Philosophy and Phcnomcnological Research Vol.

35, 1974-5

HEIDEGGER'S THEORY OF METAPHYSICS AND DIALECTICS Existentialism is a philosophy of social and cultural crisis which attempts to provid an alternative to the dialectical theory of crisis first developed by Hegel and subsequently concretized by Marx and Engels. This opinion is borne out, among other instances, in a passage in Heidegger's essay entitled "Letter on Humanism." In this essay Heidegger writes the following: "Homelessness becomes a world destiny. It is, therefore, necessary to think of this destiny from the point of view of the history of Being. What Marx, deriving from Hegel, recognized in an essential and significant sense as the alienation of man, reaches roots back into the homelessness of modern man. This is evoked from the destiny of Being in the form of metaphysics, strengthened by it and at the same time covered by it in its character as homelessness. Because Marx, in discovering this alienation, reaches roots into an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history excels all other history. Because, however, neither Husserl nor, as far as I can see, Sartre recognizes the essentially historical character of Being, neither phenomenology nor existentialism can penetrate that dimension within which alone a productive discussion with Marxism is possible/'1 This essay was written in 1947 in response to questions of Jean Beaufret and in reply to Sartre's essay, "Existentialism is a Humanism." A study of Sartre's work would show that Sartre was already on the track outlined for him by Heidegger, and would eventually develop an elaborate theory of history which would be contrasted with Marxism as more "profound" and which would be based on a theory of alienation and reification. In this article we wish to consider one aspect of this competition between Existentialist and Marxist theories of alienation.2 Since Hei1 Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism/' reprinted in The Existentialist Trad tion, Nino Langiulli, editor (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, 1971), p. 225. 2 For a more complete and general treatment of the problem of alienation see Mitchell Franklin, "On Hegel's Theory of Alienation and its Historic Force/' Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 50, 1960; also Franklin, "Aspects of the History of Theory of Alienated Consciousness," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 20, 1959-60.

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dogger sees "metaphysics" as the impediment preventing Marxism from grasping the roots of alienation (what Heidegger calls "homelessness") it is necessary to compare conflicting Marxist and Heideggerian theories of metaphysics. Moreover, the examination in Hegelian and Marxist philosophical theory is incomplete without considering the form of thought which would supersede metaphysics, that is, dialectics. In Heidegger's thought, too, there is an analogy to this development. On closer examination, however, the Heideggerian analogue to dialectics turns out to be the exact opposite of what it is for Hegel and Marxism. In his 1935 book entitled An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger contrasts "metaphysics" with the more fundamental "enquiry into being as such." 3 Heidegger writes that ". . . if we consider the question of being in the sense of an enquiry into being as such, it be] comes clear to anyone who follows our thinking that being as such is precisely hidden from metaphysics, and remains forgotten and ' so radically that the forgetfulness of being, which itself falls into > forgetfulness, is the unknown but enduring impetus to metaphysical questioning." 4 If we compare this passage with what Heidegger says about 1 Marxism in the first citation, it is clear that his compliment regard: ing the Marxist theory of history is a back-handed one. As a "meta( physics," Marxism is another theory that "forgets" the enquiry into being as such. In fact it strengthens this forgetfulness in a unique manner. For Heidegger, Marxism erects metaphysical alienation into being a foundation for human life. Although Marxism "reaches roots into an essential dimension of history," it does not see the "ground" of these roots, so to speak, and "conceals" that ground by the very fact that it focuses so sharply on the phenomenon which Heidegger claims is the cause of (or primary result of) human alienation. Thus Heidegger claims to refute superficial interpretations of Marxist materialism. For the fruitful discussion with Marxism mentioned above,
it is necessary to liberate oneself from the naive conceptions of materialism and from the cheap, supposedly effective, refutations of it. The essence of materialism does not consist of the assertion that ever>thing is merely matter, but rather of a metaphysical determination, according to which everything being appears as the material of labor. The modern metaphysical essence of labor is anticipated in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the self-establishing process of unconditional production, i.e., the objecti\ization of the actual through man 3 Martin Heidegger, An Intioduction 1961), p. 15. 4 Ibid., pp. 15-16. to Metaphysics (New York: Anchor Books,

HEIDEGGER'S THEORY OE METXPIIYSTCS AND DI\LECTICS experienced as subjeciiwt\. The essence of ma UM ijiib.ni is coiuealed in the essence of technics, about which, indeed, a great deal is written, but little is thought. Technics in its essence is a desiinv (in ihe histors of Being) of the truth of being resting in obliwon . . . . A * a lorm of truth technics is grounded ? in the histor> of metaph\MCs5

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From this passage it is clear that tor Heidegger Marxist materialism (anticipated by Hegel) is bound up with the theory of" labor, and this in turn leads us to "technics," which is paced in the center of the thought of Hegel and Marx without their having penetrated to its underlying essence. This essence, Heidegger tells us, is the historical untolding of the forgetfulness of being. And this "history" is precisely the "history of metaphysics." Thus the historical materialism of Marx is interpreted by Heidegger to be a description of a destiny whose underlying essence, the forgetfulness of being, remains in oblivion. It remains for us to consider more closely what Heidegger calls "metaphysics/' the most profound exponents of which he claims are Hegel and Marx. The subject of metaphysics is not "being" but the "essent." The translator of the Introduction to Metaphysics explains that the neologism "essent" is used to translate Heidegger's term "seiend" which is a "philosophical invention" which refers to a definite being or thing, as opposed to the being of every definite being or thing. 6 Heidegger argues that the true understanding of the being of the "essent" can be approached by raising the question, "Why are there essents rather than nothing?" 7 What Heidegger understands by definite being, the essent or thing, can be gathered by following up his analysis of this "metaphysical" question. The first part, of the question is what is normally given priority. "Why are there essents?" Here we are questioning definite beings, and asking about their cause, or "ground." This part of the question can be handled within the traditional framework of thought. Here the search for another definite being to explain the beings in question
5 "Letter on Humanism," op. cit., p. 225-6. The following discussion deals with only one aspect of this interpretation of historical materialism. It is well known that in Marxist theory the material base of society does not only consist in the technical aspect of the "forces of production" but also in the "relations of production" or property system. Moreover, this problem of Marxist sociology should not be identified with the more general problem of Marxist philosophy, "the great basic question of all philosophy . . . that concerning the relation of thinking and being." Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 603. 6 An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. x. 7 Ibid., p. 18.

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leads either God or to natural causes investigated by science. For Heidegger both Christian religion and modern science fall under the sway of traditional metaphysics and are therefore closely linked together. The second part of the question, "rather than nothing," seems from this point oi view to be "an ornamental llourish" which adds "nothing" to the main part ol the question. "Here there is nothing more to inquire about. And above all, in talking about nothing or nothingness, we are not making the slightest advance toward the knowledge of the essent." 8 In treating "nothing" as though it were something, the questioner contradicts himself, and so violates the laws of logic. Furthermore, his approach is necessarily unscientific, since science is rooted in logic. And it is a subversive question since one who "takes nothing seriously . . . is patently promoting the spirit of negation and serving the cause of disintegration." 9 This consideration which Heidegger advances against enquiring into "nothing" leads him to ask whether logical considerations, as well as moral ones, can give us criteria in the pursuit of our enquiry. For "what if both our concern for the fundamental rules of thought and our fear of nihilism, which both seem to counsel against speaking of nothing, should be based on a misunderstanding? And this indeed is the case. True, this misunderstanding is not accidental. It is rooted in long years of failure to understand the question^about the essent. And this failure to understand arises from an increasingly hardened forgetfulness of being."10 So for Heidegger the same oblivion that produced metaphysics and which is expressed in historical materialism is responsible for logic and science (as well as Christianity). The conclusion is that "The man who wishes truly to speak about nothing must of necessity become unscientific . . . Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves if it is placed in the cheap acid of logical intelligence." 11 If we turn from Heidegger's subversive enquiry into "nothing" to Marxist thought, we will find an analogous interpretation of metaphysics in which the relation of "thing" to "nothing" is equally important. In his general introduction to Anti-Diihring, Engels describes the development of the metaphysical mode of thought as an outgrowth
8 Ibid., p. 19. 9 Ibid. wibid., p. 20. "Ibid., pp. 21-22.

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of a definite stage of scientific development. From being a framework of thought that had at one time been appropriate to scientific research, metaphysical thought tends to be surpassed by the further growth of science and becomes an impediment to the consolidation of new scientific discoveries. It thereby becomes necessary to replace the metaphysical mode of thought with a more adequate one, that is, with dialectics. The greatest merit of Hegel, according to Engels, was the "re-adoption of dialectics as the highest form of thinking." 12 Dialectical thought in fact had been developed in a primitive and naive form by Heraclitus and was further elaborated by the classical Greek philosophers:
When we reflect on Nature, or the history of mankind, or our own intellectual activity, the first picture presented to us is of an endless maze of relations and interactions, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes out of existence. This primitive, naive, yet intrinsically correct conception of the world was that of the ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and also is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.u

The limitation of this form of thought was that while it was adequate in a general way, it was inadequate for presenting a clear picture of the details of which this "flux" was composed. And as long as the specific characteristics of reality are not clearly understood, the general picture too remains unclear. For scientific knowledge to make progress it was necessary that the relations and interconnections, and coming into being and. the passing away of things, be pushed to the background, while the detail is isolated and examined in its separate existence:
The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and natural objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of investigation has also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things; and therefore not in their motion, but in their repose; not as essentially changing, but as fixed constants; not in their life, but in their death. And when, as was the case with Bacon and Locke, this way of looking at things was transferred from natural science to philosophy, it produced the specific narrow* mindedness of the last centuries, the metaphysical mode of thought."

Engels proceeds to describe the metaphysical mode of thought as a manner of thinking in "absolutely discontinuous antitheses." For the metaphysician, "a thing either exists, or it does'not exist; it
12 Frederick Engels, Anti-Dhring (New York: International Publishers, 1966), p. 26. "Ibid., pp. 26-27. M Ibid., p. 27.

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is equally impossible for a thing to be itself and at the same time something else."15 Thus for Engels the metaphysical mode of thinking treats reality as consisting of definite things, strictly identical with themselves, and so sharply separated from what is not they. In logic, this metaphysical viewpoint is expressed in the principle of identity and the principle of noncontradiction. A thing cannot both be itself and be something else at the same time. Moreover, positive and negative are sharply separated from one another. Death, for example, is thought of as something easily distinguishable from life. The metaphysical viewpoint is also the manner of looking at things of "sound common sense." Normally, we have no difficulty in distinguishing whether a thing is alive or not. But this framework of thought becomes increasingly incapable of comprehending new scientific discoveries. Common sense, as well as the metaphysical mode of thought, is applicable within varying limits. But when it is pushed beyond these limits, as it is by the forward thrust of scientific discoveries, "it becomes one-sided, limited, abstract, and loses its way in insoluble contradictions." 16 The fact that "thought" loses its way when it reaches certain "limit" situations is in fact a characteristic idea of existentialism. The development of .scientific knowledge pushes past the limits of the metaphysical framework, and poses problems relating to the transitions and interconnections between things, as well as to their coming into being and passing away. Thus, for example, at a certain point the line between life and death becomes unclear. It is difficult to ascertain whether certain beings should be classified as animate or inanimate. And within living beings, "death" is necessary for life: "In the same way every organic being is at each moment the same and not the same; at each moment it is assimilating matter drawn from without, and excreting other matter; at each moment the cells of its body are dying and new ones are being formed . . , Closer investigation also shows us that the two poles of an antithesis, like positive and negative, are just as inseparable from each other as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition they mutually penetrate each other." 17 In his essay, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Ideology," Engels succinctly describes the difference between
15 Ibid., p. 28. 16 Ibid. I? Ibid., pp. 28-29.

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the metaphysical and the dialectical modes of thought: "the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidentality and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end . . . ."18 Both Engels and Heidegger therefore regard the metaphysical mode of thinking as involving the conception of reality as a complex of things, fixed entities, defined beings whose positivity sharply excludes "nonbeing." But while Heidegger identifies scientific thought with the metaphysical concept of reality, Engels conceives of the relation between the metaphysical framework and its scientific content to be a transitory one. For Engels the development of scientific knowledge tends to break through the framework which had at one time been appropriate to its lesser degree of development. The historical development of science objectively requires a more adequate mode of thought, dialectics. 19 But the transition from metaphysics to dialectics does not happen automatically. For the most part, the metaphysical mode of thought continues to dominate the thinking of scientists, even while the content of their work tends to spill over its limits and contradict its premises. But the scientists who have learned to think dialectically are still few and far between, and hence the conflict between the discoveries made and the old traditional mode of thought is the explanation of the boundless confusion which now reigns in theoretical natural science and reduces both teachers and students, writers and readers to despair/' 20 It is with this despair over the incapacity of the metaphysical mode of thought to grasp the complexity of existence and the crisis
18 In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, p. 620. T Thus, in his short essay on "The Principle of Identity," Heidegger writes: "For science could not be what it is if the self-identity of its object, whatever it may be, were not guaranteed at the outset. By \irtue of this warranty the possibility of scientific enquiry is assured." Martin Heidegger, Essays in Metaphysics (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1960), pp. 16*17. In the Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), p. 216, Engels, referring to Hegel as a basic source, writes: "For natural science in its comprehensive role, however, even in each single branch, abstract identity is totally inadequate, and although on the whole it has now been abolished in practice, theoretically it still dominates people's minds, and most natural scientists imagine that identity and difference are irreconcilable opposites, instead of one-sided poles" which represent the truth only in their reciprocal action, in the inclusion of difference within identity." 20 Anti-Diihring, p. 29.

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of social and cultural development that existentialist thought in fact begins. Existentialism denies the possibility of a scientific overcoming of the despair of intellectuals before the limits of metaphysical thought. On the contrary, it takes this despair as an indication that scientific thought and technological developments are totally impotent to bring about a solution to social and cultural crises. The solution lies outside of science, "deeper" than technology. Science or "technics" is at the heart of the problem, and to propose a scientific explanation of social crisis, as Marxism claims to do, is only to "forget" all the more surely the real answer. For this answer to the crisis of metaphysics, Heidegger turns back to the primitive dialectics of Heraclitus, pitting the early Greek thinkers against Hegel and Marx. Heidegger interprets the dialectical principle of the unity and struggle of opposites through the fragments of Heraclitus, and gives an explanation of the appearance of metaphysical thought that is quite different from Engels' interpretation. Heidegger interprets fragment 53, translated by Kirk and Raven as follows: "War {polemos) is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free."21 According to Heidegger,
The polemos named here is a conflict that prevailed prior to everything divine and human, not a war in the human sense. This conflict, as Heraclitus thought it, first caused the realm of being to separate into opposites; it first gave rise to position and order and rank, In such separation cleavages, intervals, distances, and joints opened. In the conflict [Auseinandersetzung, setting-apart] a world comes into being. (Conflict does not split, much less destroy unity. It constitutes unity, it is a binding-together, Zogos. Polemos and logos are the same.) The struggle meant here is the original struggle, for it gives rise to the contenders as such; it is not a mere assault on something already there. It is this conflict that first projects and develops what had hitherto been unheard of, unsaid and unthought. The battle is then sustained by the creators, poets, thinkers, statesmen. Against the overwhelming chaos they set the barrier of their work, and in their work they capture the world thus opened up. It is with these uorks that the elemental power, the physis first comes to stand. Only now does the essent become essent as such. This world-building is history in the authentic sense.22

The fact that Heidegger attempts to overcome the limitations of metaphysics by turning to what Engels calls the primitive dialectics of Heraclitus, has an important consequence in Heidegger's social
21 G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: University Press, 1966), p. 195. it An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 51.

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and political thought. For Heidegger interprets the loss of respect for rank and order to be one of the signs of the decadence of modern "technical" society. Heideggerian philosophy, on the contrary, attempts to revive the primitive struggle which separates (while uniting) society in an articulate order based on "rank." In fact, metaphysics is not really overcome in Heidegger's thought. It is revivified by seeing its source in a world-creating act of struggle. It is not a matter of replacing the concept of the world as a complex of things, with a concept of the world as consisting of interacting dialectical processes, but of "remembering" that the "thing" was first created out of "chaos" at the beginning of the "world," and that this creation can be continued by poets, thinkers, and statesmen.23 It is not a matter of the unity of positive and negative, being and nonbeing in processes of becoming. Following Hegel, Engels argued that whenever being is regarded as having fixed positive limits and is thought of within the framework of the principle of identity, the negation of that fixed state and the movement to a new state appear as external to the original being. Death, then, is the metaphysical opposite of life, not a reality that has its causes within vital processes themselves. It is one of the basic doctrines of Heidegger's thought that man is a "being-towards-death," and that authentic freedom is found by a recognition that the finite existence of man is bordered by the radical negation of his life.24 For Heidegger, consideration of nonbeing leads back to a chaos of unformed, unrelated, infinite being, and a creative heroic or poetic struggle whereby out of the nonbeing a# fixed being (physics or the essent) "first .comes to stand." Heidegger corsidejs the Greek understanding of "essent" as "permanence*' or "standing
23 Cf. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing, (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), Heidegger considers the concept of process to be only a variation of the metaphysical concept of the Thing. As such it produces contradictions which lead to an "existential" explanation of time as rooted in a primordial decision of Dasein. In Being and Time (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 426, Heidegger shows the contradictions of a metaphysical analysis of time as external juxtaposition of isolated moments in order to argue that their real unity consists in the primitive act of Dasein. 24 Cf. Being and Time, p. 302, where death is related to "indefiniteness," and so is essentially opposed to the preoccupation of ordinary thought with definite objects. It is this indefiniteness, too, that underlies existential "anxiety" and opposs it to ordinary "fear" of definite dangers. Cf. ibid., p. 230. It is by beginning with a metaphysical concept of finite objects and fears, that Heidegger leads his reader to look elsewhere for an indefinite or infinite reality "chaos" or "Being" from which we flee to the security of the fixed object, or rather which we flee by constructing a fixed object to mask our anxiety.

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presence," to be the most authentic one.25 Thus authentic understanding lasts as long as permanence is understood to be the result of an active effort and against contending forces. It is not then the notion of being as permanent that is challenged by Heidegger, but the oblivion of the life or death struggle that is necessary to maintain this permanence. From this it is clear that Heidegger attempts to revive or preserve metaphysics by seeing it as the result of an active creation out of the shifting chaos of infinite possibilities. This origin of metaphysics is a primitive prescientific struggle. Science as we normally understand it comes into being only when this primitive struggle has been forgotten. "Where struggle ceases, the essent does not vanish, but the world turns away. The essent is no longer asserted (i.e. preserved as such). Now it is merely found ready-made; it is datum. The end result is no longer that which is impressed into limits (i.e. placed in its form); it is merely finished and as such available to everyone, already-there, no longer embodying any world now man does as he pleases with what is available. The essent becomes an object, either to be held (view, image) or to be acted upon (product and calculation)." 26 What Heidegger calls metaphysics is thus the view of the world as consisting of objects that are already made and which stand inertly before the observing subject. Out of this metaphysical view comes the epistemological dilemma: how to get from subject to object. This is a stumbling block for all rational thought, since rational thought "objectifies" being as consisting of objects separated from a subject, and all further thought can only increase this distance. 27 The problem of epistemology is solved according to Heidegger only by returning to the root of the "separating" of subject and object in a prerational struggle which, as Heraclitus says, makes some slaves, others free. It is basic to the appeal of existentialism that it does not see

25 An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 50, 52. 26 Ibid., p p . 51-52.

27 For a discussion of this aspect of Heidegger's thought, see, Marvin Frber,

"Heidegger on the Essence of Truth," in Radical Currents in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. by DeGrood, Riepe and Somerville, Warren H. Green, Inc., St. Louis, Missouri, 1971.

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'despair" in purely intellectual terms, nor does the solution to despair remain in the realm of epistemology and ontology.28 We have seen that for Heidegger the problem of metaphysics is a problem of "world destiny." Metaphysics forgets the underlying struggle that secretly sustains it, and it is necesary to revive that struggle before the consequences of oblivion spread further. It is not a matter of abandoning science and technology, but of reviving the primitive struggle that fixed being in its place in the first place, and so enabled men to manipulate it. But without restoring the sense of this underlying world-making contention, science and technology spread blindly and threaten to level out all "authentic" differences. At stake in the "question of being" is nothing less than the "destiny of Europe, where the destiny of the earth is being decided while our own historic being there proves to be the center for Europe itself."29 What is occurring today is a "darkened of the world."30 This means that the focusing on the fixed being as already there overlooks the world-forming heroic act that first caused a fixed being to stand there. This is Heidegger's interpretation of what for Engels was a process in the development of science in which a generally adequate picture of the world as a whole is replaced by a focusing on the details of the picture. To bring back into focus the picture of the whole, now filled in by concrete understanding of the parts, is the object of dialectics, according to Engels. Attacking the notion of scientific dialectics in Hegel and then in Marx, Heidegger returns to the "world" in a primitive prescientific struggle. Heidegger writes passionately of the situation to which his philosophy attempts to reply:
28 For Engels, too, the problem of metaphysics is not limited to problems of scientific method, but these are intertwined with and ultimately based on fundamental historical developments: "Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honoured institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, alsolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, sacred." Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, op, cit., p. 598. For a more complete account of the Marxist theory of formalism, reification, fetishism and alienation the effects of social-economic relations on forms of thought would have to be added to the present discussion of metaphysics. But for Heidegger, the "flight of the gods" is related to the degeneracy of modern times, whose."essential episodes" are "the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the standardization of man, th' pre-eminence of the mediocre." An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 37. 29 Ibid., p. 35. 30 ibid., p. 37.

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PHILOSOPH Y AND PHENOMLNOLOGICAL RESEARCH This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies todav in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaplnsical point of \iew, Russia and America are the same; the same drean technological trenz>, the same unrestricted organization of the a\erage man . . . . The li\es of men began to slide into a world which lacked that depth trom out ot which the essential always comes to man and comes back to man, so compelling him to become superior and making him act in conformity to a rank . . . Intelligence no longer meant a wealth of talent, la\ishl> spent, and the command of energies, but only what could be learned b\ even one, the practice of joutiue. alwavs associated with a certain amount ot sweat and a certain amount ot show. In America and in Russia this development grew into a boundless etcetera of indifference and aiways-the-sameness so much so that the quantity took on a quality of its own. Since then the domination in those countries of a cross section of the indifferent mass has become something more than a drean accident. It has become an active onslaught that destio>s all rank and e\ery world-creating impulse of the spirit, and calls it a lie. This is the onslaught ot what we call the demonic (in the sense of destructive evil).3i

The different forms of democracy in socialist Russia and capitalist America are attacked by Heidegger as resulting from blind, technological frenzy. Metaphysics becomes a world destiny, and the original authentic struggle that established "rank" degenerates into a process that only knows the quantitative differences of "mass society." Heidegger calls on the German nation to revive the primitive struggle that establishes "authentic" differences, and to repulse the pincer movement that encircles it.
We are caught in a pincers. Situated in the center, our nation incurs the severest pressure. It is the nation with the most neighbors and hence the most endangered. With all this, it is the most metaphysical of nations. We are certain of this vocation, but our people uill only be able to wrest a destiny from it if within itself it creates a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this vocation, and takes a creative view of its tradition. All this implies that this nation, as a historical nation, must move itself and thereby the history of the West beyond the center of their future 'happening' and into the primordial realm of the powers of being.32

This passage bears out our interpretation that "metaphysics" is to be preserved. As the most metaphysical of nations, Germany has still alive in it the creative struggle that established permanent being, and so laid the groundwork for science and technology. It must enter into the primordial realm of privitive struggle, and direct this struggle both towards reestablishing authentic "rank" in Germany, in countering the threat from the East and the West, and in "creatively" preserving the tradition of German feudal hierarchy.
3i Ibid., pp. 31. 37-38. nibid., pp. 31-32.

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Heidegger attempts to save the metaphysical mode of thought, against the threat of scientific dialectics, by reviving dialectics in a primitive, intuitive form. In the same way, he defends German idealism: "it was not German idealism that collapsed; rather, the age was no longer strong enough to stand up to the greatness, breadth, and originality of that spiritual world, i.e. truly to realize it, for to realize a philosophy means something very different from applying theorems and insights." 33 What he praises in the primitive dialectics of Heraclitus is its prescientific, intuitive character and the fact that it makes the class antagonisms and hierarchy of ancient society appear to be the result of an obscure, Promethean struggle. On the social plane, descent into the "primordial realm of the powers of being" consists in an encouragement of German nationalism and racism. Although Heidegger remained in the Nazi party for only a short period, from 1933-34, he wrote in the lectures of 1935 to defend the "essential greatness" of the Nazi movement. As the guardian of authentic Naziism, Heidegger rejects only the vulgarizers, "the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of Nationnal Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man) . . ."M What Heidegger means by this is that the Nazi movement essentially sees the essence of technology to lie in a primitive struggle to establish "position, order and rank," and that it recognizes the creative work of geniuses who carve forms out of chaos, and who protect their works from incursion from without. Technology is understood as a global creation whose roots are not in a scientific appraisal of nature in its processes, interactions, and transformations, but in a struggle to fix reality in place. Heidegger's theory of the struggle to preserve class society by reverting to its more primitive forms gives the appearance of replacing metaphysics with dialectics. In fact, it defends metaphysics and attempts to deprive it of its scientific content while basing it on primitive subjectivistic and irrational action. JAMES LAWLER.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO. 33 Ibid., p. 37. Xlbid. p. 166.