on this issue in her study The Invention of a People, where she points to the specter of “metaphysical racism” (211, 219) in connection with

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Heidegger’s work during the 1930s. Yet she tends to exempt Heidegger’s Origin essay from any such tendencies toward discrimination. Overall, Sholtz subscribes to a maturation thesis, as we might call it, to the effect that Heidegger’s thinking underwent a salutary shift. Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, Sholtz concedes, is still mired in militaristic rhetoric, while the Origin essay already points the way out of this thicket. Pace Sholtz, I argue that crucial tendencies of metaphysical discrimination carry over from the Introduction to Metaphysics to the Origin essay, even if the rhetorical delivery of the latter text is less abrasive. 29 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 141–42; cf. 48, 87. The language of “rank” recurs throughout Heidegger’s text. Even if we take into account that military expressions were more frequent in common parlance at the time, the emphasis that Heidegger puts on rank remains striking. 30 “The fact that the development of Western grammar began with Greek meditation on the Greek language gives this process its whole meaning. For along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.” Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 60. What is at stake here is “the establishment and formation of the whole Western spirit.” Ibid., 59–60. 31 See, for example, the essay “A Dialogue on Language” in: Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 1–54. Compare this to his remarks about the French language in the Spiegel interview. 32 There is a long-standing debate in which several critics of Heidegger’s text have observed that the shoes in van Gogh’s painting are not actually peasant shoes. For a useful synopsis of this debate, see Dennis Schmidt, Between Word and Image. For the purposes of my discussion, nothing is riding on this issue. That is, even if the shoes in van Gogh’s painting were indeed peasant shoes, the problems pertaining to Heidegger’s apparent leaning toward spiritual elitism would remain intact. 33 See Popper, Objective Knowledge. 34 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 204/205, 218/219. 35 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 75–76. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, 77–78. Here I am indebted to Paul Bishop and Roger Stephenson. While they do not contrast Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with Heidegger’s artwork essay, they emphasize the significance of this particular passage in Zarathustra, within the context of Nietzsche’s relation to Weimar classicism. See Bishop and Stephenson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism, 126–30. Here the authors underscore the connection between Nietzsche and Schiller’s Letters, which I deem indispensable for putting the philosophical stakes of Heidegger’s Origin essay in perspective. 36 For Heidegger’s characterization of poets as essentially geistig, see: Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 64, 67, 88–94. 37 John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger, 183.

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38 See Heidegger, Erläuterungen, 86 and esp. 129. In fact, Heidegger had already made this point in an important passage in his first Schelling lecture: “Just as little as the poetry of the poet is the thinking of the thinker merely the course of ‘experiences’ in an individual man in the occurrence of which then certain experiences (works) get isolated. Where they are essential, thinking and writing poetry are a world occurrence [Weltvorgang], and this not only in the sense that something is happening within the world which has significance for the world, but also in the sense in which and through which the world itself arises anew in its actual origins and rules as world” (ST 58/GA42 100). 39 Heidegger, Erläuterungen, 114. 40 Walter Kaufmann, “Heidegger’s Castle,” 361. 41 Kaufmann, “Heidegger’s Castle,” 360. 42 Heidegger, Erläuterungen, 114. 43 Paul Althaus shares this central conviction. See Die letzten Dinge, 41. 44 Here I part ways with Herman Philipse and Mark Wrathall. While these commentators disagree on many things (including Heidegger’s overall stature as a thinker), they both posit that Heidegger’s construal of world disclosure effected through sacred-poetic words resembles Pascal’s conception of a life-in-faith inspired by Scripture. See Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 224–29, esp. 225 (where he remarks on “open[ing] ourselves up to his [God’s] grace”) and 227 (where he refers to “faith, as a rebirth or transformation (Umstellung) of Dasein”). Cf. the seventh chapter in Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, esp. 158, where he posits a parallelism between the later Heidegger’s view of language and “Pascal’s phenomenology of Christian life.” According to Wrathall, the later Heidegger and Pascal take the same approach to sacred-poetic language: “On this view, language is understood in terms of world disclosure, and the revealed word is taken to function by orienting us to the world in such a way that it can disclose itself to us anew” (ibid.). At this point in Wrathall’s discussion, it is not yet clear whether the effect of the revealed word on the believer(s) is to be understood primarily in solitary or in communal terms. Subsequently, this is made explicit, though, when Wrathall concludes: “The ordinary world shows up as a setting for the communion of believers. When the poem really works, it shows us how the objects in a Christian world hang together, how things could matter to us if we had the right disposition for the world” (169). Contra Wrathall, I would argue that this last statement does indeed fit Pascal, but not the later Heidegger. What both Philipse and Wrathall ignore is Heidegger’s unyielding impersonalism in matters of revelation as well as the preprophetic quality of his featuring of Hölderlin as the “poet of the poet.” For the latter, cf. note 46, below. 45 I will return to this crucial feature of Heidegger’s hook near the end of Chapter 6. 46 Heidegger, Erläuterungen, 34.

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47 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 182. 48 Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 7. Here, I have adopted the wording of Kaufmann’s translation in “Heidegger’s Castle,” 344. 49 To be clear, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens was first published in 1954. My point is that, in terms of its content, the present remark about “coming too late for the gods and too early for Being” can serve as an epigrammatic statement of Heidegger’s approach to artisan thinking and its characteristic style of suspenseful anticipation—an approach that came into its own during the decisive decade from 1936 to 1946.

Chapter 4 1 Hachmeister, Heidegger’s Testament. 2 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, 245. Recently, Faye’s often polemical Heidegger critique has come under critical scrutiny and many of his claims are now contested by prominent scholars in the field, especially by Thomas Sheehan, who views integral parts of Faye’s delivery as borderline “fraudulent.” See Sheehan, “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud.” Similarly, in her highly instructive study of Heidegger’s relation to theology, Judith Wolfe groups Faye with Victor Farias under the umbrella of “inflammatory polemic” unfit for serious critique of Heidegger’s project. Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 99, 119n.1. While these objections to Faye must not be taken lightly, they do not apply to Faye’s present observation about the difficulties in assessing Heidegger’s complex reception of Nietzsche; especially since Faye rather self-critically points to lingering problems with Heidegger’s legacy in France, problems from which Faye himself may not be exempt. 3 Cf. Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology, 94, 99–100. 4 See, for example, the following passage in the Letter on Humanism: “Yet Being— what is Being? It “is” It itself. The thinking that is to come must learn to experience that and to say it. “Being”—that is not God and not a cosmic ground [Weltgrund]. Being is essentially farther than all beings and is yet nearer to the human being than every being, be it a rock, an animal, a work of art, a machine, be it an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest for the human being” (W 331/P 252) [translation modified]. 5 One of the most striking passages in this regard is contained in the second volume of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures (NII 333/N2 226). I will return to this seminal passage in the main body of this chapter, in the section concerned with Nietzsche’s version of “classical” nihilism. 6 Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 142.

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7 Heidegger does mention Richard Wagner as exemplary of “Romantic pessimism,” but these references in passing do not explain how Wagner might qualify as “sentimental” or “half-Christian.” For an illuminating discussion of the full complexity of Wagner’s thought, see: Julian Young, The Philosophies of Richard Wagner. 8 Speaking of a new national religion here needs a qualifier. Within the romantic constellation under consideration, different contributors varied in how they emphasized and negotiated the national, European, and cosmopolitan aspects of their respective visions for a new unorthodox faith. Novalis’s (Friedrich von Hardenberg’s) oscillation between nationalist and cosmopolitan formulations is symptomatic in this regard. See Beiser, German Idealism, Part III, chapter 3, esp. 421 ff. 9 Norton, Secret Germany, 587. 10 Cf. the reference to Kusch, Psychologism in my Introduction. 11 Overbeck, Über die Christlichkeit. Löwith is citing the second edition published in 1903. Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur. Nietzsche and Overbeck, Briefwechsel. 12 For Löwith’s instructive comment on how Nietzsche’s presence factored in Overbeck’s “abdication from the fraternity of theologians,” see Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 383. Conversely, this line of influence is mirrored in Nietzsche’s dedication of his first Untimely Meditation to Overbeck. 13 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe: Band I, 437–38. 14 Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 378. 15 Cf. Fischer, Protestantische Theologie, 24–26. 16 Jehle, Emil Brunner, 169–70. 17 Jehle quotes a letter from Brunner to Barth (dated January 28, 1925), in which Brunner speaks of Heidegger’s “etwas pöbelhaften Anrempelungen” (somewhat rowdy-like jostling). Jehle, Emil Brunner, 238. And Gotthard Jasper relates that Brunner did not find any real comfort in the fact that, apparently, his friend Paul Althaus had been treated even “more rudely” (“noch rüpelhafter”) in Marburg on a previous occasion. Jasper, Paul Althaus, 159. To be fair, both Jehle and Jasper also note Paul Tillich’s confrontational comportment during Brunner’s talk in Marburg, which Brunner describes in terms of “sharp polemics” (“scharfe Polemik”). So Heidegger was not alone in striking an aggressive posture during these heated debates. 18 Jehle, Emil Brunner, 217, 226–29. Here Jehle sketches the context in which Emil Brunner’s 99-page-long treatise Religionsphilosophie evangelischer Theologie was published in 1927, the same year as Heidegger’s Being and Time. Paul Tillich, for his part, had written a contribution to this newly emerging genre in 1925 already. See Tillich, “Religionsphilosophie.” Even if these two thinkers did not see eye to eye on many issues, in the company of Tillich, Brunner cannot be viewed as a “Swiss

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outsider” to the German theological scene during these years. Brunner’s book Die Mystik und das Wort (Mysticism and the Word), which was published by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen in 1924 was a best seller that turned Brunner into a theological celebrity of sorts. In fact, with this early work he appeared to have “out-Barth-ed” Karl Barth. Cf. Jehle, Emil Brunner, 192. 19 Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 379. Here Löwith is citing from page 34 of the 1903 edition of Overbeck’s text. 20 Overbeck’s full statement reads: “Thus I confront the situation quite differently than, for example, Kierkegaard, who attacked Christianity although he spoke for it. I refuse to attack it even though I myself stand aside and speak as a theologian, even though that is just what I would rather not be. Kierkegaard speaks under the paradoxical pretense of being a reformer of Christianity; I would not consider doing so, but neither would I consider reforming theology, which I claim as my vocation. I acknowledge its worthlessness in itself, and am not inclined to deny its present state of dilapidation; I am opposed to its basic principles. For the moment, I would have no reservations about letting Christianity completely alone.” Cited in Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, 379–80. 21 Heidegger deliberately uses the pleonastic phrase “anfänglicher Anfang” to vest the notion of beginning with connotations of dynamic initiation or opening, similar to the notion of “origin” (Ursprung) deployed in his 1936 essay on art. 22 Speaking of a red herring here can be justified in light of Heidegger’s own remarks. For one of the most telling passages, see the full citation from (NI 215/N1 213) in note 23, below. 23 Heidegger’s statement in Nietzsche I is worth quoting in full. In the context of Nietzsche’s new interpretation of “sensuousness” (Sinnlichkeit), Heidegger moves the spotlight from Plato to Leibniz when he notes: “We would not have to go far to find proof to show that this conception of beings is precisely that of Leibniz, except that Nietzsche eliminates the latter’s theological metaphysics, i.e., his Platonism. All being is in itself perspectival-perceptual, and that means, in the sense now delineated, ‘sensuous’” (NI 215/N1 213). 24 For the reference (NII 412), there is no corresponding passage in the English translation, since the latter does not include the 1941 essay “Metaphysics as History of Being” (Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins) from the German edition. 25 Usually “Tatsache” is translated simply as “fact.” Yet, here, the translator seems to have opted for a phrase that would capture the dynamic and transformatory connotations, which the expression “Tatsache” assumes in the present context. 26 For some background information about concerns over Althaus’s theological compromise with Nazi politics, see Jasper, Paul Althaus, 98–104; 297–318. 27 Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 58–59.

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28 Here I have modified the English standard translation: “aesthetic condition” is a better rendering of “ästhetischer Zustand” (compared to the potentially misleading phrase “asthetic state”). 29 Cf. the previous reference to Zammito (KHA 231), in Chapter 1. 30 For one of the best examinations of the philosophical affinities between Nietzsche, Goethe, and Schiller, see: Bishop and Stephenson, Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism, esp. their third chapter “The Aesthetic Gospel of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.” 31 For Heidegger’s early critique of Simmel, see Chapter 2. As was already mentioned in the Introduction and several other places, the phrase “the beyond of history” is especially prominent in Paul Althaus’s study The Last Things (1922). 32 See Heidegger’s comments on Nietzsche’s motif of art as the great “stimulant” of life (NI 73, 130/N1 75, 130). 33 As mentioned in an earlier note, for the reference (NII 412) there is no corresponding passage in the English translation, since the latter does not include the 1941 essay “Metaphysics as History of Being” (Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins) from the German edition. 34 The English standard version renders “die Würde des Seins” as “the worth of Being.” Yet to preserve the reverential overtones of Heidegger’s diction, “Würde” is more accurately translated as “dignity.”

Chapter 5 1 Jean Grondin, “Der deutsche Idealismus und Heideggers Verschärfung.” 2 Grondin, “Der deutsche Idealismus und Heideggers Verschärfung,” 43. 3 “Denn die These: Das Wesen des Seins ist die Zeit—ist das gerade Gegenteil von dem, was Hegel in seiner ganzen Philosophie zu erweisen suchte” (GA32 209). For “Onto-theo-logie,” see (GA32 142). Both cited in Grondin, “Der deutsche Idealismus und Heideggers Verschärfung,” 53. 4 Heidegger, Contributions, 167 (GA65 213–4). Cf. (GA32 190). Similarly, in section VI of “Overcoming Metaphysics,” included in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Heidegger asserts: “Since Hegel’s death (1831) everything is but reactionary movement [Gegenbewegung], not only in Germany but in Europe.” 5 See (GA32 208–11). 6 To be clear, “Zwiesprache” is a common term in German, where it refers to dialogical situations of two people talking to one another (often in a private setting, at the exclusion of other parties). My point here is that Heidegger takes an ordinary term and vests it with philosophical meanings that are not ordinary at all. Of course, by choosing an artificial neologism like “inter-talk,” the unassuming ring of the German term is lost. At the same time, Heidegger’s own delivery in the original

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Notes text is not exactly smooth, when he compiles various terms that seem nearly synonymous. See the next quote in the main body of the text. Confronted with Heidegger’s strangely pleonastic wording at the beginning of this passage, we can sympathize with the translator’s struggle, when he renders “das Sichversammeln des Gespräches der Zwiesprache des Geistes mit seiner Parusie” as “the self-gathering of the talk of the dialogue of spirit with its parousia.” For the reasons just mentioned, I propose to translate “Zwiesprache” with “inter-talk” rather than with “dialogue.” Kenneth Haynes’s translation is commendable in its effort to stay close to the German, but in the present case such literalism runs the risk of hindering philosophical understanding. Ibid. Full quotation provided below. For another passage, where Heidegger directly cites Hegel’s remark on “pain” (Schmerz), see (GA32 201–02). Cf. the previous reference, in Chapter 3, to Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 142. Cf. Chapter 1, where we followed Heidegger in examining Schelling’s account of how God “absolves” His inner history (ST 109/GA42 191). See Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 177. Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1929) in Wegmarken. See W (115, 118). Cf. also the Letter on Humanism included in the same volume. See W (324–27). See (GA68 123–29). For a particularly pensive formulation in Heidegger’s evolving references to a “turning,” see the “Letter to a young student” (dated June 18, 1950), in Vorträge und Aufsätze, 178. Cf. also (H 208/OBT 159). The clearly religious overtones of Heidegger’s wording are lost in Haynes’s translation, which renders “Offenbarung” as “disclosure” (OBT 85). Here we face one of Haynes’s more severe translation errors, for he inverts Heidegger’s meaning. Heidegger states that man will be given over to the truth of Being, whereas Haynes writes that “it is being itself whose truth will be given over to man” (OBT 85). Grammatically, this is clearly false. In the present segment, Haynes’s translation would be accurate only if the German phrase in question was “dem Menschen” but the text has “der Mensch.” For one of Heidegger’s clearest statements in this regard, see (GA68 124). This overcoming of the active/passive distinction will also prove crucial for Heidegger’s discussion of a new humanitas, in the Letter on Humanism. See Chapter 7. Cf. also (GA68 105, 123). For some select comments on how Troeltsch and Harnack sought to distinguish their views from each other, in uneasy proximity to Hegel, see Stanley, Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger, 12–14. Heidegger will return to this Hegelian metaphor in a 1951/2 lecture. See Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, 52.

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23 For the reasons stated earlier in this study, in Chapter 1, I continue to capitalize “Spirit,” which differs from the translation offered in Pathmarks. 24 As an aside, we should note that the idea of God “thinking me into existence” does not by itself render Descartes an idealist of George Berkeley’s ilk, since Descartes’s dualism (in Meditation Six) preserves the notion of a physical world populated by spatially extended, three-dimensional objects. However, the way Descartes salvages the external world is rooted in additional claims about God’s integrity of character, namely His nondeceiver status. But these claims, it seems to me, are not directly relevant for Heidegger’s critical comparison of Descartes and Nietzsche in the present context. 25 Julian Young translates Entgötterung with “loss of the gods,” which is a viable alternative. However, since Heidegger’s point is to expose Entgötterung as a modern-metaphysical trend, which is more fundamental than human psychology, the expression “de-deification” strikes me as appropriate, not despite but because of its ominously impersonal ring. 26 In fact, Heidegger’s list of deplorable “modern” trends is more extensive, but for our present purpose of examining Heidegger’s co-engagement of Hegel and Nietzsche in Holzwege, the aforementioned three trends are the primary ones. 27 Ibid., 91. 28 See, for example, the fourth chapter in Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicisim, and Sebastian Luft, “Diltheys Kritik an der Wissenschaftstheorie der Neukantianer,” 194–98. Luft is sensitive to Dilthey’s struggle in working out a conception of historical reasoning that could serve as a standard for scientific knowledge in the humanities. According to Luft, this effort confronted Dilthey with a precarious balancing act between dogmatic universalism and naturalistic relativism. Acknowledging that Dilthey may not have succeeded in all his writings to steer clear of these extremes, Luft still finds great potential in Dilthey’s approach. Specifically, Luft emphasizes an important point of contact between Dilthey’s approach and Cassirer’s subsequent conception of a “pluralized a priori” (197). Cf. also our observations in Chapter 3, concerning Cassirer’s interpretation of Goethe’s remark on art as a “second nature,” which construed the understanding as an inherently pluralistic faculty, whose creativity can spawn a multitude of different rational orders. 29 The published text is based on a speech that Heidegger gave on multiple occasions during the years 1939 and 1940. 30 (GA4 106, 150–51). 31 See, for example, (H 110) and (W 323, 329). 32 In the original: “Das Heilige entscheidet anfänglich zuvor über die Menschen und über die Götter, ob sie sind und wer sie sind und wie sie sind und wann sie sind. Kommendes wird in seinem Kommen gesagt durch das Rufen” (GA4 76).

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Chapter 6 1 Julian Young has examined this trajectory in Nietzsche in instructive detail. Thus, we can witness Nietzsche’s commentary moving from unreserved commendation in The Birth to ambivalent praise in his Fourth Meditation, before launching his polemic in The Wagner Case, the very title of which signals both a legal trial and a psychological report. According to Young, Nietzsche’s own standards for what would count as desirable cultural reform remain rather constant. What changes is his estimate of Wagner’s initiative as fitting the bill or failing to do so. “The Wagnerian ideal remains, but qua man and artist, Wagner now fails to match up to it.” Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion, 160. For intellectual-historical background information, cf. also: Borchmeyer and Salaquarda, Nietzsche und Wagner. 2 “For Nietzsche . . . the central problem was how what we see as social forms of life are able to emerge from what we regard as nature, while keeping in mind that the distinction between social life and nature was merely of a heuristic kind, following in the footsteps of particular metaphysical commitments.” Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism, 192–93. 3 Ibid., 190. 4 For “uneven growth,” see: His, Unsere Körperform, 19–31, 66–118; cited in: Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism, 190n.18. 5 See Chapter 1. 6 As Jeanette Redensek relates: “In 1906 Haeckel’s followers and admirers organized the Monist League, an association of scientists, doctors, writers, social reformers, and government officials, which became one of the most prominent organs for the application of biological theory to the social sphere. Within a few years, the Monist League had over 6,000 members. Through a monthly journal, Der Monismus, and numerous auxiliary publications and pamphlet series, Monism developed into a widespread intellectual social movement.” Redensek, Manufacturing Gemeinschaft, 232. 7 Ibid., 233. 8 Ibid., 239. 9 See, for example, the very critical commentary on Haeckel as a “race hygienist” (Rassenhygieniker) in: Kühler, Die Internationale der Rassisten, 65. 10 For one of Heidegger’s explicit statements of ranking Rilke lower than Hölderlin, see H (272). 11 “Die Dichtung Rilkes, die von der abgemilderten Metaphysik Nietzsches überschattet bleibt” (H 282). 12 For further historical details, cf. Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 117. 13 Cf. Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes.

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14 Instead of explaining why this late fragment deserves the weight he assigns to it, and why we should deem it compatible with the Duino Elegies, Heidegger simply decrees: “For the time being there is no need to say another word about these verses” (Vorderhand braucht ein weiteres Wort zu diesen Versen nicht gesagt zu werden) (H 310). 15 Cited from: Rilke, Selected Poems, 163. 16 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 14. 17 Ibid., 34–5 / Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, 33. 18 In fact, in the passage under consideration Buber anticipates a reductivist’s interpretation of his proposal in terms of “animal action” and underlines that this is not what he has in mind. Buber, I and Thou, 27. 19 I adopt this phrase from Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, 44. As Young notes in this place, in ordinary German Gestell means “frame,” “rack,” “shelf,” or “stand.” Apparently for rhetorical effect, when Heidegger entered this term for the first time into his philosophical dictionary, on the occasion of a public lecture given at the Technical University in Munich in 1953 (first published in 1954), he remarked that Gestell can also refer to a skeleton. See Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 23. However, this last semantic nuance must be considered regional. Certainly, not every native speaker would make this connection, unless Gestell is further specified in terms of bones as Knochengestell or, more likely, as Knochengerüst. Heidegger then tweaks the ordinary, static meaning of Gestell as a “frame” broadly conceived and construes it as a modality of disclosure which “sets things up” for us, so that whatever we experience will show up for us in a special way. For further details concerning the ominous and all-engulfing quality of this revelatory mode, see the next reference to Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, below. 20 See H (308)/OBT (205). The German term “Grundworte” could also be translated as “foundational words.” 21 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 132 / Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 156. 22 Here I am indebted to Young’s pithy analysis of the different meanings involved in Heidegger’s understanding of Gestell. Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, 44–55, esp. 53–54. Young unpacks Heidegger’s account of Gestell as the “essence” (Wesen) of modern technology. What this entails according to Young is that Gestell not only engenders but actually “over-determines” the violence of modern technology (53). First, Gestell effaces our ability to experience beings (fellow humans, other sentient creatures, and inanimate objects) as anything but resources waiting to be consumed (in Heidegger’s sense of Bestand); and, second, in doing so Gestell effaces our capacity for respecting beings in their own right, that is, independent of our own agenda. In this sense, Gestell effects an experiential double-blindness, that is both cognitive and emotional in nature. So understood, Gestell is a horizon of disclosure that reveals a leveled, spiritually one-dimensional world in which

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everything is, in principle, up for grabs. Finally, once we are so double-blinded, we no longer notice that any such leveling of experience has taken place at all. The fully desensitized person can no longer recognize her own condition and thus “forgets” the transformation. In this sense, Gestell is both total in its leveling effect on our experience of the surrounding world and self-disguising in its damaging effect on us. In fact, for Heidegger, the totalizing and self-disguising qualities of Gestell are two sides of the same coin, that is, two inseparable aspects of the same mode of revelation. Cf. Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 30–31. In the original German, Heidegger steers clear of overtly religious connotation, when he invents the peculiar expression Entbergung (usually translated as “unconcealment”) as a secularsounding alternative to Offenbarung (revelation). This is not a new invention on his part. In the 1930s, Heidegger had already conjured the same kind of terminology, which he pushed to extremes in Beiträge zur Philosophy (Contributions to Philosophy) (1936–1938). The mutuality of totalization and self-disguise within the dynamics of Gestell (which Heidegger occasionally hyphenates as Ge-stell) is hinted, once more, in: Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 23–27. 23 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 64. 24 In the present passage, Heidegger uses both phrases: “Haus des Seins” and “Tempel des Seins” (H 306). 25 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 243. 26 To quote the German in full: “Allein, ist denn der Mensch nicht derjenige, der seinem Wesen nach die Sprache hat und es ständing mit ihr wagt? Gewiß. . . . Dann können aber die Wagenderen nicht nur die Sagenden sein. Das Sagen der Wagenderen muß eigens die Sage wagen” (H 311) [emphasis added]. 27 Gotthold Klee, Deutsche Heldensagen. 28 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 228–29. 29 Cf. my observations on “preprophetic” discourse, in Chapter 3. 30 Drewermann, Geschichten gelebter Menschlichkeit, 39–43. 31 Drewermann, Geschichten gelebter Menschlichkeit, 41. 32 Rilke, The Book of Hours, translated by Susan Ranson, 180/181–182/183 (duallanguage edition; the selected passage in English is on pages 181 and 183). For Drewermann’s quote of this segment in German, see his Geschichten gelebter Menschlichkeit, 42–43.

Chapter 7 1 For an instructive overview, see: Brenner, “Nachkriegsliteratur.” 2 This discussion regained additional momentum through the “swastika graffities” (Hakenkreuzschmierereien) of 1959; see: Albrecht, “Die Massenmedien,” 235.

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3 Here Cassirer comments specifically on the dangers of political idolatry, which connects his thought to that of Tillich and Picard. 4 Picard, Hitler in uns selbst, especially 27–28. 5 See, particularly, Hitler in uns selbst, 23–24. Cf. Tillich, “Das Dämonische.” 6 Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 292–93. 7 For Picard’s way of contrasting Heidegger und Jaspers with Kierkegaard, see: Picard, Hitler in uns selbst, 170–73. 8 “Das Gesicht Hitlers,” ibid., 68–75. 9 Ibid., 26. 10 For these four waves, which are not identified by number, see: Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger, 7–8. 11 Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?” For the controversial character of Faye’s book, cf. the note appended to the opening quote from Faye, in my Chapter 4. Zaborowski’s volume was engaged, selectively, in Chapter 3. 12 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 213. For the hotly debated details concerning the editorial history of this phrase, see: the “Translators’ Introduction” to this text. Cf. Richard Wolin, “Introduction: ‘Over the Line’” in The Heidegger Controversy. 13 Another instructive commentary is provided by Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. In his third chapter, in particular, Rabinbach draws attention to Heidegger’s uneasy position in a burgeoning rivalry between the Nazi ideologues gathered around Rosenberg and a neo-classicist brand of Italian fascism that “idealized both elements of modernism in the arts and a Roman and Florentine past that competed with, if not overshadowed, the claims of ‘Nordic’ doctrinaires that blood and not culture was the source of German superiority” (107). In this context, the details provided by Rabinbach can effectively be read together with Sean McGrath’s observations to the effect that “Heidegger’s politics has striking affinities to Benito Mussolini’s style of ‘spiritual’ fascism.” Compared to Heidegger, “Mussolini’s fascism endorses a similar ‘spiritual’ view of a people, where spirit is not understood in any otherworldly sense, but as the moral character of a people galvanized through historical struggle.” See McGrath, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction, 98–99. Characterizing Heidegger’s conception of spirit as “not otherworldly” is appropriate insofar as Heidegger does not clearly commit to any salvific domain for all of humanity, beyond this world. Yet, this does not keep him from positing Being as a supra-historical source, from which different culture-nations receive their special assignments or missions. 14 Cf. also Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933. 15 See Andersch, “Getty oder die Umerziehung in der Retorte.”

236 16 17 18 19 20 21

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Tillich, “Das Dämonische,” 44–45. Ibid. 45. “The depth of the demonic is the dialectical in it.” Ibid., 46. For a comprehensive account of that period, see Hermann Glaser, The Rubble Years. As before, I continue to capitalize “Being” for Heidegger’s references to “das Sein.” Karl Christian Führer points to significant discrepancies between cities and rural areas, with respect to the actual numbers of destroyed houses and apartments (Wohnungen). See Führer, “Wohnungen.” 22 Addressing Jean Beaufret, as the recipient of the Letter, Heidegger implies that we may want to drop the term “humanism” from our philosophical vocabulary altogether, since it has lost its meaning (W 344–45). 23 See, for example, the concluding analysis in Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy, 181–89. 24 Translation modified. In the standard translation by Frank Capuzzi, the term “Offenbarkeit” is misleadingly rendered as “manifestation,” which fails to bring out the lingering religious overtones of Heidegger’s diction such that “revealed-ness” (Offenbarkeit) remains close to revelation (Offenbarung). 25 Heidegger’s term for “claim” is Anspruch. See esp. (W 329/P 251). Anspruch can also be translated as “demand,” “summons,” or “calling upon.” 26 Heidegger, Erläuterungen, 25. 27 Ibid., 30. 28 Ibid., 149–50. 29 For the distinction between poetic persona and biographical self, see Heidegger’s remarks in his interpretation of “Remembrance” (Erläuterungen 86 and esp. 129). 30 Cf. Heidegger’s double-edged remark: “Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by internationalism as individualism is by an ahistorical collectivism” (W 341/P 260). 31 For Heidegger’s blending of poet and prophet, see: Erläuterungen, 114. 32 Translation modified. Capuzzi translates “die es durchwaltende Dimension der Wahrheit des Seins” with “that dimension of the truth of being that thoroughly governs it.” Yet the connotations of durchwalten are more subtle than those of “to thoroughly govern,” which would be closer to a verb like beherrschen. Here, as in other places, Heidegger opts for terms that convey a dynamic relation of influence or even “infusion,” which cannot directly be translated into the idiom of political power, governance, and control. Hence, rendering durchwalten in terms of “pervading” strikes me as a better fit. 33 No fully satisfying translation of the German expressions Heidegger chooses is easily available in this case. Translating geheuer as “familiar” and un-geheuer

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as “unfamiliar,” as Frank Capuzzi does, omits the connotations of something “monstrous” that adhere to Un-geheuer used as a noun phrase. Ungeheuer in German means “monster.” Yet there is an asymmetry here, which Heidegger exploits. If the adjective geheuer is negated as nicht geheuer, it means something like “dubious,” “uncanny,” or “eerie.” However, if it is negated with the prefix un- and thus rendered ungeheuer it means “enormous,” “vast,” or “gigantic.” These additional meanings should be kept in mind, when reading Capuzzi’s translation, which is otherwise commendable in its smoothness. 34 Here, Deleuze and Guattari insert note 8 in their count, which reads: “On this complex device, cf. Thomas de Quincey, “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” in David Masson, ed., Collected Writings, vol. 4, pp. 340–41 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890).” Here I omit the additional Translator’s note, which provides the passage from Quincey’s text, including the technical details of Kant’s quaint device. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 72–73. 36 See the sections “Scheler’s religious phenomenology” and “Simmel on life’s immanent transcendence” in Chapter 2.

Chapter 8 1 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 61. 2 For details about the “curious history” of this essay’s publication, see Richard Wolin’s Introduction to Löwith’s text in The Heidegger Controversy, 167. 3 Here I have provided Macquarrie and Robinson’s standard translation. For Löwith’s reference to this passage, see The Heidegger Controversy, 169–70. 4 Ibid., 170. 5 See the reference to Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 292–93, in Chapter 7. 6 While it cannot stand in for the entire field of Heidegger studies, the volumes related to Heidegger’s work in the Cambridge Companion series, a well-established forum for leading scholars, are indicative of this situation. Sternberger’s name does not make it into the index of the volume on Heidegger’s philosophy overall, nor is he mentioned anywhere in the separate volume on Heidegger’s Being and Time. 7 Sternberger, Aus dem Wörterbuch. 8 Sternberger, Der verstandene Tod. 9 Ibid., 138. 10 Löwith, “The Political Implications,” 184. 11 Ibid. 12 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 144. 13 Ibid.

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14 Ibid., 145. 15 For the text of this speech, see: Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, 40–42. 16 Sternberger, Der verstandene Tod, 138. 17 Ibid. In Sternberger’s original wording: “Darin steht ‘der Tod’, dem alten Knochenmanne durchaus ähnlich, gänzlich auβerhalb, und der Blick seiner blicklosen Augen ist in keiner noch so “radikalen” Weise mehr zu “übernehmen.” In der Allegorie des ‘Memento mori’ aber gewinnt die Kontingenz des Todes sichtbare Gestalt, ohne darum nur um einen Deut vertrauter oder gefügiger zu werden: so erst recht vielmehr sperrt sie sich der existenzialen Auslegung und Erschlieβung, welche gleichwohl, da sie ja reden muβ, ständig gezwungen ist, sprachlich von ihr und sogar von Allegorie Gebrauch zu machen.” 18 At times, it seems as if Heidegger wants to use the term “Schicksal” primarily to describe the fate of individuals, while “Geschick” is reserved for the destiny of some social collective. Yet, as § 74 demonstrates, this terminological distinction is not reliable. Thus, Heidegger maintains the terminology of Dasein, which he variously invests with individual or collective overtones, and he keeps commenting on Dasein both in terms of “Schicksal” and in terms of “Geschick.” 19 Cf. my previous deployment of the expression “strategic ambiguity” in the discussion of the Letter on Humanism, in Chapter 7. 20 See Chapters 3 and 6, above. 21 John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude.” Carol White, Time and Death. 22 Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 274. 23 Ibid., 263. 24 Ibid., 263–64. 25 Ibid., 283n.7, and 286n.17. 26 Alston, “The Inductive Argument.” 27 It “is not clear how Heidegger—as a phenomenologist who must deliberately confine himself to what we are capable of experiencing concerning the phenomenon at issue—could avoid restricting himself to what Dasein can experience here, in this world. (Surely ‘near-death’ experiences, e.g., could not settle the question of whether there is an other-worldly beyond.) For that very reason, in fact, Heidegger is careful to acknowledge that the phenomenological necessity of methodologically privileging what Dasein can experience (in our being-here) with respect to death and demise remains neutral on the religious question of whether or not there is a life after demise.” Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 284n.13. 28 Ibid., 268. For the full quotation containing Thomson’s characterization of Heidegger as “thoroughly secular,” see the next block quote in the main body of the text. 29 Ibid., 267. 30 Ibid., 268.

Notes 31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40

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Ibid., 264. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 270–71. Charles Hartshorne acknowledges Schelling as one of the pioneering thinkers, who sought to “remove from the philosophy of religion those features that prevent a social interpretation of the relations of God to the world.” Hartshorne, Creative Experiencing, 141. Similarly, one year before the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Alfred North Whitehead gave his famous Lowell Lectures under the title Religion in the Making in 1926. While it is not apparent that Whitehead had read Schelling, some central passages in these lectures show a strong philosophical affinity to the later Schelling’s Trinitarian philosophy of revelation. Consider, for example, the subsection “III. A Metaphysical Description” in chapter III “Body and Spirit” where Whitehead proffers three formative elements to explain the ways in which the “temporal world” of our lived experience relates to the “allinclusive universe.” Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 88–93. What is at stake in this passage is the relation between humans qua “creatures” and “creativity” as well as the question of how God as Creator partakes in the experience of His creatures, which Whithead addresses elsewhere under the rubric of “consequent nature.” Incidentally, it was this notion which garnered some of Hartshorne’s strongest praise for Whitehead’s religious thought, other differences between the two thinkers notwithstanding. With a nod to Schelling’s self-declared student, Paul Tillich, Hartshorne wrote: “I am convinced that the best so far presented philosophical explication of this idea is Whitehead’s. . . . Our experiences, and those we can influence for better or worse, are all contributions to the Consequent Nature of God, by which Whitehead means that they add to the beauty of the universe as enjoyed by God, who is the genuine Center of the universe. In the words of Berdyaev, to which there is a parallel in Tillich, our lives ‘enrich the divine life itself ’.” Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation, 57. This central problem pertaining to Heidegger’s account of Jemeinigkeit, framed by his discussion of death, carries over from Being and Time to his subsequent 1929/30 Freiburg lecture, published as Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). See especially (GA29/30 428–9) (FCM 296). Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 269. Richard Swinburne, “Theistic Response,” 245. Adrienne Rich, Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 186. I owe this reference and the ideas treated in the present paragraph to Harry Frankfurt, On Truth, 81–83. For the comparison with Camus’s problematic presentation of Sisyphus, see: Weidler, “Daring to be Grateful.” Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 273. Equally unconvincing from my point of view is Thomson’s earlier formulation: “Heidegger’s solution . . . is that in the desolate

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experience he calls “death,” the self—temporarily cut off from the world in terms of which it usually understands itself—finds itself radically alone with itself, and so can lucidly comprehend itself in its entirety for the first time, since there is no worldly, futural component of itself to elude its self-transparent grasp.” Ibid., 266. 41 Cf. Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 1–28. 42 Compared to cases of advanced Alzheimer’s, certain coma patients may also be difficult to judge in this regard. As long as we assume or allow for the possibility that a particular coma patient still experientially registers—however imperceptibly—changes in her environment (including, for example, changes in emotional atmosphere when a visitor enters the room), then the coma patient can still be encountered as a person. 43 For the commonalities as well as remaining differences between Connolly, Butler, and Taylor, see: Stephen White, Sustaining Affirmation. White also includes the work of George Kateb in his discussion, but while Connolly for his part recognizes the value of Kateb’s thought, he distances himself from Kateb’s particular brand of individualism. 44 Connolly, Fragility of Things, especially chapter 4. 45 In this context, Connolly acknowledges his intellectual debt to recent contributions to the field of complexity theory. Thus, Connolly points to Terrence Deacon’s study Incomplete Nature as one of his main theoretical inspirations. 46 Cf. Lecture Three and Lecture Four in Bas van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance. 47 Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 269. 48 Ibid., 269–70. 49 Ibid., 269. 50 Here Thomson inserts endnote 29, in which he acknowledges Crowell, “Subjectivity.” 51 Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 271. 52 Cf. Julian Young, Schopenhauer, 55–88. 53 Young, Schopenhauer, 55–88. 54 Cf. Julian Young, Death of God, 37. 55 This is how Morgan Freeman’s character “Red” put it in the silver-screen classic Shawshank Redemption. 56 Thomson, “Death and Demise,” 271–72. 57 Ibid., 271. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 287n.28. 60 Ibid., 264. 61 Scheler made a similar point in his concise early criticism of Being and Time, the antisocial bent of which he found guilty of promoting a dangerous form of “Daseinsolipsism” (Daseinssolipsismus). Scheler, Späte Schriften, 260; for the “dangers” that

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Scheler discerns in Heidegger’s Dasein-analysis, see 268; cf. also 265–66, 293. For further instructive details concerning Scheler’s criticisms of Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis, see: Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Scheler’s Critique of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology,” in the anthology Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives, edited by Stephen Schneck.

Conclusion: Faith and Fanaticism after Heidegger 1 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 303. 2 Heidegger (NII 442, 445). In the most pertinent passages from his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger does not use the term “logistics,” but clearly this is what he has in mind when he complains: “In the form of the assertion, logos itself has become just another thing that one comes across. . . . So this handle for attaining truth can easily be grasped as a tool, organon, and the tool can easily be made handy in the proper way. . . . The true as the correct is now merely spread about and spread afar by way of discussion, instruction, and prescriptions, thereby becoming ever more leveled out. Logos must be made ready as a tool for this. The hour of the birth of logic has arrived” (last emphasis added). Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 201; cf. 126–32. For Heidegger’s subsequent criticism of “logistics” in the 1950s, see: Heidegger, Was heißt Denken?, 16. 3 Heidegger, Überlegungen, 8. 4 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 182. 5 For details see the “Translators’ Introduction” to Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphyiscs, vii–viii. 6 Heidegger, Überlegungen, 281–82. 7 For a gesture at distancing himself from “blind hero worship,” see: Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 39. 8 Tillich, Courage to Be, 149. In German: “Es war eine geschichtliche Funktion Heidegger’s, die existentialistische Analyse des Mutes, man selbst zu sein, radikaler und—historisch gesehen—zerstörerischer durchzuführen als irgendein anderer.” Tillich, Mut zum Sein, 113. 9 See Stefan Zweig, Struggle with the Demon. For Kleist’s literary violence, see, for example, Terry Eagleton’s commentary on the “political terrorism” embodied in the obsessive title character of Michael Kohlhaas. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers, 182–86. 10 The essay was originally published as “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache” in: Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache. For the English translation of this anthology (which omits one of the original essays titled “Die Sprache”) see: Heidegger, On the Way to Language. In the References section of this translation, Heidegger relates

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Notes

that the text of the essay “A Dialogue on Language” “originated in 1953/4, on the occasion of a visit by Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University, Tokyo.” This date has been contested by Reinhard May: “As we now know from Tezuka, however, his visit did not take place until March 1954.” See May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, 14. 11 Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 24. 12 Delivered less than three years after the publication of Being and Time, this vision is confirmed and deepened in Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (FCM 171–2; 281; 285; 295–6; 351). For the original, cf. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (GA29/30 254–55; 407; 414; 427–28; 510). 13 Christian Morgenstern, Alle Galgenlieder, 150.

Selected Bibliography Heidegger Volumes of the Gesamtausgabe Note: This section only lists volumes, for which there is no separate German edition included under “Single Works,” below. GA3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991. GA20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (1925). Ed. Petra Jaeger, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979. GA26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (1928). Ed. Klaus Held, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978, 1990 (2nd rev. edn). GA29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (1929–30). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. GA31 Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie (1930). Ed. Hartmut Tietjen, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982, 1994 (2nd edn). GA32 Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1930–31). Ed. I. Görland, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997. GA42 Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) (SS 1936). Ed. Ingrid Schüssler, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988. GA49 Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus (1941). Ed. Günter Seubold, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1991, 2006 (2nd rev. edn). GA60 Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (1918/19, WS 1920/21, and SS 1921). Eds. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995. GA63 Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität (1923). Ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2018 (3rd edn). GA65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–38). Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989, 1994 (2nd edn). GA68 Hegel (1938–39/1942). Ed. Ingrid Schüssler, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2009 (2nd edn).

Single Works Heidegger, Martin. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (1927). Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

244

Selected Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin. “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” (1946). In Wegmarken, 313–64. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. “Briefe Martin Heideggers an Julius Stenzel (1928–1932).” Heidegger Studies, 16 (2000): 11–33. Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (1936–1938). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011. Heidegger, Martin. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann RoteReihe, 2012 (GA4). Heidegger, Martin. The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Trans. Ted Sadler. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. Identität und Differenz (1957). Stuttgart: Clett-Kotta, 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929). Trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (1946). Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi. In Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill, 239–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Erster Band. Siebte Auflage. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, (1961) 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Zweiter Band. Siebte Auflage. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, (1961) 2008. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, Volume One: The Will to Power as Art and Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche, Volume Three: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi; and Volume Four: Nihilism. Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Off the Beaten Track. Eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: HarperCollins, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. “Only a God Can Save Us.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Ed. Richard Wolin, 91–116. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. [aka the “Spiegel-Interview”]

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Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36). Trans. Julian Young. In Off the Beaten Track, Eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 1–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit (1927). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond. Ed. John van Buren. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938). Ed. Peter Trawny. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014 (GA94). [aka the Black Notebooks] Heidegger, Martin. Übungen für Anfänger. Schillers Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Wintersemester 1936/37. With an essay by Odo Marquard. Ed. Ulrich von Bülow. Deutsche Schillergesellschaft: Marbach, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1959. Heidegger, Martin. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (1935–36). In Holzwege, 1–72. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, (1954) 2004. Heidegger, Martin. Was heiβt Denken? Vorlesung Wintersemester 1951/52. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1992. Heidegger, Martin. Wegmarken. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996 (GA9). Heidegger, Martin. “Why Poets?” (1946). Trans. Kenneth Haynes. In Off the Beaten Track. Eds. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 200–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. “Wozu Dichter?” (1946). In Holzwege, 265–316. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980.

General Albrecht, Clemens. “Die Massenmedien und die Frankfurter Schule.” In Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule. Eds. Clemens Albrecht, Günter C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann, and Friedrich H. Tennbruck, 203–46. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1999. Alston, William P. “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition.” Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29–67.

246

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Althaus, Paul. Die letzten Dinge: Lehrbuch der Eschatologie. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1922, 1949 (5th rev. edn). [The original 1922 edition had a different subtitle: Entwurf einer christlichen Eschatologie.] Andersch, Alfred. Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der literarischen Situation. Karlsruhe: Volk und Zeit, 1948. Andersch, Alfred. “Getty oder die Umerziehung in der Retorte.” Frankfurter Hefte 2, no. 11 (1947): 1088–96. Bambach, Charles. Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Beiser, Frederick. After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900. Princeton: Princeton University, 2014. Beiser, Frederick. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Beiser, Frederick. Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-examination. Oxford: Oxford University, 2005. de Beistegui, Miguel. Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias. New York: Routledge, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Briefe: Band I: Briefe 1910–1918, Eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Bishop, Paul, and R. H. Stephenson. Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism. New York: Camden House, 2005. Borchmeyer, Dieter, and Jörg Salaquarda, eds. Nietzsche und Wagner: Stationen einer epochalen Begegnung. 2 volumes. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1994. Borg, Marcus. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Trans. P. Collier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1993. Brenner, Peter J. “Nachkriegsliteratur.” In Deutsche Literatur zwischen 1945 und 1995: Eine Sozialgeschichte. Ed. Horst A. Glaser, 33–57. Bern/Stuttgart/Wien: Paul Haupt, 1997. Brockmann, Stephen, and Frank Trommler, eds. Revisiting Zero Hour 1945: The Emergence of Postwar German Culture. Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1996. Brooks, David. “Huntington’s Clash Revisited.” The New York Times, March 4, 2011: A27. Brunner, Emil. Die Mystik und das Wort. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1924. Brunner, Emil. “Religionsphilosophie evangelischer Theologie.” In Handbuch der Philosophie, Abteilung II, Band 6. München und Berlin: Oldenburg, 1927. Buber, Martin. I and Though (1923). Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

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Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1944, 1992 (reprint). Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946, 1974 (reprint). Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. R. Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–57 [orig. 1923–1929], 3 volumes; vol. 1, Language; vol. 2, Mythical Thought; vol. 3, The Phenomenology of Knowledge. For the fourth volume, see: Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. J.M. Krois. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer, Ernst. “The Technique of Modern Political Myths” (1945). In Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–1945. Ed. Donald P. Verene, 242–70. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Cooper, John. Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers, from Plato to the Present. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006. Connolly, William. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Crowe, Benjamin. Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion: Realism and Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University, 2007. Crowell, Steven. “Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time.” Inquiry 44, no.4 (2001): 433–54. Cykowski, Beth. “In Pursuit of Something ‘Essential’ about Man: Heidegger and Philosophical Anthropology. ” In Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology: Nature, Life, and the Human between Transcendental and Empirical Perspectives. Ed. Phillip Honenberger, 27–48. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Dahlstrom, Daniel O. “Scheler’s Critique of Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology.” In Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives. Ed. Stephen Schneck, 67–92. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002. Danz, Christian. Die philosophische Christologie F.W.J. Schellings. Stuttgart / Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996. Danz, Christian. “Die Philosopie der Offenbarung.” In F.W.J. Schelling. Ed. H. J. Sandkühler, 169–89. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1998. Deacon, Terrence. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Deutschland im Mittelalter.de. “Grundlagen zum Nibelungenlied.” Accessed March 9, 2017. http://deutschland-im-mittelalter.de/Kuenste/Liter atur/Nibelungen#nibelungensage Dorrien, Gary. Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2012, 2015 (pbk. edition). Drewermann, Eugen. Geschichten gelebter Menschlichkeit oder: Wie Gott durch Grimm’sche Märchen geht. Ostfildern: Patmos Verlag, 2012.

248

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Eagleton, Terry. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Emden, Christian J. Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Fischer, Hermann. Protestantische Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2002. Forster, Michael N. After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. van Fraassen, Bas. The Empirical Stance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Frankfurt, Harry. On Truth. New York: Knopf, 2006. Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Führer, Karl Christian. “Wohnungen.” In Deutschland unter alliierter Besatzung 1945– 1949/55: Ein Handbuch. Ed. W. Benz, 206–09. Berlin: Akademie, 1999. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1989 (2nd rev. edn). Glaser, Hermann. The Rubble Years: The Cultural Roots of Postwar Germany, 1945–1948. New York: Paragon House, 1986. Gordon, Peter. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Grondin, Jean. “Der deutsche Idealismus und Heideggers Verschärfung des Problems der Metaphysik nach Sein und Zeit. ” In Heideggers Zwiegespräch mit dem deutschen Idealismus. Ed. Harald Seubert, 41–57. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2003. Guignon, Charles (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2006 (2nd edn). Guyer, Paul. “Beauty, Freedom, and Morality: Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology and the Development of His Aesthetic Theory.” In Essays on Kant’s Anthropology. Ed. Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, 135–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hachmeister, Lutz. Heideggers Testament: Der Philosoph, der Spiegel und die SS. Berlin: Propyläen, 2014. Haeckel, Ernst. The Riddle of the Universe (1899). Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2013. Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. von Hartmann, Eduard. Schelling’s positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer. Berlin: Otto Loewenstein, 1869. Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom. Eds. Donald Wayne Viney and Jincheol O. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

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Hartshorne, Charles. Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Haugeland, John. “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism.” In Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 1. Eds. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, 43–78. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. Hemming, Laurence P. Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Herder, Gott: Einige Gespräche (1787) [= Spinoza-Gespräche (1. Fassung)]. In Herder, Werke. Ed. Wolfgang Pross, Band II, Herder und die Anthropologie der Aufklärung, 733–843. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1987. His, Wilhelm. Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer Entstehung. Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1874. Hull, Isabel V. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005. Janik, Allan. Style, Politics, and the Future of Philosophy. Dordrecht, Netherlands; Boston: Kluwer, 1989. Jasper, Gotthard. Paul Althaus (1888–1966) Professor, Prediger und Patriot in seiner Zeit. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Jaspers, Karl. Die Schuldfrage. Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1946. Jehle, Frank. Emil Brunner: Theologe im 20. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis / Cambridge: Hackett, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ed. Heiner F. Klemme. Meiner: Hamburg, 2001. Kaufmann, Walter. “Heidegger’s Castle.” In From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 339–69. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980. Klee, Gotthold. Deutsche Heldensagen. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1930. Koepke, Wulf. “The Reception of Schiller in the Twentieth Century.” In A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller. Ed. Steven D. Martinson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. Kommerell, Max. Kasperle-Spiele für groβe Leute (1948). Ed. Joachim Storck. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Korff, Hermann. Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen Entwicklung der klassischromantischen Literaturgeschichte. Vol. 2: Die Klassik (1927). Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1964.

250

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Krell, David Farrell. Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Kühler, Stefan. Die Internationale der Rassisten: Aufstieg und Niedergang der internationalen Bewegung für Eugenik und Rassienhygiene im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Campus, 1997. Küng, Hans. Menschwerdung Gottes: Eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie. München und Zürich: Piper, 1989. Kusch, Martin. Psychologism: The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 1995. Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Löwith, Karl. “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Ed. Richard Wolin, 167–85. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Luft, Sebastian. “Diltheys Kritik an der Wissenschaftstheorie der Neukantianer und die Konsequenzen für seine Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften. Das Problem des Historismus.” In Dilthey als Wissenschaftsphilosoph. Eds. Christian Damböck and Hans Ulrich Lessing, 176–98, Freiburg und München: Karl Alber, 2016. Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. May, Reinhard. Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work. Trans. Graham Parkes. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. McGrath, Sean J. “Formal Indication, Irony, and the Risk of Saying Nothing.” In A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life. Eds. Sean McGrath and A. Wierciński, 179–205. Amsterdam and New York: Radopi, 2010. McGrath, Sean J. Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008. Mitchell, Andrew. “Heidegger’s Later Thinking of Animality: The End of World Poverty.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 1 (2011): 74–85. Morgenstern, Christian. Alle Galgenlieder. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1989. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Unzeitgemäβe Betrachtungen. Frankfurt a.M. und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1981. Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Franz Overbeck. Briefwechsel. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1916. Norton, Robert E. Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Ott, Hugo. Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. Frankfurt / New York: Campus, 1988.

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Overbeck, Franz. Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie: Streit- und Friedensschrift. Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1873. Overbeck, Franz. Christentum und Kultur: Gedanken und Anmerkungen zur modernen Theologie. Ed. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli. Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1919. Pavesich, Vida. “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 3 (2008): 421–48. Picard, Max. Hitler in uns selbst. Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1946. Popper, Karl. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. de Quincey, Thomas. “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant.” In Collected Writings, Vol. 4, Ed. David Masson, 340–41. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890. Rabinbach, Anson. In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997. Redding, Paul. Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche. New York: Routledge, 2009. Redensek, Jeanette. “Manufacturing Gemeinschaft: Architecture, Tradition, and the Sociology of Community in Germany, 1890–1920.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2007. Rich, Adrienne. Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Book of Hours. Trans. Susan Ranson. Ed. Ben Hutchinson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poems. Trans. Albert Ernest Flemming. With an Introduction by Victor Lange. New York: Routledge, 1985. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Das Stunden-Buch (1905). In Sämtliche Werke. 1. Bd.: Gedichte. 1. Teil. Ed. Rilke-Archiv, in collaboration with Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Ernst Zinn, 251–366. Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1955. Ringer, Fritz. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Rockmore, Tom. Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being. New York: Routledge, 1995. Sallis, John. Echoes: After Heidegger. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Man. Trans. Bernard Noble. New York: Harper, 1960. Scheler, Max. Späte Schriften. Ed. Manfred S. Frings. Bern und München: Francke, 1976. Scheler, Max. Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921). Ed. Maria Scheler. Bern und München: Francke, 1968 (5th edn). Schelling, F. W. J. Sämmtliche Werke. 14 (XIV) Volumes, Ed. K. F. A. Schelling. Stuttgart und Augsburg: J.G. Cotta, 1856–1861. [Complete Works, original edition]. Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände. Ed. Thomas Buchheim. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011.

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Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophie der Offenbarung: 1841/42. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977 [aka Paulus-Nachschrift / Paulus-transcript]. Schelling, F. W. J. Urfassung der Philosophie der Offenbarung. Ed. Walter E. Ehrhardt. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795). Trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Schmidt, Dennis. Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012. Schnädelbach, Herbert. Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933. Trans. Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. The Shawshank Redemption. Directed by Frank Darabont (1994). Hollywood, California: Castle Rock Entertainment, 1999. DVD. Sheehan, Thomas. “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy?” Philosophy Today 59, no. 3 (2015): 367–400. Sholtz, Janae. The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Simmel, Georg. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Trans. John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. With an introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel Silver. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Stanley, Timothy. Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010. Sternberger, Adolf [later Dolf]. Der verstandene Tod: Eine Untersuchung zu Martin Heideggers Existenzialontologie. Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1934. Sternberger, Dolf, Gerhard Storz, and Wilhelm E. Süskind. Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (1957). München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1962. Swinburne, Richard. “A Theistic Response to the Problem of Evil.” In Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Eds. Louis Pojman and James Fieser, 236–47. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Tillich Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1952, 1980. Tillich Paul. “Das Dämonische: Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte” (1926). In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. VI. Ed. Renate Albrecht, 42–71. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1963. Tillich Paul. Der Mut zum Sein. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 1991. Tillich Paul. “Religionsphilosophie.” In Lehrbuch der Philosophie. 2 Volumes. Ed. Max Dessoir, 2:765–835. Berlin: Ullstein, 1925. Thomson, Iain. “Death and Demise in Heidegger’s Being and Time. ” In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Ed. Mark A. Wrathall, 260–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Vandenberghe, Frédérick. “Immanent Transcendence in Georg Simmel’s Sociology of Religion.” Journal of Classical Sociology 10, no. 1 (2010): 5–32. Weidler, Markus. “Daring to be Grateful: Robert Solomon on Gratitude in the Face of Fanaticism.” In Passion, Death, and Spirituality: The Philosophy of Robert C. Solomon. Eds. Kathleen Higgins and David Sherman, 223–44. New York: Springer, 2012. Weidler, Markus. “Heidegger’s ‘Fourfold’ as a Critique of Idolatry.” Monatshefte 104, no. 4 (2012): 489–510. Weidler, Markus. “Toward a New Materialist Semiotics: Undoing the Dialectic’s Philosophical Hypocrisy.” Monatshefte 96, no. 3 (2004): 388–408. White, Carol J. Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000. Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making. Introduction by Judith A. Jones. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996. Wirth, Jason M. Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Pearson, 1973. Wolfe, Judith. Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 2015 (pbk. edn). Wolfe, Judith. Heidegger and Theology. London and New York: Bloomsbury T&T Cark, 2014. Wolin, Richard. The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Wolin, Richard. “Introduction: ‘Over the Line’: Reflections on Heidegger and National Socialism.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Ed. Richard Wolin, 1–22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Wrathall, Mark A. (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Wrathall, Mark A. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Yates, Christopher. The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Young, Julian. The Death of God and the Meaning of Life. New York: Routledge, 2003. Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Young, Julian. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Young, Julian. The Philosophies of Richard Wagner. London: Lexington Books, 2014.

254

Selected Bibliography

Young, Julian. Schopenhauer. New York: Routledge, 2005. Zaborowski, Holger. “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?” Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2010. Zammito, John. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Zammito, John. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 2009. Zweig, Stefan. Der Kampf mit dem Dämon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche (1925). Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2007. Zweig, Stefan. The Struggle with the Demon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche (1925). Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. London: Pushkin Press, 2012.

Index Abel, Jakob Friedrich  36 Absolute  59–60, 65, 68–9, 105–6, 113–22, 128, 218 n.8 Absolute Destruction (Hull)  179, 181 absolute knowledge  113, 121 act center  62–4 aestheticization  122, 126 Aesthetic Letters (Schiller)  41 aesthetics  9, 11, 36, 40–1, 71, 79, 96, 99, 101–2, 103, 122, 126, 128, 158, 204 After Hegel (Beiser)  38 afterlife  188, 191–2 alienation (Entfremdung)  115–16 Althaus, Paul  55, 57, 93, 98, 219 n.14, 227 n.17 Alzheimer  193–4, 240 n.42 Ammon, Otto  136 analogy  46–7 “analogy of life” (Analogon des Lebens)  39 Andersch, Alfred  157–8 anecdote  172–6 “anfänglicher Anfang”  228 n.21 angel  136–43, 145–7, 153 animality  35 animals  4, 34–5, 141–3 antagonism  8 anthropology  5, 24–5 ethos  36 revolution  9, 11, 135 style of thought  24 turn in philosophy  37 anthropomorphism  14, 42–3, 46, 52, 54, 58, 60–1, 65, 67, 69, 85, 93, 106, 145, 176, 215 n.22 anthropomorphy (Anthropomorphie)  8, 46–7, 65, 69, 103, 207, 220 n.25 anti-French chauvinism  100 aphorism  79 Aristotle  104, 108–9, 111, 173 art  37, 43, 72, 78, 79–80, 90, 98, 101, 103, 122–3, 126–8, 208, 210

art-centered approach  128 artisan thinking  1–2, 10, 12, 14–15, 43, 79–86, 120, 129, 205, 208–9, 226 n.49 artist  77, 134 artistic activity  23, 106, 122, 128 art religion  91 artwork essay  70, 76 artworks  72, 77–9, 82, 98, 101, 127, 205, 208 atheism  24–7, 26, 91–2, 94, 96, 98, 103, 118 “Augustine and Neo-Platonism”  2, 6 Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (Sternberger)  180 authenticity  80, 136, 180, 183, 187 authoritarianism  81 Bambach, Charles  231 n.28 Barth, Karl  11, 93–4, 228 n.18 Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, The (Heidegger)  51 “The Battle of Life Against the Historical”  6 Bayreuth festival  151 beauty  41, 74, 142 Befindlichkeit  20 being  29, 42, 44, 74, 76–8, 79–81, 83–4, 90–1, 97–8, 102–3, 108, 114–15, 118–20, 125, 128, 139, 140, 145, 149, 160–2, 163–4, 166, 168–70, 171, 173, 176, 204, 226 n.4, 228 n.23, 230 n.18 Being and Time (Heidegger)  1, 6, 12, 13, 20, 22, 27, 43, 50–1, 70, 107, 114, 134, 143, 155, 179–80, 182–9, 192, 196, 199–203, 211 n.6, 227 n.18, 237 n.6, 239 nn.34, 35, 240 n.61, 242 n.12 being-in-the-world  69, 185, 194, 201, 207, 210 beingness  104, 108

256

Index

Beiser, Frederick  9, 14, 24, 38, 40–2, 217 n.63, 223 n.20 Beistegui, Miguel de  11 Benjamin, Walter  92–3, 158 Bergson, Henri   10 Berkeley, George  231 n.24 Berlin Olympics  70 Bertram, Ernst  92 betrayal  193–4 Between Word and Image (Schmidt)  224 n.32 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)  123 Bible  83, 90 biological life  188 biological orientation  4 biological reductionism  61 Birth, The (Nietzsche)  232 n.1 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche)  133 Bishop, Paul  224 n.35 Black Notebooks (Heidegger)  202–3 “blue deer”  35 bodiless being  143–9, 153 Böhme, Jakob  189 Book of Hours. See Stunden-Buch (Rilke) Borg, Marcus  215 n.23 Bourdieu, Pierre  157 Bowie, Andrew  214 n.22, 219 n.11 Brecht, Bertolt  158 Brunner, Emil  93–4, 227–8 nn.17, 18 “brute projection”  196–200 Buber, Martin  133–5, 144, 176, 233 n.18 Bultmann, Rudolf  7, 44, 93 business of philosophy  14 Butler, Judith  195 Cambridge Companion  237 n.6 Captain Klein (fictional character)  181– 3, 186, 200–1 Capuzzi, Frank  236 nn.24, 32, 237 n.33 care  4, 20 Cartesianism  125, 127 Cassirer, Ernst  2, 19–20, 22, 31, 44, 54, 72, 101, 133–4, 155–7, 159, 180, 207, 231 n.28 Catholicism  56, 196 causality  32, 39, 61 Chladenius, Johann Martin  32 Christ  83, 189 Christentum und Kultur (Overbeck)  92, 94 Christian God  91, 103, 148

Christianity  48, 53, 83, 91–2, 93, 94, 115, 140, 190, 228 n.20 Christianity and Culture. See Christentum und Kultur (Overbeck) Christian life  225 n.44 “Christian personalism”  219 n.14 Christian Religion contra Christian Theology (Overbeck)  93 Christological idiom  41 church  15, 83–4, 120, 209 classical nihilism  94, 99, 103, 106 classicism  99, 100–1 “co-achiever of God”  45–6 coextension thesis  69, 207 cogito ergo sum formula  124 cognition  39, 63–4, 82, 96, 105–6, 117, 124–5 Collected Works (Heidegger)  43, 222 n.10 communication  45–7, 50, 74, 79, 82–4, 111, 129, 134, 144, 149–50, 163, 164–5, 173, 186, 202–3, 206 communicative space  164–8 concealment/unconcealment  75, 97–8, 119, 128 Connolly, William  13, 195–6, 200, 240 nn.43, 45 consciousness  113–16, 119–20, 121, 128, 135 Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time, The (Wirth)  214 n.22 contemporary physics and chemistry  33 Continental Divide (Gordon)  19 continental philosophy  7, 9, 135 contingency problem  194–6 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger)  9, 23, 37, 110, 234 n.22 conversation  35, 37, 44, 50, 66, 71, 74, 93, 111, 113, 184, 204 Cooper, John  215 n.23, 220–1 n.26 creation  26, 30, 47–51, 53–5, 90, 98, 125, 190, 207 creative destruction  103, 126 Creative Experiencing (Hartshorne)  239 n.34 creativity  29, 51–3, 56, 73, 90, 102–3, 106, 122–3, 128

Index creator  21, 30, 38, 48–9, 91, 103, 125, 190, 239 n.34 Critique of Judgment or Third Critique (Kant)  22–6, 28, 32, 34, 36, 38–40, 61, 72 “Critique of Teleological Judgment”  25 Crowe, Benjamin  14 Crowell, Steven  197 “Cult and Liturgy”  82 culture  57, 127–8, 145, 158, 166–7, 179, 208 communities  75 critique  134–7 evolution  58 nationalism  70, 75, 85, 170–2 rebirth  70, 133 semiotics  156 soul  57 “culture-philosophical” approach  57 Cykowski, Beth  212–13 n.3 Dahlstrom, Daniel  240–41 n.61 Danz, Christian  214 n.22 Darwinism  136 Dasein/Da-sein  13, 20–1, 76, 111, 116, 118, 119–21, 123, 128–9, 156, 169, 171–3, 179, 181, 183–4, 186, 189–93, 198, 200, 201, 203–4, 206, 214 n.21, 219 n.14, 238 nn.18, 27, 240–1 n.61 Däubler, Theodor  217 n.39 Davos disputation  19, 22, 31, 156, 212 n.3 Deacon, Terrence  240 n.45 “dead matter”  5, 28 death  13, 180, 182–4, 185, 186–9, 191, 193–200, 201, 204, 211 n.6 “Death and Demise in Being and Time”  187, 239 n.40 Decline of the German Mandarins (Ringer)  157 de-deification  98, 231 n.25 Deleuze, Gilles  13, 175 “demiurge” (Demiurgos)  219 n.12 demonic  156, 158–64, 173, 175, 176 Denken  84, 90, 112 deontology  65 De partibus animalium (Aristotle)  173 der Brenner  216–17 n.39 Der verstandene Tod: Eine Untersuchung zu Martin

257

Heideggers Existenzialontologie (Sternberger)  180 Descartes, René  29, 45–6, 96, 104–5, 119, 124–7, 135, 231 n.24 despair  118 determinism  21 Deutsche Heldensagen (Klee)  151 “Deutsche Literatur in der Entscheidung”  158 Dewey, John  109 dialectical movement  113–14, 117 dialectical theology  93 dialectical twists  158–64 “dialogic-agonic essence” (dialogischagonische Wesen)  113 “A Dialogue on Language”  203, 242 n.10 Dichtung  80, 83–4 Dictionary of the Inhuman. See Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen (Sternberger) Die Auseinandersetzung Herders mit Spinoza (Vollrath)  215 n.24 “Die Grundgedanken in Herder’s Schrift ‘Gott’ und ihr Verhältnis zu Spinozas Philosophie”  215 n.24 Die Klassik (Korff)  27–8 Die Mystik und das Wort (Brunner)  228 n.18 Die philosophische Christologie F.W.J. Schellings (Danz)  214 n.22 “Die Philosopie der Offenbarung”  214 n.22 Die Schuldfrage (Jaspers)  155 Dieterle, J. A.  215 n.24 Die unmögliche Tatsache (Morgenstern)  204 Die Welträtsel (Haeckel)  134, 144, 206 dignity  160, 171 Dilthey, Wilhelm  2, 7, 10, 56, 66, 127–8 “Diltheys Kritik an der Wissenschaftstheorie der Neukantianer”  231 n.28 Diogenes Laertius  175 discourse  24, 26, 32, 34–6, 155–8 disruptive events  112 divine  8, 12, 49, 60, 62, 68–9, 82, 91, 108, 111, 112, 114–15, 125, 129, 170, 207 existence  46 and human  46–7, 50 light  118–19, 120, 128–9

258 nature  32 providence  38 revelation  45, 50 spirit  50, 52 divinity  45, 50, 52, 54, 59–60 Dorrien, Gary  37 double mediation  81 double movement  187–9 Drewermann, Eugen  154 drive toward form (Formtrieb)  73 dualism  39, 41, 45–6, 102, 123, 231 n.24 Duino Elegies (Rilke)  137, 140, 142, 153–4 dynamic pantheism  27 Eagleton, Terry  241 n.9 earth  75–6, 77, 78 eclectic attitude  114 elitism  70, 135–7 Emden, Christian  135, 232 n.2, n.4 “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud”  226 n.2 emotions  20 Empedocles  175 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Hegel)  110, 120 Engel  146–7, 152–3 Ens a se  53 entelechy  63–4 Entgötterung  231 n.25 epic tales  75–6 epic theater  158 epistemic solipsism  46 “epistemological-psychological” bias  56–7 epistemology  54, 96, 124, 197 equality  77, 79 “Erläuterung”  209 eschatology  52, 55, 120, 122 eschaton  52 essence  47–8, 58, 64, 75, 97, 104, 108–9, 126, 141, 166–7, 171, 179 Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach)  92 “The ‘Essence’ of Da-sein”  43 “The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy”  21 essential poetry  74–6 Eternal in Man, The (Scheler)  50, 55, 58 eternity  42, 215–16 n.30 ethical theism  52–3, 55, 65, 82, 209

Index eugenics  136 European intellectual life  93, 102 existentialism  13, 116, 181, 186, 202, 218 n.5 Existenzphilosophie  156 experience (Erfahrung)  110, 113, 119 experiential diversity  53, 79 expressionist literature  216 n.39 faith  64, 82–3, 93, 120, 195 fanatical enthusiasm  25 fanaticism  203, 210 Farias, Victor  156, 226 n.2 fascism  235 n.13 fatalism  26–7, 67, 156, 207 Faye, Emmanuel  89, 157, 226 n.2 Feuerbach, Ludwig  92 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  25, 223 n.20 Ficker, Ludwig von  216–17 n.39 “figurations of life” (Lebensgestalten)  34 “finite and living image”  211 n.4 finite spirit  51, 53–4 First Critique (Kant)  22–3, 36, 54, 146 first philosophy (prima philosophia)  108 First World War  10, 134, 136 Formalism in Ethics and a Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Scheler)  20 form and content  41 form and matter  73–4, 101–2, 223 n.14 Fourth Meditation (Nietzsche)  232 n.1 Fragility of Things, The (Connolly)  195 Fragment 119 (Heraclitus)  173–4 freedom  21–2, 28–9, 32, 34, 37–8, 39, 40–1, 45, 50, 58, 61–2, 64, 215 n.22 “freedom for death”  13, 179, 186 Freedom (Schelling)  7, 22, 25, 30–2, 37, 41, 46, 50, 53, 67–8, 214 n.21, 215 n.22 French Revolution  71 Friedman, Michael  212 n.3 Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism (Bishop)  224 n.35 Friedrich Nietzsche’s Correspondence with Overbeck  92 Führer, Karl Christian  236 n.21 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger)  2, 4–5, 35, 239 n.35, 242 n.12

Index fundamental error  2, 5 fundamental ontology  155 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  66 Gatterer, Johann Christoph  32 geheuer  236–67 n.33 Geist der Goethezeit (Korff)  27 Gemeinschaft  136 Genesis  90 genuine metaphysics  44 George, Stefan  74 George Circle  92 German Hero-Tales. See Deutsche Heldensagen (Klee) German Idealism  9, 23, 38, 40, 43, 104–5, 110, 122 German intellectual discourse  32 history  31 life  24 German language  140, 147, 163, 166–8, 170, 224 n.30 German Literature  100 German poet  168–74, 207 German tradition  72, 208, 222 n.11 Germany  9–11, 36, 70–1, 77–8, 91–2, 133, 136, 137, 151, 158, 160, 166–8, 170, 174, 181, 183 Germany medicine  36 Gesamtausgabe (Heidegger)  1, 89 “Geschick”  185, 238 n.18 Gesellschaft  136 Gespräch  111 Gestalt  73, 159, 184, 196 Gestell  73, 146–7, 152–3, 223 n.17, 233–4 nn.19, 22 Getty, Fort  158 gnosticism  221 n.27 god  21, 26–8, 37–40, 42, 45–6, 49, 54, 59–60, 67–8, 83, 90–1, 98, 116, 118, 124–5, 140, 148, 154, 163, 170, 173, 207, 214 n.21, 216 n.31, 218 n.6, 220 n.14, 226 n.4, 231 n.24, 239 n.34 capability  49 creation  51, 53, 61–2 (see also creation) death of  122 as ground and as existing  28–32 image  119

259

modalities of  48 worshipping  56 God: Some Conversations (Herder)  24–5, 27–8, 36 “God is dead”  71, 96, 98, 137 “God is love”  27 godlessness  98 “God loves matter”  27, 30 God-self  30, 37, 40, 42, 50, 115, 190 God We Never Knew, The (Borg)  215 n.23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  26–8, 71– 3, 79, 99–101, 104, 134, 231 n.28 Gordon, Peter  19, 22, 212 n.3 Gospel of John  27 “The Grand Style”  99, 215 n.26 gravity and light  33 Greece  77–8 Greek  76–7, 104–5, 115, 140, 173, 224 n.30 Green Table, The (ballet)  201 Grimm Brothers’ Tales  75, 154, 172, 184 Grondin, Jean  107, 110, 114 Group 47  158 “Grundstoff”  151 Guattari, Felix  13, 175 Hachmeister, Lutz  89 Haeckel, Ernst  9, 133–6, 144, 221 n.27 Hamburg, University of  19 Harnack, Adolf von  6, 120 Härtle, Heinrich  11 Hartmann, Eduard von  219 n.11, 221 n.27 Hartshorne, Charles  190, 239 n.34 Haugeland, John  187 Haynes, Kenneth  150, 230 nn.7, 18 “heart space” (Herzraum)  138, 143 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  9–10, 23, 25, 37–42, 60, 86, 90, 95, 99, 101, 104–5, 107–15, 117–23, 125–8, 139 “Hegel’s Concept of Experience”  107 Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (McGrath)  235 n.13 Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicisim (Bambach)  231 n.28 Heidegger, Martin. See also individual entries Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, The  51

260

Index

Being and Time  1, 6, 12, 13, 20, 22, 27, 43, 50–1, 70, 107, 114, 134, 143, 155, 179–80, 182–9, 192, 196, 199–200, 200–3, 211 n.6, 227 n.18, 237 n.6, 239 nn.34, 35, 240 n.61, 242 n.12 Black Notebooks  202–3 Collected Works  43, 222 n.10 Contributions to Philosophy  9, 23, 37, 110, 234 n.22 engagement with Hegel  107–10 first Schelling commentary  22–3, 225 n.38 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics  2, 4–5, 35, 239 n.35, 242 n.12 Gesamtausgabe  1, 89 Holzwege  90, 95, 110, 113, 118–19, 121–2, 124–5 Humanismusbrief  11–12, 42, 85, 100, 129, 133, 149, 155, 157–8, 161–2, 164–5, 167–76, 185, 187, 196, 201, 207, 226 n.4 Identität und Differenz  107, 148 Introduction to Metaphysics  70, 76, 157, 202, 203, 224 n.28, 241 n.2 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics  1, 19, 22–3 Kassel Lectures  51 Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, The  3 Metaphysics of German Idealism, The  1, 8, 43 Nietzsche  28, 42, 71, 79, 89, 94, 95–7, 98–9, 101, 103–4, 176, 202 Nietzsche I  90, 94, 99, 104, 228 n.23 Nietzsche II  90, 100, 104 Off the Beaten Track  209 Ontology-The Hermeneutics of Facticity  2, 4 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs  2–4 Schelling commentary as philosophical teaser  66–9 second Schelling lecture  43–7 Vorträge und Aufsätze  1, 9, 234 n.22 Heidegger and Nazism (Farias)  156 Heidegger and Theology (Wolfe)  91, 226 n.2

Heidegger and Unconcealment (Wrathall)  225 n.44 Heidegger’s Atheism (Hemming)  221 n.1 Heidegger’s Hidden Sources (May)  242 n.10 Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Young)  233 nn.19, 22 Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religion (Crowe)  14 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being (Philipse)  225 n.44 Heile, das/heilen/heil machen  147–8 Helmholtz, Hermann von  135 Hemming, Laurence  221 n.1 Heraclitus  81, 173–4 “Heraclitus by the stove”  174–5 Herder, Johann Gottfried   8–9, 24–8, 30–1, 34–7, 40, 42, 67, 99–100, 102, 104, 135, 205–6, 213 n.18, 214 n.21, 219 n.14 hermeneutics  22–3, 54, 55, 83, 91, 120, 188, 210 Hertwig, Oscar  136 heuristic self-examination  37–42 “himSelf ”  216 n.31 His, Wilhelm  135 historical dialectic  56–7, 66 historicism  121–2 history (Geschichte)  7, 21, 31, 37–8, 49, 53, 55, 56–8, 66, 75–6, 77, 79, 95, 103, 112, 115, 117–18, 120, 121–2, 125, 163, 170, 171–2, 175, 216 n.36. See also pragmatic history history-of-Being (Seinsgeschichte)  163 History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. See Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs Hitler  19, 70, 148, 151, 156 Hitler in Ourselves. See Hitler in uns selbst (Picard) Hitler in uns selbst (Picard)  155 Hölderlin, Friedrich  10–12, 28, 37, 40, 74, 79–85, 90–1, 99–100, 106, 129, 133–4, 137, 152, 154, 166–70, 173, 207–8, 212 n.20 Hölderlin Society  137 “Hölderlin Year”  137

Index holy  129, 164, 170, 205, 207 Holy, The (Otto)  58 holy songs  152–3 Holy Spirit  90, 111 Holzwege (Heidegger)  90, 95, 110, 113, 118–19, 121–2, 124–5 Homecoming (Heimkunft)  167, 170 Homer  74, 76 homology  124, 197 How Christian is our Present-Day Theology?. See Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie (Overbeck) How Christian is our Present-Day Theology? (Overbeck)  92, 94 “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People”  24 Hull, Isabel V.  13, 179, 181–3 human  4, 8, 34–5, 112, 142, 149, 154, 160–2, 170, 179, 185, 188, 221 n.27 agency  21, 77 behavior  198 beings  3, 19, 59, 65, 67, 91, 159, 165, 169, 172, 192, 215 n.22, 226 n.4 body  143 civilization  135 development  36 dignity  155 and divine  46–7, 50 evolution  36 existence  13, 20, 46, 49, 53, 55, 116, 138–9, 141, 171, 186, 192, 200 experience  20, 35, 38, 50–1, 60, 149, 205 finitude  21, 61, 69, 207 freedom (see freedom) mind  54–8, 125 nature  41 organism  62 personality  219 n.14 soul  51–2 spirit  51–2, 55, 69 (see also finite spirit) understanding  26 humanification  68 humanism  99–100, 104, 127, 155, 157, 158, 161–2, 165, 236 n.21

261

Humanismusbrief (Heidegger)  11–12, 42, 85, 100, 129, 133, 149, 155, 157–8, 161–2, 164–5, 167–76, 185, 187, 196, 201, 207, 226 n.4 humanity  9, 21, 26, 34, 51, 52–3, 55, 77, 83, 97–8, 115, 118, 129, 143, 144, 161–4, 165, 171, 173, 176, 190, 198, 231 n.28 human-onto-human communication  204 human-self  50 humbling  196 Hume’s empiricism  31 Husserl, Edmund  3, 20 hylozoism  5, 24, 38, 102, 135 I and Thou (Buber)  133 idea of God  53–5 Identität und Differenz (Heidegger)  107, 148 Identity and Difference. See Identität und Differenz (Heidegger) idolatry  21, 56, 59, 156, 159, 213 n.8 immanent transcendence  47, 59–66, 82 immaterial minds  45–6 impersonalism  44, 205, 225 n.44 Impossible Fact, The. See Die unmögliche Tatsache incognito  72 Incomplete Nature (Deacon)  240 n.45 Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, The (Žižek)  214 n.22 “infinite shadow figures”  211 n.4 inhuman(e)  161–2, 165 “In memoriam Max Scheler”  3, 44 inner history  34–5, 37, 42 inquiry  19, 36. See also scientific inquiry integration  138 intellectual reorientation  24 interface problem  45–6 inter-talk (Zwiesprache)  111, 113, 116, 229 n.6, 230 n.7 In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. (Rabinbach)  235 n.13

262 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger)  70, 76, 157, 202, 203, 224 n.28, 241 n.2 “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion”  56 Invention of a People, The (Sholtz)  223 n.28 inverted Platonism  95 Jacobi, Friedrich  24–7, 40, 67, 213 n.19 James, William  109 Janik, Allan  216 n.39 Jasper, Gotthard  219 n.14, 227 n.17 Jaspers, Karl  13, 44, 155–7, 202, 203 Jehle, Frank  227 nn.17, 18 Jehova  148 Jemeinigkeit  239 n.35 Jooss, Kurt  201 Judaism  115 Jünger, Ernst  13, 199, 203 Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Zammito)  24 Kant, Immanuel  1, 8–9, 19–20, 22–9, 32, 34, 36–40, 48, 54–5, 61, 65, 72, 80, 102, 104–5, 108–10, 146–7, 175, 205, 217 n.49 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger)  1, 19, 22–3 Kantianism  40 Karlschule  40–1 Kassel Lectures (Heidegger)  51 Kateb, George  240 n.43 Kaufmann, Walter  81, 83 Kehre  117 Kierkegaard, Søren  188, 195, 228 n.20 Kingdom of God  52 Klages, Ludwig  20 Klee, Gotthold  151 Kleist, Heinrich von  13, 203–4 knowledge  54, 93, 105, 125 Kommerell, Max  158 Korff, Hermann  27–8 “Körper”  143–4 Kracauer, Siegfried  158 Krell, David Farrell  211 n.3 Küng, Hans  37 Kusch, Martin  10

Index labor (Arbeit)  113 language  34, 62, 74, 76–7, 84, 118, 121, 133, 148, 159, 165–9, 172, 176, 185, 198, 202–4, 206, 209, 225 n.44 Language (Cassirer)  133 “Language in the Poem”  35 Last Things, The (Althaus)  55 Lauer, Christopher  214–15 n.22 Lavoisier, Antoine  134 law of conservation of mass  135 leadership qualities  70 Lebensphilosophie  213 n.3 Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel)  123 “Leib”  143–4 Leiblichkeit  145 Leibniz, Gottfried   2, 29, 31, 37, 40, 44, 95–6, 104–5, 114, 228 n.23 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  24–7 Les Temps Modernes  180 Letter on Humanism. See Humanismusbrief (Heidegger) Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller)  8, 72, 73, 79, 101, 222 n.4 “levels of being in nature” (Seinsstufen der Natur)  34 life  5, 10, 56, 59, 63, 65, 122, 126, 138, 145 concept of  60 immanent tension  101 immanent transcendence  59–66 metaphysics of  55–6, 65 perceptual appetite  122–30 philosophy of  47, 55–6, 61, 65–6, 69 science  32 lifeless matter  62 “lightning” metaphor  212 n.20 linguistic destiny  164–8 linguistic essences  78 literary studies  84–5, 100 lived experience  20, 116, 127, 188, 194, 198 living God (der lebendige Gott)  47–50, 66–7 living matter  134, 144 “living substance”  5 “living will”  89 “logic of the heart”  136, 138, 140, 143, 146, 154 love  20, 53, 190–3, 219 n.14

Index Lowell Lectures  239 n.34 Löwith, Karl  12, 94, 179–81 Luft, Sebastian  231 n.28 Luther, Martin  139 Malabou, Catherine  240 n.41 McGrath, Sean  14, 235 n.13 man and god  213 n.7 Maxims and Reflections (Goethe)  72, 101 May, Reinhard  242 n.10 Mayer, Julius Robert von  135 mechanical God  68 mechanical laws  39 mechanistic model  21 medical enlightenment  36–7, 40 medical psychology  36 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes)  45, 124 memory problem  191–5 Mendelssohn, Moses  27 meta-discourse  84–5 Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, The (Heidegger)  3 “The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.” See “Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz” metaphysics  38, 42–3, 63–4, 65, 85–6, 91, 102, 104–6, 107–8, 111, 114, 120–1, 123, 125, 127–8, 134, 137, 143, 145, 153, 161. See also specific entries of life  55–6, 65 monism  54 potential  23 racism  223 n.28 self-forgetting  108–9 systems  59 teleology  36 violence  103 Western  44, 94–5, 104, 108–10, 124–5 Metaphysics of German Idealism, The (Heidegger)  1, 8, 43 “Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz”  2, 44 Mitchell, Andrew  35 modern anthropology  127

263

modernity  14, 118–19, 126 modern metaphysics  125–6 modern science  33–4 modern society  157 modern technology  233 n.22 monadology  105 monism  134–6, 144, 221 n.27, 232 n.6 monistic theories  40, 135 “Monist League” (Monistenbund)  136, 232 n.6 monist metaphysics  42, 55–6, 66, 102, 121, 123, 145 monist movement  9, 42, 134–7 monist philosophy  5 monotheism  47–8 moral-aesthetic anthropology  127 moral charge  61, 65 moral cosmos  52, 54–5 moral philosophy  38 moral sensibility  52–3 Morgenstern, Christian  204 Morgenthau, Henry  167 Morgenthau Plan  166 morphology  124 mortality  35, 38–9, 187, 201 mourning  193–4, 199 multiculturalism  172 Mussolini, Benito  235 n.13 Myth of the State, The (Cassirer)  155 mythology  92 Napoleon  71 narrative  174 nationalism  236 n.30 national religion  227 n.8 National Socialism  70, 156–7 nature  60, 215 n.22, 216 n.36, 232 n.2. See also natural philosophy conception of  100–1 consciousness  110–16 freedom and  28–9, 39 laws  62 mechanistic conceptions of  29 philosophy (Naturphilosophie)  25–6, 33, 35 romantic philosophy of  32–6 science  33–4 as “self-organizing”  38 theology  60

264 Nazi  10, 72, 77, 136, 137, 156, 157, 235 n.13 Nazism  10, 70 negative theology  60, 62, 65, 85, 120, 221–2 n.1 neo-Augustinian vantage point  52 neo-Kantianism  2, 14 neologism  125 neo-Spinozist anthropology  36 nervous energy  198, 200 new-age mysticism  33 “new earth”  53 Nibelungen Ring, The (opera)  151 Nibelungen Saga (Die Nibelungensage)  75, 150–1, 172, 209 Nibelungen Song (Das Nibelungenlied)  151 Nietzsche (Heidegger)  28, 42, 71, 79, 89, 94, 95–7, 98–9, 101, 103–4, 176, 202 Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (Bertram)  92 Nietzsche I (Heidegger)  90, 94, 99, 104, 228 n.23 Nietzsche II (Heidegger)  90, 100, 104 Nietzsche, Friedrich  5, 9–11, 14, 42, 71, 74, 79, 86, 89–110, 121–30, 133–7, 143–5, 151, 153, 175–6, 205–6, 224 n.35, 226 n.2, 231 n.24, 232 n.1 Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Young)  232 n.1 “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’”  95, 110 nihilism  71, 79, 96–9, 102, 181–2, 186–7 1916 habilitation thesis  107 Nineteenth Letter (Schiller)  73, 102 nonformal ethics  20 “ob-ject” (Gegenstand)  64, 220 nn.20, 21 Odyssey (Homer)  74 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)  74 "Of Divine Things and their Revelation." See “Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung” “Offenbarkeit”  236 n.24 Off the Beaten Track (Heidegger)  209 “On Spinoza’s Doctrine in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn”  26–7

Index On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller)  72 On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul (Herder)  34 On the Eternal in Man (Scheler)  4, 8, 62, 209 “On the Gift-Giving Virtue”  79 ontology  6, 108–9, 114, 116, 124, 184, 189–90, 198, 213 n.4, 218 n.8 Ontology-The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Heidegger)  2, 4 onto-theology  107–11, 114, 122 optical metaphors  119 organic beings  62–3 organic formation  135 organicism  41 organicist theory  40 organic matter  135 organic revolution  34, 37, 42 organism  32, 62, 64, 66 “The Origin of the Work of Art”  8, 28, 37, 41, 43, 69–79, 85, 98–9, 101, 123, 187, 205–6, 222 n.10, 224 n.28 origin (Ursprung)  72, 77 Ostwald, Wilhelm  221 n.27 Ott, Hugo  157 Otto, Rudolf  6, 58, 205 Overbeck, Franz  92, 94, 228 n.20 “Overbeckerei”  93 “Overcoming Metaphysics”  9 Owens, Jesse  70 pain (Schmerz)  113 panentheism  27–8, 42, 221 n.26 Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers, from Plato to the Present (Cooper)  215 n.23 pantheism  31, 40–1, 45, 59, 69, 135, 213 n.19, 215 n.23, 219 n.14, 221 n.27 controversy  7, 9, 24–9, 31, 37, 67, 102, 205 Herder’s  30–1 philosophical resources of  38 struggle  32 Parmenides  81 “parousia” (Parusie)  111 Parting of the Ways, A (Friedman)  212 n.3

Index Pascal, Blaise  136–7, 143, 225 n.44 Pauline Christianity  189 Pavesich, Vida  212–13 n.3 peasant life  78 woman  85 Penthesilea and the Amphitryon (Kleist)  203–4 “permissible hypothesis” (erlaubte Hypothese)  39 personal a-theistic piety  221 n.1 personality  45–7, 50, 52, 58, 62, 64–6, 67–9, 82, 190, 206–7 “Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle”  1 phenomenology  110–13, 115 “Phenomenology and Theology”  22 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel)  110, 111, 113–14, 119–20 Philipse, Herman  225 n.44 Philolaus  214 n.21 philosophical anthropology  1–2, 9–10, 13, 14, 19–20, 22, 31, 35–6, 42–5, 59, 85–6, 128, 204, 205, 207–8, 215 n.22 Philosophical Investigations of the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters (Schelling)  25 Philosophische Briefe (Schiller)  40–1 philosophy  7, 81, 83, 90, 94, 95, 107, 111, 114–15, 122, 133, 160, 204 analysis  68 of art  11, 128 Christianity  90 individualism  222 n.1 legacy  22 medicine  40 of philosophy  127 poetics  133–4 of religion  60, 93 of revelation  7, 9, 11, 82, 115, 121, 129, 163, 176, 214 n.21 self-limitation  60 of spirit  110 philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie)  47, 55–7, 61, 65–6, 69, 206 Philosophy of Revelation (Schelling)  30– 1, 37, 41, 46–7, 50, 52, 66 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer)  133, 155

265

physiological aesthetics  9, 79, 96, 99–104, 106 Picard, Max  155–6, 159 Platner, Ernst  36 Plato  95, 104, 108, 228 n.23 Platonism  95, 228 n.23 plural God  48 pluralism  48, 54, 73, 101, 195 “Poesie”  74, 80 poetic language  76 poetic thinking  216 n.39 poetic work  80, 82, 84, 166–7, 212 n.20 poetry  74–6, 80, 90, 137–8, 140–1, 142–3, 152, 168, 225 n.38 poets  81, 133, 136 “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism”  180 Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, The (Bourdieu)  157 polytheism  115 Popper, Karl  77 “The Possibility of Impossibility”  196 post-Leibnizian metaphysics  96 post-world self  192, 194 “potency” (Potenz)  51 poverty  101, 139 poverty-wealth relation  160–1, 165 pragmatic history  31–2, 35, 37 preprophetic discourse  79–86, 204 prima philosophia  109, 111 prism effect  118 private religion  221 n.1 Problems of the Philosophy of History (Simmel)  56 process theology  30 projective saying  75 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Heidegger)  2–4 prophetic discourse  84 prophetic poetry  170 Protestant theology  94 proto-totalitarian conception  71 Prussian military  13, 179, 200–1 psychologism  124, 128 psychology  21, 45, 124, 198 Public Lectures and Essays. See Vorträge und Aufsätze (Heidegger) “purposiveness without a purpose”  72

266

Index

“The Question Concerning Technology”  13 Question of [German] Guilt, The. See Die Schuldfrage (Jaspers) Rabinbach, Anson  235 n.13 raw data  54–5 reason and nihilism  71 Redensek, Jeanette  136, 232 n.6 Reinhold, K. L.  223 n.20 reinternalization  115 religion  14, 39–40, 60, 82, 92, 115 Religion in the Making (Whitehead)  239 n.34 religion-philosophy (Religionsphilosophie)  93 Religionsphilosophie evangelischer Theologie (Brunner)  227 n.18 religious phenomenology  47, 50–5, 60, 62–6, 82–3, 90, 206 religious-philosophical discourse  7 religious revelation  64, 82, 127 religious skepticism  60, 62, 65–6, 85–6, 110–17, 119–20 “Remembrance” (Andenken)  129, 166–7, 170 representational thinking  143–9 resistance  4, 51, 65, 123 revelation (Offenbarung)  6, 7, 9, 11–12, 26, 46, 50, 53, 57–8, 62–4, 68–9, 74, 76, 80–5, 90–1, 98–9, 111–12, 114–21, 128–9, 153, 164, 165, 170, 172, 204, 206–8, 214 n.21 revelatory power  80–1, 96, 98, 118–20, 128, 205, 210, 212 n.20 reversal (Umkehrung)  117 rhetorical effect  169, 233 n.19 Rich, Adrienne  193 Richter, Hans Werner  158 Riddle of the Universe, The. See Die Welträtsel (Haeckel) Rilke, Rainer Maria  74–5, 80, 133–4, 137–43, 145–7, 153–4 Ringer, Fritz  157 risk language  149–54 Romanticism  25, 91–2, 94, 129 Romantic pessimism  227 n.7 romantic philosophy of nature (romantische Naturphilosphie)  7, 32–6, 42

Roosevelt, Franklin D.  167 Rorty, Richard  109 Rosenberg, Alfred  11, 77 Royal Institute for History  32 “Rubble Years” (Trümmerjahre)  139 “saga” (Sage)  74–6, 78, 133, 151, 170–1, 187, 208–9 “Sage”  150, 151, 173 “Sagen”  150, 173, 209 St. Augustine  52, 219 n.12 Sallis, John  80 salvation  50, 52, 55, 83, 112, 120–1, 140, 147 “sanctifying song”  152 Sartre, Jean-Paul  13, 186, 203 “saying” (Sagen)  74, 78, 133, 170–1, 187, 208–9 Scheler, Max  1–6, 8–10, 14, 19–20, 37, 43–66, 68–9, 80, 82–3, 90, 98, 164, 175–6, 205–7, 209, 212 n.3, 219 n.12, 220 n.20, 221 n.27, 240 n.61 Schelling, F. W. J.  6–9, 11, 14, 22–3, 25–32, 34, 37–54, 58–61, 65–71, 82–3, 104–5, 108–11, 115, 120, 163–4, 176, 188, 190, 205–6–207, 213 n.19, 214 nn.21, 22, 217 n.40, 218 n.5, 219 n.9, 219 nn.9, 11, 14, 221 nn.26, 27, 239 n.34 Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (Bowie)  214 n.22, 219 n.11 Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (Wirth)  214–15 n.22 Schelling’s [sic] positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer (Hartmann)  219 n.11 “Schicksal”  238 n.18 Schiller, Friedrich  8–9, 11, 14, 28, 36–42, 70–4, 77, 79, 99–102, 128, 176, 205–6, 217 n.63, 222 n.10, 223 n.20 Schmauβ, Johann Jacob  32 Schmidt, Dennis  224 n.32 Schmidt, Ferdinand  215 n.24 Schoen, Ernst  92–3 scholastic ontology  38 school metaphysics  110 Schopenhauer, Arthur  123, 197–8, 200 “Schwärmerei”  25, 213 n.18 “Science and Reflection”  100

Index science of beings  108 scientific discourses  102 scientific inquiry  32, 36, 138 Second Untimely Meditation (Nietzsche)  123 Second World War  90, 92, 139, 157, 181 secularization  90 Seelenheil  147 self-consciousness  114, 115–16, 120, 121 self-critical theology  98 “selfhood of man” (Selbstheit des Menschen)  43–4 self-willing  125 sense drive (Stofftrieb)  73, 217 n.63 sensitive thinking (Denken)  90 “Seynsfuge”  29 shallow skepticism  118 Sheehan, Thomas  226 n.2 Sholtz, Janae  223–4 n.28 Sickness Unto Death, The (Kierkegaard)  189, 195 Simmel, Georg  20, 37, 55–9, 211 n.6, 213 n.3, 219 n.14, 221 n.27 on life’s immanent transcendence  59–66 Skepsis  117–18 skeptical atmosphere  118 social character  74 social life  232 n.2 society  74, 135–6 solidarity  52, 69 Sonnettes to Orpheus, “Gesang ist Dasein”  151 Sophocles  74, 81 soul life (Seelenleben)  34–5, 134, 144, 216 n.36 sovereign philosophy  119 Spiegel  70, 89, 152 Spinoza, Baruch  24–5, 27–8, 59, 60, 66–8, 221 n.27 Spinozism  24, 26–7, 67, 205 Spinozist anthropology  25 spirit-fused (geistig) matter  38–9 Spirit (Geist)  23, 27–8, 34, 42, 47–8, 51, 55, 59, 65, 71, 73, 110, 111–13, 115–18, 120–2, 129, 135, 139 spiritual blindness  139 spiritual death  191, 194–5, 198, 200

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spiritual discipline  85 spiritual harmony  53 spiritual materialism  10, 135, 144 stale demiurge model  50 Stambaugh, Joan  216 n.36 Stanley, Timothy  11 Stenzel, Julius  12 Stephenson, Roger  224 n.35 Sternberger, Dolf  12, 179–80, 184–5, 201, 237 n.6 story  174 strategic ambiguities  158 strife and play  72–9, 101, 222 n.14 Stunden-Buch (Rilke)  154 Sturm und Drang period  24 Style, Politics, and the Future of Philosphy (Janik)  216 n.39 subjectity (Subjektität)  113, 116–20, 125–6 subjectivism  14, 57–8, 61, 65, 66, 104–5, 125, 206 subjectivity  44, 50, 104–5, 119, 125 suffering (Erleiden)  113, 116 “supersensible substratum of nature” (das übersinnliche Substrat der Natur)  39 Sustaining Affirmation (White)  240 n.43 Swinburne, Richard  193 sympathy  20, 60 systematicity  32 “Tatsache”  228 n.25 Taut, Bruno  136 Taylor, Charles  195 “The Technique of Modern Political Myths”  155 teleology  55, 61–2, 64–6 principles  39 of purposive nature  36 system  26 textual ontology  90 theism  45, 55–6, 91 theology  37, 81, 83–5, 93, 94, 108–9, 114, 118, 204 theomorphism  3 Theophron  214 n.21 therapeutic techniques  36 thesis of multiple earths  75 thinking  32, 160–1, 163

268 Thomson, Iain  13, 179, 187–93, 195–7, 199–200, 239 n.40 Thurneysen, Eduard  93–4 Tillich, Paul  90, 98, 156, 159, 190, 221 n.26, 227 n.17, 239 n.34 “The Time of the World Image”  2, 110, 118, 126 “torn sock”  120–2 traditional Christianity  27, 90, 94 Trakl, Georg  35, 74, 216 n.39 transcendental imagination  23 transcendental method  20 transformation  33, 35 Treatise on the Origin of Language (Herder)  34 Troeltsch, Ernst  6, 56, 66, 120 true God  48 trust  172–6 truth  80, 82, 104, 109, 118, 119, 122–3, 124–5, 160–2, 230 n.18 “The Turning”  117 Twelfth Letter (Schiller)  41, 73, 102, 223 n.20 Twenty-fifth Letter (Schiller)  73 Twenty-seventh Letter (Schiller)  73–4 Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie (Overbeck)  92 unchurched faith  14, 90, 209 unconditional subjectity (unbedingte Subjektität)  117 Understanding Death: An Investigation of Martin Heidegger’s Existential Ontology. See Der verstandene Tod: Eine Untersuchung zu Martin Heideggers Existenzialontologie undisturbed tranquility (Gelassenheit)  49 ungeheuer  236–37 n.33 unity of the Trinity  48 “universal-historical orientation” (universalsgeschichtliche Orientierung)  56–7, 66 universal history  118 universal soul capacity  53 “unpreconceivable being”  48–9, 53 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche)  92, 133 “ur-phenomenon” (Urphänomen)  46 “Urpoesie”  74

Index values  65, 97, 179, 193–4, 195 Van Gogh, Vincent  35, 77–8, 85, 224 n.32 verbal exchanges  74 Vergangenheitsbewältigung  156 Vernunftglaube (rational faith)  39 Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Reinhold)  223 n.20 View of Life, The (Simmel)  6, 8, 55–6, 58–9, 61–2, 64–6, 211 n.6 vocabulary  72, 107 volitional metaphysics  96, 99, 103–6, 134 Volk effect  206 Vollrath, Wilhelm  215 n.24 Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Scheler)  55 “Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung”  25 “Von den Verächtern des Leibes”  144 von Haller, Albrecht  36 Vorträge und Aufsätze (Heidegger)  1, 9, 234 n.22 Waage  141 Wage  140–1 Wagner, Richard  151, 227 n.7 Wagner Case, The (Nietzsche)  133–4, 232 n.1 Wagner triplet  133, 151 Wandlung  180 “Was heißt Denken?”  202 Wegmarken (Pathmarks)  121 Weimar Classicism  28, 42, 72, 79, 99–100, 102, 224 n.35 “Weimar Dioscuri”  72 Weimar Republic  19–20 Weltnacht  139 Wendungspunkt  117 Western metaphysics  94–5, 104, 108–10, 124–5 Western philosophy  95, 221 n.26 “What Is Called Thinking?’’ See “Was heißt Denken?” White, Carol J.  187 White, Stephen  240 n.43 Whitehead, Alfred North  239 n.34 “Why Poets?”  29, 85, 129, 133–4, 137, 143, 145, 148–50, 151–2,

Index 154–5, 164, 170–1, 173, 187, 201, 208–9 “Wie wenn am Feiertage”  129 will to perception  104–6 Will to Power, The (Nietzsche)  99, 123 “will to power”  102, 123–4, 126 “will to will”  123, 126, 198 Winckelmann, Johann  42, 79, 99–100 Wirth, Jason  14, 214 n.22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  150 Wolfe, Judith  4, 11, 14, 22, 91, 226 n.2 Wolin, Richard  222 n.2, 235 n.12, 237 n.2, 238 n.15 world  4, 36, 38, 41, 45, 49–55, 63, 69, 75–8, 77–8, 90, 115, 117–18, 138–48, 166–7, 185–97, 199–201, 204, 207–10

269

“world sustainer” (Welterhalter)  219 n.12 worship  56, 82, 84, 112, 153 “Wozu Dichter?”  136 Wrathall, Mark  225 n.44 writing style  1–2 Yates, Christopher  14 Young, Julian  75, 231 n.25, 232 n.1, 233 nn.19, 22 Zaborowski, Holger  70–1, 77, 157, 215 n.24 Zammito, John  5, 24, 38, 40, 215 n.24, 217 n.40 Zarathustra (Nietzsche)  74, 79, 137, 143–5, 224 n.35 zero-hour texts  10, 85, 129, 201, 208 Žižek, Slavoj  214 n.22, 218 n.8 Zweig, Stefan  13, 203

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