Insight Editions · No. 45
Being and Truth
The Fundamental Question of Philosophy and the Question of Truth
Martin Heidegger · Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
Heidegger’s 1933–34 lecture courses examine metaphysics, Hegel, Plato’s cave, and truth as unconcealment, linking philosophical questioning to the political upheaval of Nazi Germany.
A study guide to Being and Truth by Martin Heidegger, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
The argument map: from the summer's critique of metaphysics to the winter's struggle with untruth.
How the book is built
The summer course argues backward from Hegel: "metaphysics" began as a librarian's title, became under Christianity the science of the supersensible, and in modernity was ruled by the mathematical (Descartes, Wolff, Baumgarten) until Hegel completed it as theo-logic. The winter course repeats the 1931-32 lectures (GA 34) with a new Heraclitus introduction: πόλεμος, struggle, sets beings into unconcealment. Plato's cave shows truth as a history of liberation; the idea of the good yokes Being and truth but is left unasked, so truth decays into ὁμοίωσις. The Theaetetus then asks how a false view is possible and answers with the bifurcation of every view. The main part of the winter course survives only in Wilhelm Hallwachs's transcript.
Sources of the text and how reliable each layer is.
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| F | Translators' Foreword | A patchwork of sources and a charged political vocabulary. |
| I.0 | Summer Introduction | The people's awakening demands philosophy as questioning who we are. |
| I.1 | Development, Transformation, and Christianization of Metaphysics | A stopgap book title became the science of the supersensible. |
| I.2 | The System of Modern Metaphysics: The Mathematical | The mathematical decides in advance what counts as being and true. |
| I.3 | Determination by Christianity and Mathematical Grounding | Baumgarten derives God from the possible by logical consistency. |
| I.4 | Hegel: The Completion of Metaphysics as Theo-logic | Theo-logic completes metaphysics and ends questioning. |
| I.5 | Conclusion | Confrontation becomes engagement for "the new German state". |
| II.0 | Winter Introduction | Polemos sets beings into unconcealment; Being and truth are one. |
| II.1.1 | The Four Stages of the Happening of Truth | The cave as four stages of liberation; freedom is projection of Being. |
| II.1.2 | The Idea of the Good and Unconcealment | The good empowers and yokes Being and truth; the Kolbenheyer speech. |
| II.1.3 | The Question of the Essence of Untruth | The yoke left unasked; truth must be retrieved as the assault on untruth. |
| II.2.1 | Preliminary Considerations on the Greek Concept of Knowledge | Epistēmē is know-how; the question is an attack on settled opinion. |
| II.2.2 | Theaetetus's Answers and their Rejection | Perception and view are insufficient; δόξα opens the door to ψεῦδος. |
| II.2.3 | The Possibility of ψευδὴς δόξα | Every view is bifurcated; truth is struggle with untruth. |
| A.I | Notes and drafts, Summer 1933 | The fundamental question, the rift, the confrontation with Hegel. |
| A.II | Notes and drafts, Winter 1933-34 | Thomas's adaequatio; Theaetetus 184-187 as the turning point. |
| B | Editor's Afterword | Sources and an apologetic political reading. |
Reading tips
- Mind the layers. Text from §10 of the winter course is a student's transcript; treat exact wording with care.
- Read the recaps. Each winter session opens with a dated recapitulation; they show what Heidegger stressed in the room.
- Political vocabulary. Volk, Kampf, Geist, Führer: keep the 1933-34 context in mind.
Depth map: what each course contributes
| Course | Philosophical payload | Political register to flag |
|---|---|---|
| Summer 1933 | Metaphysics as decline from Greek question; Descartes illusion; Baumgarten ladder; Hegel as theo-logic | Leadership, nation, mission; attack on wait-and-see party members; Greek-German provenance |
| Winter 1933-34 | Aletheia vs correctness; cave as happening; good as empowerment; pseudos via bifurcation | Enemy / annihilation; plebiscite example; Führer reeducation; Kolbenheyer; race from above; blood and soil |
Translators' Foreword
A text of mixed sources
The volume prints two lecture courses that Martin Heidegger gave as rector of Freiburg in 1933-34. As Hartmut Tietjen's afterword explains, they rest on Heidegger's partial manuscript, his notes and student transcripts. The language is less idiosyncratic than the 1936-38 Contributions to Philosophy, but the reader should expect sudden shifts in style.
- Consistency over elegance. Key terms get one English rendering throughout; a German-English glossary closes the book.
- Precision kept. Where Heidegger is exact, so is the English, even when a looser version would read better; where he is informal, they use matching idiom.
- Brackets mark intervention. Incomplete notes are turned into full sentences; every added word, every translator's note and every rendering of Greek or Latin sits in square brackets.
- German pagination. Page numbers cited in the foreword refer to GA 36/37, Sein und Wahrheit, ed. Tietjen (Klostermann, 2001).
Five loaded words
| German | Rendering | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Sein / Seiendes | Being / a being, beings | Capital B keeps the verb "to be" apart from things; Being is no super-being but roughly the field of meaning in which beings become accessible, unfolding in time. |
| Dasein | left untranslated | The human being as the one for whom its existence is a question, rooted in a historical "here". |
| Volk | people (singular) | Could mean community, nation or masses; Heidegger attacks the racial reading (German pp. 209-213) but keeps a people's identity open to questioning. |
| Kampf | struggle | Carries readiness for real combat; in 1933 it echoed Mein Kampf; Heidegger ties it to Heraclitus' polemos. |
| Geist, geistig | spirit, spiritual | Human culture as a whole, not religion; "breath, gust, astonishment, impulse, engagement", against both rootless intellect and Hegel's "empty eternity". |
The Baumgarten passage shows why lowercase "being" would fail: whatever "stands above Being" would, if it is at all, be a being beneath Being. The translators thank Dieter Thomä for political connotations, Michael Sweeney for Aquinas, their 2008-09 seminars, and Andrew Mitchell for reading the draft.
How the translators handle the mixed sources: each layer gets its own treatment.
The Fundamental Question of Philosophy
Introduction: The Fundamental Question of Philosophy and the Fundamental Happening of Our History
§1. The mission as a decision for the fundamental question
The chain is explicit: a people finds its leadership, creates its state, grows into a nation, and gains a spiritual mission among peoples. Knowing this mission is not political news and not prophecy ("fortunately forbidden"); it is a "demanding knowledge" of what must be. It demands what is not yet, quarrels with what is, and honors past greatness; this restlessness is "our Being".
- We are by asking. "We are, insofar as we ask who we are." This questioning is "the highest spiritual engagement" and is the people's philosophy.
- The circle. The fundamental question defines philosophy's essence and the essence defines the question; Heidegger accepts the circle. The question was decided at the inception, and the task is to become "equal" to that decision again.
§2. The Greek inception
The decision happened when the Greeks, "whose ethnicity and language have the same provenance as ours", created a way of Dasein through poets and thinkers. That inception "still is" and links the German destiny to it. Two questions follow: whether we will the greatness of our people, and whether we will create the spiritual world latent in the current turn of events.
He mocks the common opinion that one should "spiritualize the National Socialist revolution": with what spirit? Spirit today is empty "cleverness"; real spirit is "breath, gust, astonishment, impulse, engagement". If the latent world is not brought to form, "some barbarism" will sweep over us. He glosses σοφός as one with the right taste for what is worthy and φιλία as pressing toward and protecting: philosophy is "the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings".
§2: Heidegger's answer to those who would 'spiritualize' the revolution.
§3. What philosophy is not
- Not science. Science is a subordinate mode that studies one region; philosophy concerns all beings and leaps over every result.
- Not a worldview. A picture built from science, practice and "universal cultivation" is artificial and derivative; the aim is "world history in the struggle over our own history".
- Not a foundation for knowledge. Studying the logic of scientific concepts stays rootless unless it draws on the essence of truth.
- Not absolute knowledge. Philosophy springs from "the ownmost urgency and strength of humanity, and not of God": essential, but finite.
- Not concern with the isolated individual. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were "the two greatest voices of warning", but "broken under their burden"; we must hear them without becoming adherents.
The twist: philosophy has historically been all five. Its history is "an ever steeper decline" from its essence, and each appeal to the Greeks misreads the inception in later terms. The denial does not come from a suprahistorical standpoint but from history grasped "between inception and end". Summary: philosophy is the questioning struggle over Being, it is historical (a people's demanding, challenging and honoring), and it is none of the five.
The opening argument of the 1933 course: from political moment to the confrontation with Hegel.
§4. Confrontation with Hegel
History speaks only when forced into confrontation, and the attack must hit "that highest position of the entire history". That is Hegel: looking back, the completion of Western philosophy; looking forward, the point of departure for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Students need not know Hegel's works, because the world those works shaped "is still actually here", and experts are "just as clueless". The decision is each listener's: to give way to "spiritual torpor and willing cowardice" or to will the people, before "the West cracks at its joints".
§§1-4 expanded: mission chain, five nots, confrontation with Hegel
Mission chain (§1). A people finds its leadership, creates its state, grows into a nation, and gains a spiritual mission among peoples. Knowing this mission is not political news and not prophecy ("fortunately forbidden"); it is a "demanding knowledge" of what must be. It demands what is not yet, quarrels with what is, and honors past greatness; this restlessness is "our Being". "We are, insofar as we ask who we are." This questioning is "the highest spiritual engagement" and is the people's philosophy. The fundamental question defines philosophy's essence and the essence defines the question; Heidegger accepts the circle. The question was decided at the inception, and the task is to become "equal" to that decision again.
Greek-German provenance (§2). The decision happened when the Greeks, "whose ethnicity and language have the same provenance as ours", created a way of Dasein through poets and thinkers. That inception "still is" and links the German destiny to it. Two questions: whether we will the greatness of our people, and whether we will create the spiritual world latent in the current turn of events. He mocks "spiritualize the National Socialist revolution": with what spirit? Spirit today is empty "cleverness"; real spirit is "breath, gust, astonishment, impulse, engagement". If the latent world is not brought to form, "some barbarism" will sweep over us. σοφός: one with the right taste for what is worthy; φιλία: pressing toward and protecting. Philosophy is "the ceaseless questioning struggle over the essence and Being of beings".
Five rejected definitions (§3), with the twist. Philosophy has historically been all five (science, worldview, foundation, absolute knowledge, concern with the isolated individual). Its history is "an ever steeper decline" from its essence, and each appeal to the Greeks misreads the inception in later terms. The denial does not come from a suprahistorical standpoint but from history grasped "between inception and end". Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were "the two greatest voices of warning", but "broken under their burden"; we must hear them without becoming adherents.
Confrontation (§4). The way into the fundamental question is a confrontation with the history of Western spirit at its "highest position": Hegel. Not refutation, not commentary, but Auseinandersetzung: scission and decision for and against. The summer course is therefore preparation: expose the powers that made Hegel's completion possible (the mathematical and Christian theology), so that a new questioning can be equal to the Greek inception.
Summer Introduction: from the people's mission to the confrontation with Hegel.
The Development, Transformation, and Christianization of Traditional Metaphysics
§5. Who is Hegel?
The way into philosophy is historical because philosophy is "the fundamental happening of the history of our Dasein". A compact biography follows.
- 1770. Born in Stuttgart; part of the "German movement" of 1770-1820.
- 1788-93. Tübingen with Schelling and Hölderlin.
- To 1796. Tutor in Berne, on Kant's ethics and "positive" Christianity; then tutor in Frankfurt, where Hölderlin turns him to the Greeks.
- 1801. Jena, lectures on logic and metaphysics; finishes the Phenomenology of Spirit on the evening of Jena-Auerstädt (1806).
- 1808-16. Gymnasium rector in Nuremberg, writes the Science of Logic (1812-16).
- 1816. Heidelberg at 46, the Encyclopedia (1817).
- 1818-1831. Berlin, going for "political" rather than philosophical purposes.
Heidegger praises Hegel's "Swabian brooding", "tremendous knowledge" and conceptual precision. He refuses a summary: the aim is the "inner movement of the questioning", found where Hegel and the tradition located the core of philosophy, in metaphysics.
§6. From book title to Christian concept
μετὰ τὰ φυσικά joins μετά ("after") and τὰ φυσικά, beings that arise and pass away by themselves (φύσις, against θέσις, human positing). Aristotle's lectures, lost until the first century BC, were sorted by school editors who appended the unplaceable treatises after the physics. So the name is "a stopgap title" born in an age of "the business of the schools".
In the Christian age ("perhaps Boethius") the phrase fused into metaphysica, and μετά shifted from post to trans: nature is creation, and what lies beyond is God. The stopgap became "the highest possible type of human knowledge". Kant's essay on the progress of metaphysics since Leibniz and Wolff shows the reading had become self-evident: "from knowledge of the sensible to that of the super-sensible". Even Werner Jaeger's Aristotle research (1912, 1923) keeps the Christian view of content.
How a shelf-mark became a discipline: the three stages of the word 'metaphysics'.
§7: Christian faith sets the three domains of metaphysica specialis; Kant asks whether any of it is possible.
§7. Kant's crisis of metaphysics
The Christianized concept is "a Christian concept through and through". Faith determines beings as a whole in three respects: the world is created, the individual soul seeks salvation and immortality, and God is creator and savior. Even without faith this survives as a "pallid, washed-out" everyday worldview.
| Domain | Rational discipline | Christian root |
|---|---|---|
| Soul | Rational psychology | Salvation, immortality |
| World (nature) | Rational cosmology | Creation |
| God | Rational theology | Creator, savior; summum ens |
| Being in general | Metaphysica generalis (ontology) | Ens in communi, the "architectonic" base |
The three are metaphysica specialis, the "genuine" part; metaphysica generalis treats ens in communi. Kant toiled within this scheme until the Critique of Pure Reason asked whether metaphysics is possible at all, a "metaphysics of metaphysics". The question becomes: how are synthetic a priori cognitions possible (as ontological, not ontic), and on what ground (transcendental unity)? Underneath lies "what is man?" Metaphysics is a natural tendency and a constant transcendental illusion. Yet Kant "remains in the received Christian world": the ancient world stayed "closed to him".
§§5-7 expanded: Hegel bio detail, stopgap title, specialis domains
Hegel as Heidegger tells him (§5). Born 1770 Stuttgart; part of the "German movement" of 1770-1820. 1788-93 Tübingen with Schelling and Hölderlin. Tutor in Berne (to 1796) on Kant's ethics and "positive" Christianity; then Frankfurt, where Hölderlin turns him to the Greeks. 1801 Jena; finishes the Phenomenology of Spirit on the evening of Jena-Auerstädt (1806). 1808-16 Gymnasium rector in Nuremberg, writes the Science of Logic (1812-16). 1816 Heidelberg at 46, the Encyclopedia (1817). 1818-1831 Berlin, going for "political" rather than philosophical purposes. Heidegger praises "Swabian brooding", "tremendous knowledge" and conceptual precision. Aim: the "inner movement of the questioning", found where Hegel and the tradition located the core of philosophy, in metaphysics.
Stopgap to supersensible (§6). μετὰ τὰ φυσικά joins μετά ("after") and τὰ φυσικά, beings that arise and pass away by themselves (φύσις, against θέσις, human positing). Aristotle's lectures, lost until the first century BC, were sorted by school editors who appended the unplaceable treatises after the physics. So the name is "a stopgap title" born in an age of "the business of the schools". In the Christian age ("perhaps Boethius") the phrase fused into metaphysica, and μετά shifted from post to trans: nature is creation, and what lies beyond is God. The stopgap became "the highest possible type of human knowledge". Kant's essay on the progress of metaphysics since Leibniz and Wolff shows the reading had become self-evident: "from knowledge of the sensible to that of the super-sensible". Even Werner Jaeger's Aristotle research (1912, 1923) keeps the Christian view of content.
Specialis and generalis (§7). Christian faith sets three domains for metaphysica specialis: God, world, soul (theology, cosmology, psychology). Metaphysica generalis or ontology treats ens in communi. Kant's critical question is whether any of this knowledge is possible. Heidegger's claim: the whole architecture is already "un-Greek"; Western philosophy turned away from the Greek question "right after its inception" and stayed so "until Nietzsche".
§7: Christian faith sets specialis; ontology becomes generalis; Kant asks possibility.
The System of Modern Metaphysics and the First of Its Primary Determining Grounds: The Mathematical
§8. What "the mathematical" means
Two aims: show the effects of the two grounds, and gauge how far metaphysics drifted from the Greek question, as evidence that Western philosophy is an "accelerating decline". There is still "no real history of Western metaphysics". The academic concept Kant used came from Christian Wolff (1679-1754), Crusius, Baumgarten and Meier, whose ideal was mathesis: fundamental concepts, principles and rigorous deduction. Leibniz, like Spinoza and Descartes, took mathematics as the prototype of all scientificity.
The Greeks distinguished four kinds of things: τὰ φυσικά (what arises on its own), τὰ ποιούμενα (what is made), τὰ χρήματα (things in use) and τὰ πράγματα (things we deal with). τὰ μαθήματα names no content at all: it is the learnable as such, what we take from ourselves. Plato's Meno (85d) says the learner gets knowledge "himself from himself". Number and figure are "mathematical" only derivatively: the procedure forms its own objects and lays down its own rules, so it is a way, a method.
- Two conditions of method. It must separate true from false and reach everything knowable in the domain.
- Descartes' two elements. Intuitus (direct insight into principles) and deductio (derivation), per Regulae rule IV; rule V: reduce the obscure to the simplest, then ascend by the same steps.
- Older roots. Plato's νοεῖν / διανοεῖσθαι and Aristotle's ἐπαγωγή / ἀπόδειξις.
- Universal science. Descartes' mathesis universalis; Leibniz's characteristica universalis and scientia generalis, with analysis (resolve into simpler notions) and synthesis (compose back to the question).
The mathematical as method: from the learnable to a decision about Being.
§9. The mathematical decides the content
Because this knowledge seems universal and close to logic, all knowledge was assimilated to it. It is "the inner law" fixing the starting point and the idea of truth up to Hegel, behind the passion to "raise philosophy to the rank of a science". A note dismisses the foundations crisis of the day (intuitionism versus formalism): "neither of the two".
§10. Descartes: the illusory new inception
The usual picture: medieval philosophy decayed under theology; Descartes (1596-1650) begins with universal doubt and finds the cogito, where the ergo is no inference but a fundamentum absolutum et inconcussum. The I moves to the centre and subjectivity gains priority. Heidegger mocks how this figure dominates German exam papers, a sign of "spiritual bankruptcy".
- α Doubt is method-driven. Doubt is "methodical" in the deeper sense that the mathematical method fixes in advance that the ground must be simplest and perspicuous.
- β The rigor is illusory. That presupposition is arbitrary and ungrounded; it decides the ground must be indubitably present at hand.
- γ The ground is the I. Strip away everything doubtful and only doubting, a kind of thinking, remains: I think.
- δ Self-reflection is a delusion. It is never asked whether the self is reached through the "I" at all.
- ε Self as consciousness. The I dissolves into a bundle of representations; no action, decidedness, historicity or being-with.
- ζ I as subject. Subjectum translated ὑποκείμενον, what lies before us (today's "object"); objectum meant what is merely represented. Because the I is the indubitable thing lying at hand, "subject" comes to mean "I".
The upshot: certainty → truth → beings → Being. Mathematical certainty determines what truly is; consciousness becomes genuine Being, and the fundamental question is "nipped in the bud". German idealism's struggle against the thinglike I only confirms the Cartesian start.
§§11-12. Wolff and the Euclidean system
Eighteenth-century German metaphysics shows the dominance in Euclid-style construction: terse definitions, each section citing earlier ones. Wolff's Ontologia (1729) states it in its title (methodo scientifica pertractata), its Dedication (philosophy awaits a "correcting hand"; as Euclid systematized mathematics, eius exemplo Wolff gathers the first principles of all cognition, foundations "even of mathematics") and its Preface, which faults Descartes for leaving fundamental concepts undefined. Descartes starts from the ego sum, Wolff from primal concepts, but both follow the method. Baumgarten's Metaphysica (1739), Kant's lifelong textbook, defines metaphysics as "the science of the first principles in human cognition".
- Descartes. Starts from the doubting I; principles by intuitus; the system grows from the subject.
- Wolff. Starts from defined primal concepts; demands rigorous definition rather than intuition; system as Euclidean textbook.
- Shared. Both obey mathematical method; Hegel will fuse Descartes' subject with Wolff's concepts inside a Christian-theological system.
§10 continued: six steps that undo Descartes
After the usual picture, Heidegger states two theses and proves them in six Greek-letter steps (§10 α-ζ). The theses: (1) Cartesian doubt's radicalism and the rigor of the new founding are an illusion and a source of "fateful delusions"; (2) there is no new inception with Descartes; rather, a "further essential decline" that drives philosophy farther from its fundamental question. The attack is also the "first advance" of the summer course's general assault on Hegel.
- α Methodical in the deep sense. Doubt is "methodical" not only because it aims at certainty, but because it serves mathematical method: what can count as foundation is decided in advance as simplicissima propositio, purely perspicuous (intuitus).
- β The process is an illusion. Why must philosophy's ground be "purely simple and perspicuous"? Only if one already subordinates philosophy to the mathematical. Descartes never grounds that presupposition and never tries; the "rigor" of the doubt therefore presupposes what it pretends to discover: something indubitably present at hand.
- γ The ground is the I. Strip away the doubtful and only doubting remains, a kind of thinking: I think. The cogito is not a discovery pulled from nowhere; it is what the method had to find.
- δ Self-reflection as delusion. It is never asked whether the self is reached through the "I" at all. Self-reflection under the mathematical rule misses action, decidedness, historicity and being-with.
- ε Self as consciousness. The I dissolves into a bundle of representations. Genuine Being becomes consciousness; what does not fit consciousness falls outside what "is".
- ζ I as subject. Subjectum translated ὑποκείμενον, what lies before us (today's "object"); objectum meant what is merely represented. Because the I is the indubitable thing lying at hand, "subject" comes to mean "I". The linguistic shift is itself a symptom of the ontological one.
§10 α-ζ: how mathematical method manufactures the Cartesian subject.
The upshot is a chain of substitutions: certainty → truth → beings → Being. Mathematical certainty determines what truly is; consciousness becomes genuine Being; the question of Being is "nipped in the bud". German idealism's later struggle against the thinglike I only confirms that the Cartesian start was accepted. Heidegger mocks the exam culture that still treats this Descartes as the paradigm of radical thinking: a sign of "spiritual bankruptcy" among students and teachers alike. The mockery is not a digression; it belongs to the rectorate's university-reform rhetoric of 1933.
§§11-12 expanded: Wolff's Euclidean machine
Eighteenth-century German metaphysics shows the dominance in Euclid-style construction: terse definitions, each section citing earlier ones by number. Wolff's Ontologia (source: 1729; standard bibliographies: 1730) states the program three times:
- Title. Philosophia prima sive Ontologia, methodo scientifica pertractata: first philosophy treated by the scientific (that is, mathematical) method.
- Dedication. Philosophy awaits a "correcting hand"; as Euclid systematized mathematics, eius exemplo Wolff gathers the first principles of all cognition, foundations "even of mathematics".
- Preface. Faults Descartes for leaving fundamental concepts undefined. Descartes starts from the ego sum; Wolff starts from primal concepts; both obey the method.
Baumgarten's Metaphysica (1739), Kant's lifelong textbook, defines metaphysics as "the science of the first principles in human cognition". The academic line (Wolff, Crusius, Baumgarten, Meier) makes mathesis the ideal: fundamental concepts, principles and rigorous deduction. Leibniz, like Spinoza and Descartes, took mathematics as the prototype of all scientificity. A note dismisses the foundations crisis of Heidegger's day (intuitionism versus formalism): "neither of the two".
- τὰ φυσικά. What arises on its own.
- τὰ ποιούμενα. What is made.
- τὰ χρήματα. Things in use.
- τὰ πράγματα. Things we deal with.
- τὰ μαθήματα. Names no content: the learnable as such. This fifth class is the one modernity elevates into the inner law of metaphysics.
Determination by Christianity and the Concept of Mathematical-Methodological Grounding in the Metaphysical Systems of Modernity
§13. Two framing tasks
Metaphysics knows beings as a whole. God, the summum ens, rules all beings; yet in the light of ens in communi God is only "one being among others". A mathematical construction must therefore do two things nobody bothers to name: mathematize the Christian concept of God, and say whence the ens in communi comes. Behind the frame stand "two powers of the history of Western humanity": the Greek question about beings and Christian faith. Both have "lost their edge and their dangerousness". Rigor here flows from a "secured position of Dasein" rather than from struggle with need. So Hegel must be read from this lineage, not only "from Kant".
§14. Metaphysical truth as agreement with principles
Baumgarten (§92) defines veritas metaphysica as "the agreement of what is with the universal principles". A principium (ἀρχή) is that from which something is determined; the catholic ones concern every being as such. So the mathematical is entrenched in the essence of truth itself. If Being must fall under a principle higher than Being, only the nothing qualifies. Heidegger rejects "formally logical and apparently clever objections" and asks two questions: does ens rest on something more originary, and by what principle?
§15. The possible and the principle of contradiction
Baumgarten's order is telling: the possibile (§§7-18), then the rationale (§§19-33), and only then ens (§§34-71). The first principle is the principle of contradiction, "absolute primum". The contradictory is A and not-A, which "is nothing"; the non-contradictory is the possible. So "the nothing (contradictorium) serves as the principle of Being".
§16. Grounding the principle in Dasein
The principle is unprovable and indisputable; its ground is "human Dasein", specifically historical man in "language- and people-bound" being-with-one-another. Language is no tool attached to isolated individuals; it preserves and increases the world a people exists into. Speakers can talk about one and the same thing only because they understand Being, including the selfsameness of the selfsame. The principle expresses, negatively, this preservation of selfsameness. Aristotle (Metaphysics IV.4) says that whoever denies it sinks to "the level of a plant". Behind it stands a decision: whether humans "will to exist as human" and raise λόγος to the ruling power, which also opens the way into non-Being, error and the null. Only there is there "greatness".
§16: where Heidegger locates the ground of the principle of contradiction.
§17. From the possible to God in seven moves
Baumgarten's deductive ladder as Heidegger reconstructs it: from contradiction to the existing God.
- α Thought as judgment. Metaphysics begins with the nihil defined by contradictio, so behind it stands dictio, assertion, λόγος. The thinkable becomes the measure of what can be; the possible in connection is rationale, giving the principle of sufficient reason (§20).
- β Essence as compatibility. Positive determinations are realitas; the simple, inner, compatible ones make up the possibilitas or essentia. Ens is more than "something" but less than the existent; existentia is the "complement" of essence and itself a realitas (§§55, 66).
- γ Perfection as concord. Perfectio is consensus ad unum: "many taken together" as sufficient ground of a unity (§94). It is a mathematical concept, not moral; bonum and voluntas are kept out.
- δ Increase. Plurality and unity make perfection capable of increase, and the logic of derivation makes the perfectissimum necessary.
- ε God. The most perfect being has all compatible realities (§§806-809); existence is such a reality, ergo it exists (§810). "Deus est perfectissimum ens" (Christian!) "ergo Deus actualis est" (§811).
| Move | Mathematical side | Christian side |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Principle of contradiction | (silent) |
| Perfection | Concord of many in one | God as perfect, summum bonum |
| End point | Maximum of compatible realities | God as creator; existence necessary |
| Payoff | Principle is the epistemic ground of God | God is the essential ground of the principle |
The non-existence of God would be a logical contradiction; God "is the essential ground of the principle", and the principle is "the epistemic ground of the knowledge of God". Aristotle's questioning, by contrast, still "circles around" unsettled fundamental concepts; a system of Aristotle is "un-Greek", a product of "Arabic-Jewish and Christian philosophy".
§§13-16 expanded: two powers, metaphysical truth, Dasein as ground
Two framing tasks (§13). Metaphysics knows beings as a whole. God, the summum ens, rules all beings; yet in the light of ens in communi God is only "one being among others". A mathematical construction must therefore do two things nobody bothers to name: mathematize the Christian concept of God, and say whence the ens in communi comes. Behind the frame stand "two powers of the history of Western humanity": the Greek question about beings and Christian faith. Both have "lost their edge and their dangerousness". Rigor here flows from a "secured position of Dasein" rather than from struggle with need. So Hegel must be read from this lineage, not only "from Kant".
Metaphysical truth (§14). Baumgarten (§92) defines veritas metaphysica as "the agreement of what is with the universal principles". A principium (ἀρχή) is that from which something is determined; the catholic ones concern every being as such. So the mathematical is entrenched in the essence of truth itself. If Being must fall under a principle higher than Being, only the nothing qualifies. Heidegger rejects "formally logical and apparently clever objections" and asks: does ens rest on something more originary, and by what principle?
Possible before being (§15). Baumgarten's order is telling: the possibile (§§7-18), then the rationale (§§19-33), and only then ens (§§34-71). The first principle is the principle of contradiction, "absolute primum". The contradictory is A and not-A, which "is nothing"; the non-contradictory is the possible. So "the nothing (contradictorium) serves as the principle of Being".
Ground in Dasein (§16). The principle is unprovable and indisputable; its ground is "human Dasein", specifically historical man in "language- and people-bound" being-with-one-another. Language is no tool attached to isolated individuals; it preserves and increases the world a people exists into. Speakers can talk about one and the same thing only because they understand Being, including the selfsameness of the selfsame. The principle expresses, negatively, this preservation of selfsameness. Aristotle (Metaphysics IV.4) says that whoever denies it sinks to "the level of a plant". Behind it stands a decision: whether humans "will to exist as human" and raise λόγος to the ruling power, which also opens the way into non-Being, error and the null. Only there is there "greatness". Academic logic treats the principle as an empty axiom; for Heidegger it is "a fundamental element of the existential structure of our Dasein". The self-evidence since Aristotle (with a stir only from Leibniz) is "a thin veneer" that will one day break "into the groundless".
§13-16: from two historical powers to the principle of contradiction in Dasein.
§17 ladder detail: seven moves from nihil to Deus
How is the chasm between ens in communi and summum ens bridged? The summum ens must be conceived so that its deduction can be subordinated completely to the mathematical-metaphysical method. It is conceived as ens perfectissimum; the decisive characteristic is perfectio, but how perfectum itself is conceived decides everything.
- α Thought as judgment. Metaphysics begins with the nihil defined by contradictio, so behind it stands dictio, assertion, λόγος. The thinkable becomes the measure of what can be; the possible in connection is rationale, giving the principle of sufficient reason (§20): omnis possibilis est ratio.
- β Essence as compatibility. Positive determinations are realitas; the simple, inner, compatible ones make up the possibilitas or essentia. Ens is more than "something" but less than the existent; existentia is the "complement" of essence and itself a realitas (§§55, 66).
- γ Perfection as concord. Perfectio is consensus ad unum: "many taken together" as sufficient ground of a unity (§94). It is a mathematical concept, not moral; bonum and voluntas are kept out.
- δ Increase. Plurality and unity make perfection capable of increase, and the logic of derivation makes the perfectissimum necessary.
- ε God. The most perfect being has all compatible realities (§§806-809); existence is such a reality, ergo it exists (§810). "Deus est perfectissimum ens" (Christian!) "ergo Deus actualis est" (§811).
- Payoff, epistemic. The principle is the epistemic ground of the knowledge of God.
- Payoff, essential. God is the essential ground of the principle. The non-existence of God would be a logical contradiction.
Aristotle's questioning, by contrast, still "circles around" unsettled fundamental concepts; a system of Aristotle is "un-Greek", a product of "Arabic-Jewish and Christian philosophy". Crusius, Heidegger notes, places ontology immediately followed by theology.
- §§7-18 possibile. Defined by non-contradiction.
- §§19-33 rationale. Nothing without a ground; principle of sufficient reason.
- §§34-71 ens. Essence as compatible determinations; existence as complement.
- §94 perfectum. Concord of many in one.
- §§803-811 Deus. Most perfect; existence necessary; Deus actualis est.
Hegel: The Completion of Metaphysics as Theo-logic
§18. Transition
Kant's critique stands between the school metaphysics and Hegel, yet it remains under the same powers. Hence the critique is followed "right away" by a new total metaphysics that raises both powers to their highest development, partly with Kant's own means. Heidegger refers back to his Amsterdam lecture of March 1930 and the 1930-31 Phenomenology course.
§19. Why "theo-logic"
"Theo-logic" is not theology (natural or revealed, a "-logy" with its own domain). It means logic grounded in θεός, the Christian God. Two questions follow: in what way is it logic, and in what way theo-logic?
- Logic as metaphysics proper. The system's base is the Science of Logic (1812-16), "metaphysics proper", which school logic had "diluted and attenuated".
- Against the old definitions. Wolff made logic a science of directing cognition; Kant, of "the mere form of thought", excluding the What and How of beings.
- Begins with Being. "Being is the indeterminate immediate"; it is the nothing, and their unity is becoming. Its topics (ground, actuality, necessity) are the primordial concepts of metaphysics.
- Logos as essentialities. The concept means the thinghood of things, the "pure essentialities". Heidegger notes that Aristotle already used λόγος for εἶδος.
- Higher logic as reason. Consciousness, then self-consciousness, then their unity, then reason's truth as absolute spirit that supersedes every relation.
§19: the ascent of Hegel's 'higher logic' as Heidegger outlines it.
The genitive is deliberately double: logic of God as objective genitive (exhibiting God) and as subjective genitive (God's own unfolding as absolute spirit). The principle of contradiction is superseded (aufheben: tollere, elevare, conservare): A and not-A are not only distinct but the same in the "not". Absolute identity, inherited from Fichte and Schelling and from Leibniz's "belonging-together", is the making-possible of the belonging-together of subject and object.
Theo-logic: how Hegel completes both powers of modern metaphysics.
§20. Completion and its questionworthiness
Pre-Kantian metaphysics already claimed to know the absolute, but only finitely and theoretically; Kant's knowledge is finite and practical. Now knowledge is infinite. Baumgarten's perfectum returns as absolute identity, the perfectissimum as absolute spirit: absolute in the What (God) and the How (contradiction superseded). Knowing "equates itself with absolute Being".
- The inception. "Deepest urgency of questionworthiness", struggle with "unmastered powers of truth and errancy"; philosophy "arouses the people".
- Hegel's end. "Highest blessedness" of superseding oppositions; mere conceptual oppositions; "failure and dying-out of all questioning", an "empty eternity of the decisionless".
§§18-20 expanded: Kant between, double genitive, completion as end
Kant between (§18). Kant's critique stands between school metaphysics and Hegel, yet remains under the same two powers (Christian worldview; mathematical-logical method). Hence the critique is followed "right away" by a new total metaphysics that raises both powers to their highest development, partly with Kant's own means. Heidegger refers back to his Amsterdam lecture of March 1930 (later in GA 80.1, published 2016) and the 1930-31 Phenomenology course.
Theo-logic unpacked (§19). Not theology (natural or revealed) but logic grounded in θεός, the Christian God. The system's base is the Science of Logic (1812-16), "metaphysics proper", which school logic had "diluted and attenuated". Against Wolff (logic as directing cognition) and Kant (logic as "the mere form of thought"), Hegel's Logic begins with Being: "Being is the indeterminate immediate"; it is the nothing, and their unity is becoming. Its topics (ground, actuality, necessity) are the primordial concepts of metaphysics. Logos means the thinghood of things, the "pure essentialities" (Aristotle already used λόγος for εἶδος). Higher logic ascends: consciousness → self-consciousness → their unity → reason's truth as absolute spirit that supersedes every relation. Hegel's Introduction: Logic is "truth as it is without veil", "the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit". The genitive is deliberately double: logic of God as objective genitive (exhibiting God) and as subjective genitive (God's own unfolding). The principle of contradiction is superseded (aufheben: tollere, elevare, conservare): A and not-A are not only distinct but the same in the "not". Absolute identity, from Fichte, Schelling and Leibniz's "belonging-together", makes possible the belonging-together of subject and object.
Completion as end of questioning (§20). Because both powers reach their peak, Hegel is "completion" (Vollendung): not a better system among systems but the end of the possibility of the fundamental question inside this lineage. Confrontation with Hegel is therefore confrontation with the whole of Western metaphysics. The summer course's preparation ends here; the Conclusion will turn confrontation into engagement.
§18-20: Kant between the school and Hegel's completion.
Conclusion
- Confrontation. Not formal refutation but scission on the basis of decision; engagement as "steadfastly letting fate hold sway".
- Knowing we do not know. Not a fact but insight into "the necessity of having to act"; questioning is the answer, as engagement and as teaching.
- Vindication. Recalls the 1929 inaugural "What Is Metaphysics?", rebuked as subjective whim: "truth itself will make its nullity apparent".
- Real risk. Not the pre-secured effort, not blind rushing; the will to succeed plus courage to learn from failure.
- Wait-and-see Nazis. Some "who today wear party insignia" cooperate while hoping things return to how they were, "just that now everything is called National Socialist".
- The people's fate. "The German people has not yet lost its metaphysics", because it does not yet possess it; it is "a people that still has a fate".
§21: from confrontation to engagement, as the summer course closes.
Closing move: from confrontation to engagement
The Conclusion turns the summer's Auseinandersetzung with Hegel into engagement (Einsatz) for "the new German state". Philosophy is not a spectator science; it is the people's questioning struggle. The course ends without a long summary: the preparation (metaphysics' two powers; theo-logic as completion) is complete, and the demand is action in the university under the rectorate. Readers should pair this close with the winter course's blood-and-soil caveat and the Black Notebooks of the same years.
On the Essence of Truth
Introduction: The Question of Essence as Insidious and Unavoidable
§1. Insidious and unavoidable
Thinking about the essence of danger while missing real dangers, or the essence of honor while acting without honor, looks like "evading reality through the semblance of profundity". Yet whoever wants what is true must tell it from the untrue, and that needs knowing what truth is. So knowledge of essence is unavoidable. The real suspect is the habit, since Plato, of fixing essence as "Idea", a look we merely represent; that may be "a great, centuries-long error". We must therefore first ask about the essence of essence.
§2. Essence essences
Heidegger's first answer is a list in the regime's vocabulary: the essence of our people "rules throughout our doings"; of our state, what secures the people's enduring Dasein; of labor, the "empowerment of our Dasein"; of the world, what lifts us into "the greatness of our fate". Essence cannot be held in empty concepts; it comes to light only when peoples, "rooted in their heritage and vocation", put essence to work.
- Courage first. The fundamental achievement is "the awakening of the courage for ourselves"; courage forges the fundamental moods.
- Against stimulation. People chase "ever new means of stimulation" instead of awakening moods by "originary courage".
- Representation as setting aside. "All representation is setting-aside" (Vor-stellen ist weg-stellen); essence is grasped by acting, measuring "how much truth we can endure".
- The Greek inception. Hearkening back is "the deepest necessity of our German Dasein", to draw on "the proto-Germanic ethnic essence".
§3. Heraclitus, fragment 53: struggle
Heidegger renders πόλεμος as Kampf, "struggle", but stresses it is war, not ἀγών between friendly rivals: "the opponent is not a partner but an enemy". He reads the saying in two parts.
Heidegger's two-part reading of Heraclitus B 53.
- Scope. Struggle concerns πάντα, all beings, not only human fighting.
- Father and king. It both generates beings and rules their persistence; without it come "leveling, mediocrity, harmlessness, decline".
- Powers of ruin. Destructive powers live in beings themselves, "the unrestrained, the ecstatic and wild, the raving, the Asiatic"; they must not be judged by "Christian standards of evil and sin". Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian are such powers.
- ἔδειξε, ἐποίησε. Not "engenders, makes" but "sets out, lets come forth" into perceptibility; Being is "stamped subsistent presence".
- Modes of Being. God, human, slave and master are modes of Being won or lost in decision; the slave's being "contains a defeat, a denial, a deficiency, a cowardice".
- Mood. The fitting mood is τὸ δεινόν; a note praises "Angst as only the great and heroic human being knows it".
§3a-b expanded: struggle's double sway and the enemy
The Heraclitus reading does not stop at "father and king". Heidegger presses two further claims that bind the introduction to the whole winter course.
Double sway. ἔδειξε (sets out) and ἐποίησε (lets come forth) are not two acts but one struggle holding sway in two aspects: beings are set into openness and let stand forth from prior concealment. Bring beings into Being and bring them into unconcealment are therefore "one act". That is why fragment 53, which never names ἀλήθεια, is already a saying about truth.
The enemy passage (§3a). The opponent in πόλεμος is "not a partner but an enemy". The enemy "need not be external"; it may have "attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people" and must be "found out" or "even first made". The struggle is to be prepared "with the goal of total annihilation" (völligen Vernichtung). No group is named. The A closer look above records the main readings (Faye; Fried/Schmitt; Black Notebooks). What matters for the argument's structure is that struggle here is not sport (ἀγών) and not liberal contest: it aims at elimination, and it can invent its target.
§3a: how Heidegger moves from Heraclitean struggle to the enemy.
Powers of ruin. Destructive powers live "in beings themselves": "the unrestrained, the ecstatic and wild, the raving, the Asiatic". They must not be judged by "Christian standards of evil and sin". Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian name such powers. The fitting mood is τὸ δεινόν; a note praises "Angst as only the great and heroic human being knows it". Slave and free, god and human, are modes of Being won or lost in decision; the slave's being "contains a defeat, a denial, a deficiency, a cowardice".
§4-5 deepened: examples, grammar, silence beyond BT
The four sample "truths" of §4 are not random. Beside arithmetic ("2 and 1 is 3"), astronomy ("the earth orbits the sun") and the heated lecture hall stands "On the 12th of November the German people will cast the vote that determines its ownmost future": the 12 November 1933 plebiscite on withdrawal from the League of Nations, which Heidegger had publicly urged (Leipzig, 11 November; GA 16). The example shows that for him a "true proposition" can be a political act.
On language, three further moves matter:
- Grammar from Greek logic. Word classes mirror ways of grasping present-at-hand beings. Applying that grammar to poem and conversation is "a monstrous violation".
- The sign triad. φωνή, νόημα, πρᾶγμα (sound, meaning, thing) treats language as a sign system; linguistics cannot reach essence because it presupposes one.
- Silence beyond Being and Time. "The ability to keep silent is the origin and ground of language." A window does not keep silent; nor does an animal or someone mute; only one who can talk can keep silent. Heidegger says he here "passes decisively beyond" Being and Time §34, where discourse (Rede) was equiprimordial with understanding and disposedness. A later marginal note on the animal ("closed off to the assailing powers") reverses the order: "The other way around!"
§5: logos as gathering that tears beings from concealment.
§7-9: liberalism, the last struggle, the cave as centre
§7 turns the Being/truth identity into a claim about "what is happening with us today, with our people". The obstacle is "the entire history of Western Dasein". Heidegger mocks those who have newly "discovered that liberalism must be refuted": liberalism is "a marginal epiphenomenon", and its "overzealous killers" may be agents of "a liberal National Socialism" full of the youth movement's innocence. The real question is "the moment of world history into which the spirit of this earth has entered". Essence of truth will be put to work only if "our own Dasein" is put to decision "in the whole of its rootedness, commitment, and choice".
§8 restates the standard view (agreement of proposition and thing) via Aquinas (De veritate q. 1), Kant (A58/B82) and Aristotle (De interpretatione 1), then names the aporia: a metal coin is round and buys things; a proposition has no shape and is not legal tender. How can they "agree"? Truth has already been moved into the proposition; recently it appears as "validity", where Being rests on truth instead of truth on Being. The old and new concepts collide "in a final struggle" in Plato.
§9 places that struggle: the cave (Republic VII) is "the single center of Platonic philosophizing", told as μῦθος, a sign of a transition "decisive for two thousand years". Understanding it does not depend on Greek but on whether one takes seriously "sitting here in the lecture hall of a German university".
- Unconcealment (ἀλήθεια). Unveiling; bearer is beings themselves as open; position at the inception; witnesses Heraclitus and early Plato's language.
- Correctness (adaequatio). Directing and measuring; bearer is the proposition; position at the end, dominant today; witnesses Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant.
- Relation. Correctness arises from unconcealment and then covers it over; the winter course will watch that happen inside Plato.
§2 vocabulary and §6 identity thesis restated with structure
Regime vocabulary of essence (§2). Before Heraclitus, Heidegger lists what "essences" in the idiom of 1933: the essence of our people "rules throughout our doings"; of our state, what secures the people's enduring Dasein; of labor, the "empowerment of our Dasein"; of the world, what lifts us into "the greatness of our fate". Essence cannot be held in empty concepts; it comes to light only when peoples, "rooted in their heritage and vocation", put essence to work. Courage forges the fundamental moods; people chase "ever new means of stimulation" instead. "All representation is setting-aside" (Vor-stellen ist weg-stellen); essence is grasped by acting, measuring "how much truth we can endure". Hearkening back is "the deepest necessity of our German Dasein", to draw on "the proto-Germanic ethnic essence".
Identity thesis (§6) as course hinge. Struggle "sets out and lets come forth" into openness: bringing beings into Being and into unconcealment are one act. So "the essence of truth is essentially one with the essence of Being itself", and the guiding question is the question of Being. Everything after §6 (history of Western Dasein, disappearance of unconcealment, cave, good, Theaetetus) is the working-out of that identity under the obstacle of the correctness tradition.
Winter Introduction hinge: from essence-vocabulary to Being = truth.
§4. Two concepts of truth
The circle (truth about essence needs the essence of truth) is the mark of a philosophical question, not a logical blunder. The same fragment speaks of truth once we hear ἀ-λήθεια, "unconcealment". The German Wahrheit is non-sensory; we use it securely through examples: "2 and 1 is 3", "the earth orbits the sun", "On the 12th of November the German people will cast the vote that determines its ownmost future", "this lecture hall is heated".
| Feature | Unconcealment (ἀλήθεια) | Correctness |
|---|---|---|
| Picture | Unveiling, uncovering | Directing, measuring |
| Bearer | Beings themselves, as open | The proposition |
| Position | At the inception | At the end; dominant today |
| Witnesses | Heraclitus, early Plato's language | Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant (A58/B82) |
A deeper fact appears: we understand in advance what truth, animality, spatiality or "the mountainous" mean, and only so can we meet individual beings. Without it there would be "some hazy rush" endurable only in madness. Humans are "transposed into the superior power of Being"; this bond is their deepest essence.
§5. Truth and language
Because humans are exposed to Being they speak. The animal does not speak because it is "closed off to the assailing powers", as one sees in "a cow or a chicken". A later marginal note reverses the order: "The other way around!"
- Logical-grammatical view. Grammar derives from Greek logic, which took the simple assertion ("the stone is hard") as the basic form; word classes mirror ways of grasping present-at-hand beings. That is "a monstrous violation" of poem and conversation.
- Sign and expression. The triad φωνή, νόημα, πρᾶγμα (sound, meaning, thing) treats language as a sign system; linguistics cannot reach its essence because it presupposes one.
- Keeping silent. "The ability to keep silent is the origin and ground of language." A window does not keep silent; nor does an animal or someone mute; only one who can talk can keep silent. Heidegger says he here "passes decisively beyond" Being and Time §34.
- Reticence. Keeping silent is "the gathered disclosedness for the overpowering surge of beings as a whole"; the word "breaks silence" and stays its witness, or decays into idle talk.
- λόγος as gathering. λέγειν means selecting, gathering. Heraclitus B 2: the many live "as if each had his own understanding". Language is "the law-giving gathering", tearing beings from concealment, hence ἀλήθεια.
- λόγος and μῦθος. μῦθος is the older word that gives directives; λόγος "takes hold". Philosophy's λόγος stays bound to myth; science cuts the bond.
From silence to truth: the chain of §5.
§6. Being and truth are one
Struggle "sets out and lets come forth" into openness: bringing beings into Being and into unconcealment are one act. So "the essence of truth is essentially one with the essence of Being itself", and the guiding question is the question of Being.
§7. Truth and our history
This insight lets us grasp "what is happening with us today, with our people". The obstacle is the whole history of Western Dasein. Heidegger mocks those who have newly "discovered that liberalism must be refuted": liberalism is "a marginal epiphenomenon", and its "overzealous killers" may be agents of "a liberal National Socialism" full of the youth movement's innocence. The question is only about "the moment of world history into which the spirit of this earth has entered".
§8. How unconcealment disappeared
The standard view: truth as agreement of proposition and thing ("this coin is round"), shared by Aquinas (De veritate q. 1), Kant and Aristotle (De interpretatione 1).
- The aporia. A metal coin is round and buys things; a proposition has no shape and is not legal tender. How can they "agree"?
- Truth moved into the proposition. Already in Aristotle; recently as "validity", where Being rests on truth instead of truth on Being.
- The last struggle. The old and new concepts collide "in a final struggle" in Plato.
§9. The cave as Plato's centre
The cave (Republic VII) is "the single center of Platonic philosophizing", told as μῦθος, a sign of a transition "decisive for two thousand years". Understanding it does not depend on Greek but on whether one takes seriously "sitting here in the lecture hall of a German university".
§1 and Heraclitus Greek: what "insidious" means, the fragment's verbs
Why the essence question is "insidious" (§1). Asking for the essence of truth looks like a textbook opener. Heidegger's point is that it already decides what kind of answer may count: a definition that can be held in a concept, taught, and applied. That decision sets aside the happening in which truth first opens. So the question is "unavoidable" (every science and every political claim rests on some sense of truth) and "insidious" (it steers us into correctness before we notice). The winter course's method is to stay with the question until the correctness tradition shows itself as an obstacle, not as the ground.
Fragment 53 verbs. Heraclitus: πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους. Heidegger stresses two verbs: ἔδειξε (sets out, shows, puts into the open) and ἐποίησε (lets come forth, makes). Struggle does not first destroy; it assigns ranks (gods/humans, slaves/free) by bringing beings into their Being. That is why struggle can be named the essence of beings without reducing to battle reports. The translation "struggle" (Kampf) rather than "war" (Krieg) is deliberate: to keep the ontological sense and the 1933 political resonance at once.
§4 two concepts restated as a fork. Either truth is a property of assertions (agreement, validity), or truth is the openness of beings in which assertions become possible. The course argues that the first concept presupposes the second and then forgets it. Plato's cave is chosen because it still stages the second while already preparing the first: the last struggle of the two concepts.
§1 and §4: why the essence question is insidious, and the fork it hides.
Truth and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic
The Four Stages of the Happening of Truth
§10. Procedure and structure
The two concepts, unconcealment and correctness, still struggle in Plato, and "the outcome of this struggle determined the spiritual history of the millennia to come". Heidegger cites Stephanus pages from Burnet's Oxford text and makes his own translation, because "every translation is an interpretation".
The four stages of Republic 514a-517b in Heidegger's division.
Stages I-II expanded: everydayness, degrees, failed liberation
Stage I detail. The prisoners are chained "by the legs and neck" since childhood; they face a wall; behind them a fire burns "far above"; between fire and prisoners a road with a little wall like a puppeteer's screen, along which people carry implements and statues, some talking, some silent. The prisoners take the shadows, and the echoes, as what is. Heidegger's first ontological claim follows at once: even here humans stand in τὸ ἀληθές. "To be human means to stand in the unconcealed." They do not see shadows as shadows (that would need knowledge of fire and light). He distinguishes lux (source of light, πῦρ) from lumen (brightness, φῶς). They address what appears as τὰ ὄντα through διαλέγεσθαι, the root of dialectic. An animal cannot comport itself "toward something that is" ("dog in relation to the bone!"). They have no relation to themselves, and do not know the difference between concealed and unconcealed. Glaucon calls the scene ἄτοπον; Heidegger: it is "the everyday situation of man", lost in idle talk and "business as usual".
Stage II detail. One prisoner is released (λύσις), made to stand, turn and look at the fire. In pain and dazzled, he cannot name the passing things and holds "that what he had seen before was more unconcealed". Heidegger reads 515c5 with Schleiermacher's text (οἵα τις ἂν εἴη φύσει): what must happen by essential necessity. Here "history begins". The comparative ἀληθέστερα ("more unconcealed") shows that unconcealment and Being come in degrees (μᾶλλον ὄντα). Three further theses:
- "Not everyone has the same right to every truth, nor the same strength for it. Every truth has its time."
- One turned to what is more sees "more correctly" (ὀρθότερον); so "truth as correctness is impossible without truth as unconcealment".
- He prefers what "demands no effort"; freed chains are an "external liberation", and his will "is a not-willing". Man "is only as much as he has the strength to demand of himself".
Stage II: why the first liberation fails and correctness still depends on unconcealment.
Stage III expanded: violence, habituation, idea as Being
Four questions of §16. Liberation happens βίᾳ, by force, against resistance. Greek Dasein was not "golden blessedness and cheer" but "a great, immense struggle" (Aeschylus). "Liberation is no walk in the park." Freedom first begins outside the cave through συνήθεια, a slow habituation to brightness, starting from what resembles the cave (shadows, then reflections in water, then things, the night sky, then the sun). The sun rules time and is "the ground of all Being". Liberation needs "a long courage" that survives setbacks. Plato's own key (517b): cave = life under the vault of heaven; outside = ὑπερουράνιος τόπος (Phaedrus 247c), place of the ideas; sun = idea of the good.
Idea (§17-18). Plato's ideas shaped the Christian concept of God, modern reason and natural science, even Romanticism; they culminate in Hegel, from whom came Marxism's doctrine of ideology and Kierkegaard's Christianity. Nietzsche fought on three fronts (humanism, baseless Christianity, Enlightenment) with their own weapons. Since then there is "only mishmash". Then the sentence the course is known for: "This tremendous moment into which National Socialism is being driven today is the coming to be of a new spirit of the entire earth."
Idea comes from ἰδεῖν, Latin videre: what is seen. But with the eyes we see only colors and brightness; we never sense "the book". The eye "does not see at all"; it is "a passageway". Seeing in the wide sense underlies θεωρεῖν, "theory". "I see in this... that it is a book": the thing offers a look. εἶδος / ἰδέα is "what something looks like", the presence (οὐσία) as which it shows itself. So "the idea is nothing other than Being", what is understood in advance. With only colors given "we would have no world at all".
- Light versus physical theory. Newton, particle, wave, electromagnetic theories "may be correct... and yet untrue", missing the phenomenon of brightness.
- Seen in advance. On waking we see bright and dark first; they are conditions of seeing anything.
- Helle and Hallen. German Helle (brightness) linked to hallen (to resound); clear sound and light share the piercing. The nightingale "shrills through the night".
- Transparency. Light is "what lets the gaze pass through"; darkness is "only a limit case of brightness".
The double character of light (seen in advance and letting through) is exactly what the idea does: the understood essence "book" lets me see this thing as a book. That is the understanding of Being, without which man could not say "I" or "you" or speak.
§18: idea and light share the same double character.
§§20-22 expanded: projection, Galileo, race from above, return
Projection examples (§20). Freedom means binding oneself to "the essential law of things"; the more originary the binding, "the nearer we come to beings and the more we come to be". A bracketed aside, gappy in the transcript, refers to the Gleichschaltung ("not being said for purposes of the 'Alignment'") and to scholars being asked to sign a proclamation that "all science is grounded...". Four domains show that facts follow a prior view of essence:
- Galileo. Not the experiment or "mathematization" (both Greek) but a prior decision that nature is "the spatiotemporal totality of the motion of mass-points"; only then can one experiment. Technology has since blocked man's relation to nature; "the worldview of the natural sciences" is "nonsense".
- Burckhardt. Great not for sources but for a prior view of "human greatness, human limitation, and human fate". Talk of "synthesis" betrays the weakness of fact-piling.
- Art and poetry. Neither self-expression nor copy nor pleasure but "the free, creative projection of what is possible"; Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Homer "achieved far more than any scientist".
- Source of projection. Depends on "the historical Dasein of humanity", not the individual's whim.
Degrees and evidence (§21). The doctrine of ideas misread as values and norms gives a rational human being in general, the root of Enlightenment and liberalism, "all of the powers against which we must struggle today". Against it: finitude, temporality, historicity. Interpretation must "understand the author better than he understood himself". Comparatives: ἀληθέστερα in stage II; in stage III ἀληθινόν (like xulinon, "wooden"): "unconcealed through and through", matching ὄντως ὄν. Evidence: Republic VI 490a-b (true lover of learning joins through eros with what genuinely is); Sophist 240a-b (εἴδωλον unlike τὸ ἀληθινόν). Ideas are "the vanguard for the genuinely true"; they exist only in a "beholding that first creates what can be beheld". Augustine made them thoughts of God; "since then: decline", down to "values in themselves". "Truth is decision and fate for human beings." Against the charge of relativism: do you know what human means?
Human essence (§22). Truth "is not the idea, but the seeing of the idea", "the creative projection of the essence of things": a happening, not an incident. The objection that this humanizes truth is reversed: "we are determining the essence of human beings on the basis of truth". "Man is in truth." Each person is "born into a community" and grows up in "a quite definite truth". Ex-sistence: only humans step out into beings and so relate to themselves. "We must rather define man from above"; even an infant "is immediately human". Then the race sentence: "race and lineage, too, are to be understood on this [higher] basis", not by "an antiquated biology based on liberalism". Philosophical statements cannot be proved by fact or formal logic; "There can be no philosophy that is standpoint-free".
Stage IV (§23-24). The freed man goes back down. Blinded by darkness, he loses the shadow contest, is laughed at, and if he tried to free others "wouldn't they actually kill him"? The liberator is the philosopher (Sophist 254a-b). σοφός knows a matter "from the bottom up"; φίλος is driven by an inner "must". "Philosophy has nothing to do with science." Plato recalls Socrates' hemlock, but the real killing is being translated into the cave's language and ridiculed; hence the philosopher's solitude. He goes down not to debate but "to seize this or that person" and lead him up "through the happening of history itself". Result: "there is no truth in itself"; truth happens "in the innermost confrontation with concealment"; "to persist in untruth is to slacken in the struggle". The more a people is afflicted, "the more necessary is the struggle for truth". "History is not fulfilled in a time frame that ends in 1934 or 1935, maybe not until 1960."
§20-24: from projective seeing to the liberator's return and death-threat.
Recap dates and the four-stage table restated
The winter sessions that build this chapter open with dated recapitulations (Hallwachs). They stress: unconcealment is not a property of statements; liberation is a history; each stage has its own truth and its own untruth. Stage 1: chained to shadows, truth is what is nearest. Stage 2: turned to artifacts, dazzled; truth is the things, but the turn is forced. Stage 3: outside to the sun; truth is the ideas and the good. Stage 4: return; the liberator risks death. Freedom is not choice among options but projection of Being. Correctness (Richtigkeit) is a late, thinned residue of this happening.
Four cave stages: each has its own truth and its own untruth.
§11. The situation in the cave
People chained "by the legs and neck" since childhood face a wall; behind them a fire burns "far above"; between fire and prisoners runs a road with a little wall like a puppeteer's screen, along which people carry implements and statues, some talking, some silent. The prisoners would take the shadows, and the echoes, as what is: "they would consider nothing else to be the unconcealed than the shadows". So even here humans stand in τὸ ἀληθές, the unconcealed: "To be human means to stand in the unconcealed."
§12. What is unconcealed in the cave
The prisoners do not see shadows as shadows; that would need knowledge of fire and light. Heidegger distinguishes lux (source of light, πῦρ) and lumen (brightness, φῶς). They address what appears as τὰ ὄντα, beings, through διαλέγεσθαι, the root of dialectic. An animal cannot comport itself "toward something that is" ("dog in relation to the bone!"). They have no relation to themselves, and do not know the difference between concealed and unconcealed. Glaucon calls the scene ἄτοπον, odd; Heidegger: it is "the everyday situation of man", lost in idle talk and "business as usual".
§13. A "liberation" within the cave
One prisoner is released (λύσις), made to stand, turn and look at the fire. In pain and dazzled, he cannot name the passing things and holds "that what he had seen before was more unconcealed". Heidegger reads 515c5 with Schleiermacher's text (οἵα τις ἂν εἴη φύσει): what must happen by essential necessity. Here "history begins".
§14. The failed first liberation
The comparative ἀληθέστερα ("more unconcealed") shows that unconcealment and Being come in degrees (μᾶλλον ὄντα).
- Truth has rank. "Not everyone has the same right to every truth, nor the same strength for it. Every truth has its time."
- Correctness rests on unconcealment. One turned to what is more sees "more correctly", ὀρθότερον; so "truth as correctness is impossible without truth as unconcealment".
- Why he goes back. He prefers what "demands no effort"; freed chains are an "external liberation", and his will "is a not-willing". Man "is only as much as he has the strength to demand of himself".
| Stage | What counts as unconcealed | Kind of freedom | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | Shadows, taken as beings | None; chained | Everydayness, no self-relation |
| II | Things and fire, "more unconcealed" | Negative: free from chains | Pain, flight back to shadows |
| III | Ideas, sun: ἀληθινόν, ὄντως ὄν | Positive: free for the light | Authentic liberation by habituation |
| IV | Shadows seen as shadows | Liberator's freedom | Ridicule, threat of death |
§15. Liberation into the originary light
Now someone drags him "by force" up "the rough, steep ascent". At first he can look only at shadows, then reflections in water, then things, the night sky, and at last the sun itself, which "bestows the seasons and governs the years" and is the ground even of the shadows. He would pity the prisoners and scorn their prizes for predicting shadows, preferring with Homer "to serve some other impoverished man for hire" (Odyssey XI.489-90).
§16. Four questions
- Violence. Liberation happens βίᾳ, by force, against resistance. Greek Dasein was not "golden blessedness and cheer" but "a great, immense struggle" (Aeschylus). "Liberation is no walk in the park."
- Rehabituation. Freedom first begins outside the cave through συνήθεια, a slow habituation to brightness, starting from what resembles the cave.
- The sun. It rules time and is "the ground of all Being".
- Endurance. Liberation needs "a long courage" that survives setbacks.
Plato's own key (517b): the cave is life under the vault of heaven; outside is the ὑπερουράνιος τόπος (Phaedrus 247c), the place of the ideas; the sun is the idea of the good. Four connections must be explained: idea and light, light and freedom, freedom and beings, and all three with truth.
§17. The idea and its history
Plato's ideas shaped the Christian concept of God, modern reason and natural science, even Romanticism; they culminate in Hegel, from whom came Marxism's doctrine of ideology and Kierkegaard's Christianity. Nietzsche fought on three fronts (humanism, baseless Christianity, Enlightenment) with their own weapons. Since then there is "only mishmash". Then the sentence the course is known for: "This tremendous moment into which National Socialism is being driven today is the coming to be of a new spirit of the entire earth."
Idea comes from ἰδεῖν, Latin videre: what is seen. But with the eyes we see only colors and brightness; we never sense "the book". The eye "does not see at all"; it is "a passageway". Seeing in the wide sense underlies θεωρεῖν, "theory".
§18. Idea and light
Plato's own mapping of image to meaning (517b), as Heidegger tabulates it.
"I see in this... that it is a book": the thing offers a look. εἶδος, ἰδέα is "what something looks like", the presence (οὐσία) as which it shows itself. So "the idea is nothing other than Being", what is understood in advance. With only colors given "we would have no world at all".
- Light versus theory. Physical theories (Newton, particle, wave, electromagnetic) "may be correct... and yet untrue", missing the phenomenon of brightness.
- Seen in advance. On waking we see bright and dark first; they are conditions of seeing anything.
- Helle and Hallen. German Helle (brightness) is linked to hallen (to resound); clear sound and light share the piercing. The nightingale "shrills through the night".
- Transparency. Light is "what lets the gaze pass through"; darkness is "only a limit case of brightness".
The double character of light (seen in advance and letting through) is exactly what the idea does: the understood essence "book" lets me see this thing as a book. That is the understanding of Being, without which man could not say "I" or "you" or speak.
§19. Light and freedom
Greek man is defined by seeing, and, from Aristotle, by hearing too: ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, a living being "that has the capacity for talk", and ζῷον πολιτικόν, not a "social being" but one who "belongs from the start to a with-one-another in the state". Rhetoric becomes "the political science".
- Stage II, freedom from. Removing chains: "lack of restraint", confusion, longing for support.
- Stage III, freedom for. Being "led forth to something": habituation, "binding oneself to the light". Schiller: "Bright as day the night is lit"; light clears, like a forest clearing. "Binding oneself in this way is... being-free itself."
§20. Freedom and Being
Freedom means binding oneself to "the essential law of things"; the more originary the binding, "the nearer we come to beings and the more we come to be". A bracketed aside, gappy in the transcript, refers to the Gleichschaltung ("not being said for purposes of the 'Alignment'") and to scholars being asked to sign a proclamation.
Projection precedes facts:
- Galileo. Not the experiment or "mathematization" (both Greek) but a prior decision that nature is "the spatiotemporal totality of the motion of mass-points"; only then can one experiment. Technology has since blocked man's relation to nature; "the worldview of the natural sciences" is "nonsense".
- Burckhardt. Great not for sources but for a prior view of "human greatness, human limitation, and human fate". Talk of "synthesis" betrays the weakness of fact-piling.
- Art and poetry. Neither self-expression nor copy nor pleasure but "the free, creative projection of what is possible"; Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Homer "achieved far more than any scientist".
- 1 Prior view. A view of essence "that reaches ahead".
- 2 Binding. Freedom binds itself to that essential law.
- 3 Access. Only then do facts show up as facts.
- 4 Science. Experiment and measurement follow from the projection, not the reverse.
- 5 Source. The projection depends on "the historical Dasein of humanity", not the individual's whim.
§21. Degrees of unconcealment
The doctrine of ideas misread as values and norms gives a rational human being in general, the root of Enlightenment and liberalism, "all of the powers against which we must struggle today". Against it: finitude, temporality, historicity. Interpretation must "understand the author better than he understood himself".
- Comparatives. ἀληθέστερα in stage II; in stage III ἀληθινόν (like xulinon, "wooden"): "unconcealed through and through", matching ὄντως ὄν, "what genuinely is".
- Evidence. Republic VI 490a-b: the true lover of learning, through eros, joins with what genuinely is, "engendering understanding and unconcealment". Sophist 240a-b: an εἴδωλον (image) is unlike τὸ ἀληθινόν, which is ὄντως ὄν.
- Projective seeing. Ideas are "the vanguard for the genuinely true"; they exist only in a "beholding that first creates what can be beheld", neither objects nor subjects. Augustine made them thoughts of God; "since then: decline", down to "values in themselves".
- No truth in itself. "Truth is decision and fate for human beings." Against the charge of relativism: do you know what human means?
§22. Truth and the human essence
Truth "is not the idea, but the seeing of the idea", "the creative projection of the essence of things": a happening, not an incident. The objection that this humanizes truth is reversed: "we are determining the essence of human beings on the basis of truth". "Man is in truth." Each person is "born into a community" and grows up in "a quite definite truth". The question is "Who are we?"
Ex-sistence: how stone, plant, animal and human stand toward beings (§22).
- Ex-sistence. Only humans exist: stepping out into beings and so relating to themselves.
- Not a rational animal. "We must rather define man from above"; even an infant "is immediately human".
- Race from above. "race and lineage, too, are to be understood on this [higher] basis", not by "an antiquated biology based on liberalism".
- Unprovable. Philosophical statements cannot be proved by fact or formal logic; "There can be no philosophy that is standpoint-free".
§23. The return
The freed man goes back down. Blinded by darkness, he loses the shadow contest, is laughed at, and if he tried to free others "wouldn't they actually kill him"? The new theme is death, and a new figure: the liberator.
§24. The philosopher as liberator
The liberator is the philosopher (Sophist 254a-b: the masses cannot bear "gazes toward what exceeds the everyday"). σοφός is one who knows a matter "from the bottom up"; φίλος one driven by an inner "must". "Philosophy has nothing to do with science." Plato recalls Socrates' hemlock, but the real killing is being translated into the cave's language and ridiculed; hence the philosopher's solitude. He goes down not to debate but "to seize this or that person" and lead him up "through the happening of history itself".
The returning man learns that the cave's unconcealment covers up genuine unconcealment: "concealment, semblance, and deception happen and must happen". Hence the chapter's result: "there is no truth in itself"; truth happens "in the innermost confrontation with concealment", and "to persist in untruth is to slacken in the struggle". The more a people is afflicted, "the more necessary is the struggle for truth". "History is not fulfilled in a time frame that ends in 1934 or 1935, maybe not until 1960."
Truth as happening: the structure Heidegger draws from the four stages.
The Idea of the Good and Unconcealment
§25. Being free: acting in the confrontation of truth and untruth
The fourth stage is "no mere appendix". The philosopher "is only as such a liberator": freedom is not "tranquil enjoyment" in the sun but acting "with others in the history of those who belong with him in a community". What makes one human is "the transition out of the cave into the light and back into the cave", a fate "that one cannot shake off by declaring that one is not interested in philosophy".
The return yields "the decisive answer: untruth belongs to the essence of truth". Because ἀλήθεια is a privative, what is must be "wrested from concealment"; "truth is not a possession". The philosopher "is cast out in advance of his time and anticipates its fate".
- The secret. What is not yet experienced or cannot be experienced: not knowing, not falsehood.
- Disguise. Covering-up and seeming, like a stage-set house: something "only seems (looks) as if". Only the second is untruth in the sense of the false, and it belongs to unconcealment itself.
§26. The idea of the good as highest idea
The ascent ends in the τόπος νοητός, the region of what νοῦς apprehends, where the good is "caught sight of last" and "only with effort". τέλος here means not goal but limit, the form "that stamps and thus really determines everything". The main texts are Republic VI, 506-511 and VII, 517a-e. Heidegger insists the route is "serious, step-by-step philosophizing", not "so-called intuition", yet what is reached "cannot be said" as scientific results are said.
- Method. First extrapolate the highest idea from the essence of idea; then check against Plato.
- Extrapolation. If ideas make beings unconcealed and be, the highest idea makes "unconcealment in general possible", "empowering beings".
- The word. ἀγαθός "originally has no moral meaning". It is not the opposite of evil or "sinful" ("there is sin only where there is Christian faith") nor the "ladylike" sense of a good person. It is what "succeeds, stands fast, holds up": "a pair of good skis".
- The state. Rulers must be philosophizing humans, the φύλακες or guardians, though this does not mean that "professors of philosophy should become Reich-chancellors", which "would be a disaster from the start". The Republic asks how a state educates its guardians; knowing is "the innermost content of the Being of the state".
§27. The yoke between seeing and the visible
Plato sets ὁρᾶν (seeing with the eyes) against νοεῖν (apprehending ideas). Both seeing and being seen need one enabling δύναμις; they are joined in one ζυγόν, yoke: light, whose source is the sun. So the eye must be ἡλιοειδής, "sun-like", as Goethe put it; correspondingly νοῦς must be ἀγαθοειδής, good-like.
Republic VI 508-509 as Heidegger schematizes it: the sun and the good each yoke a seeing to a seen.
The good "grants unconcealment to the knowable beings and lends to the knower the capacity to know" (508e). It is "beyond Being", ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, superior πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει, in rank and power (509b). Asked like a thing, it is "nothing". In Republic VII (517c) it is κυρία, sovereign, and παρασχομένη, granting: "the good gives and it binds". "The good is empowerment": not content or value, "but a how, the manner of the deployment of power", grasped only "when I submit myself to the power".
§28. Truth as the history of humanity
The 25 January 1934 recapitulation lists results:
- Truth is not ultimate. It "stands under a higher empowerment".
- Being is not ultimate. Over Being "there still stands something else".
- Yoked. Truth (openness of beings) and Being (their graspability) are joined under the good.
- Freedom as binding. The good liberates man and "precisely thereby binds him", bringing necessity as the presupposition of freedom.
- History. Liberation is "an innermost change in the Being of man".
§28: the order of empowerment that Heidegger reads off the sun analogy.
The cave is "a leading of the essence of humanity around and out", ψυχῆς περιαγωγή (521c), from "a night-like day to a true day". Phaedrus 249b: the soul could not take human form "if it had not seen what is unconcealed". The story is about παιδεία and ἀπαιδευσία (514a). Heidegger rejects "education", "cultivation" and Werner Jaeger's "formation of Greek humanity" (Paideia, 1933) as "humanistic"; παιδεία is "the inner binding-fast of human Dasein" to "what fate demands".
- Not culture. A domain of admired works.
- Not self-display. A stage for personalities.
- Not scholarship. "In philosophy there is no progress."
- Not worldview. A summation of scientific results.
- Not private creed. A standpoint for those detached from religion. Instead: "a fundamental happening in the history of humanity" in which "the essence of humanity transforms itself".
Kolbenheyer (30 January 1934)
"Every age and every people has its cave", and today's prime cave-dweller is "the popular philosopher and cultural politician Kolbenheyer", who had spoken in Freiburg the day before. The ten numbered charges, reproduced from Heidegger's own notes because Hallwachs recorded only that Heidegger arrived nearly an hour late with an anniversary speech:
- Old biology. Kolbenheyer's biology "of 1900" rests on Darwinism, itself shaped by "the liberal conception of humanity" of English positivism.
- Surpassed. New biology (the environment as condition, not result, of adaptation) has destroyed the old organism concept.
- Ground versus determinant. Bodily life may be "the supporting ground" of a people's generations without being "the determining ground".
- Freedom. Sacrifice, courage and faith are possible "only on the basis of freedom", not as functions like "gastric juices". "The Prussian nobility": grown "like an apple on a tree", or from history?
- Same as Freud and Marx. Biologism is "in principle" like psychoanalysis and Marxism.
- Reaction. Kolbenheyer is "a reactionary, nationalistic, and folkish bourgeois" who waits for others to make the revolution and then supplies it with spirit, citing the Führer: "the revolution is at an end, the evolution is beginning". Heidegger: in education "the revolution... has not even begun". The "deafening applause" is the clearest sign of failure.
§25-27 expanded: untruth, agathos, the yoke
Return as essence of freedom (§25). The fourth stage is "no mere appendix". The philosopher "is only as such a liberator": freedom is not "tranquil enjoyment" in the sun but acting "with others in the history of those who belong with him in a community". What makes one human is "the transition out of the cave into the light and back into the cave", a fate "that one cannot shake off by declaring that one is not interested in philosophy". The return yields "the decisive answer: untruth belongs to the essence of truth". Because ἀλήθεια is a privative, what is must be "wrested from concealment"; "truth is not a possession". Two senses of concealment: (1) the secret, not yet or never experienced (not knowing, not falsehood); (2) disguise, covering-up and seeming, like a stage-set house. Only the second is untruth in the sense of the false, and it belongs to unconcealment itself. The philosopher "is cast out in advance of his time and anticipates its fate".
Agathos without morals (§26). The ascent ends in the τόπος νοητός, where the good is "caught sight of last" and "only with effort". τέλος here means not goal but limit, the form "that stamps and thus really determines everything". Main texts: Republic VI, 506-511 and VII, 517a-e. Method: first extrapolate the highest idea from the essence of idea; then check against Plato. If ideas make beings unconcealed and be, the highest idea makes "unconcealment in general possible", "empowering beings". ἀγαθός "originally has no moral meaning". It is not the opposite of evil or "sinful" ("there is sin only where there is Christian faith") nor the "ladylike" sense of a good person. It is what "succeeds, stands fast, holds up": "a pair of good skis". Rulers must be philosophizing humans, the φύλακες; this does not mean "professors of philosophy should become Reich-chancellors", which "would be a disaster from the start". The Republic asks how a state educates its guardians; knowing is "the innermost content of the Being of the state".
Yoke (§27). Plato sets ὁρᾶν (seeing with the eyes) against νοεῖν (apprehending ideas). Both seeing and being seen need one enabling δύναμις; they are joined in one ζυγόν: light, whose source is the sun. The eye must be ἡλιοειδής, "sun-like", as Goethe put it; νοῦς must be ἀγαθοειδής, good-like. The good "grants unconcealment to the knowable beings and lends to the knower the capacity to know" (508e). It is "beyond Being", ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, superior πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει, in rank and power (509b). Asked like a thing, it is "nothing". In Republic VII (517c) it is κυρία, sovereign, and παρασχομένη, granting: "the good gives and it binds". "The good is empowerment": not content or value, "but a how, the manner of the deployment of power", grasped only "when I submit myself to the power".
§26-27: from everyday agathos to the good beyond Being.
§28 and Kolbenheyer: full charge list
§28 results (25 January 1934 recapitulation). (1) Truth "stands under a higher empowerment". (2) Over Being "there still stands something else". (3) Truth and Being are yoked under the good. (4) The good liberates man and "precisely thereby binds him", bringing necessity as the presupposition of freedom. (5) Liberation is "an innermost change in the Being of man". The cave is "a leading of the essence of humanity around and out", ψυχῆς περιαγωγή (521c), from "a night-like day to a true day". Phaedrus 249b: the soul could not take human form "if it had not seen what is unconcealed". The story is about παιδεία and ἀπαιδευσία (514a). Heidegger rejects "education", "cultivation" and Werner Jaeger's "formation of Greek humanity" (Paideia, 1933) as "humanistic"; παιδεία is "the inner binding-fast of human Dasein" to "what fate demands". Philosophy is not culture, self-display, scholarship ("In philosophy there is no progress."), worldview or private creed, but "a fundamental happening in the history of humanity".
Kolbenheyer, 30 January 1934. "Every age and every people has its cave", and today's prime cave-dweller is "the popular philosopher and cultural politician Kolbenheyer", who had spoken in Freiburg the day before. Ten numbered charges (from Heidegger's own notes; Hallwachs recorded only that Heidegger arrived nearly an hour late with an anniversary speech):
- Kolbenheyer's biology is "of 1900", resting on Darwinism shaped by "the liberal conception of humanity" of English positivism.
- New biology (the environment as condition, not result, of adaptation) has destroyed the old organism concept.
- Bodily life may be "the supporting ground" of a people's generations without being "the determining ground".
- Sacrifice, courage and faith are possible "only on the basis of freedom", not as functions like "gastric juices".
- "The Prussian nobility": grown "like an apple on a tree", or from history?
- Biologism is "in principle" like psychoanalysis and Marxism.
- Kolbenheyer is "a reactionary, nationalistic, and folkish bourgeois" who waits for others to make the revolution and then supplies it with spirit.
- He cites the Führer: "the revolution is at an end, the evolution is beginning". Heidegger: in education "the revolution... has not even begun".
- The "deafening applause" is the clearest sign of failure.
- The attack is delivered on the first anniversary of Hitler's appointment (heading slip "30 January 1933" vs note's 30.I.34).
Kolbenheyer attack: biologism rejected from inside the movement.
d) Asking "Who is man?"
Biology, psychology and ethics carve man into body, soul, spirit and so "do not even ask this question anymore". "The authentic revolution in the question" is to ask not "What is man?" but "Who is man?": man is a self, a being whose "Being is that which is an issue" for it. Only a self can be "an I and a you and a we". This Heidegger calls care, the ground of "resoluteness, readiness for service, struggle, mastery". "There is mastery only where there is also readiness for service."
| Question | Presupposes | Leads to |
|---|---|---|
| What is man? | A thing assembled from components | Anthropology, biology, psychology |
| Who is man? | A self deciding its Being | History, care, decision, service |
The Question of the Essence of Untruth
§29. The disappearance of the experience of ἀλήθεια
The 1 February 1934 recap restates the good, παιδεία, and the shift from "What is man?" to "Who is man?". Man is a self whose Being is an issue for it: care, the ground of "resoluteness, labor, heroism" and also of "innocuousness, busy-ness, cowardice, slavery, money-grubbing". "Care is the condition of possibility for man's ability to be a political entity."
- Categorial. Beings whose Being is closed off to them, addressed from outside (κατηγορεύειν): organism, procreation, propagation.
- Existential. Determinations of existence: tradition, decision, struggle, insight. Only humans exist; "the self is the originary source that makes I and you possible".
Plato never explains the yoke. Because what it joins was posited in advance as two juxtaposed things, the idea slips from "what is seen" to a content (table, house, mountain) set apart by a χωρισμός, a gap, as an "objective stratum". Things become images of prototypes, and truth becomes ὁμοίωσις, adaequatio. Aristotle still equates ἀλήθεια with ὄν, οὐσία, but unconcealment itself is "not really questioned anymore".
§29: how the unasked yoke decays into correspondence truth.
Why retrieve the question
- The proposition depends. "This chalk is white" can correspond only if the chalk is revealed in advance: "the assertion already presupposes the openness of things".
- Human truth. Correctness cannot grasp "conviction, inner decision, or the truth of a work of art".
- Neither tradition nor nostalgia. The question must be retrieved "in the context of the historical situation of our Dasein", neither cut off from the tradition nor "reaching blindly back".
Two kinds of the concealed follow: what has not yet been unconcealed, and what was unconcealed and sank back: "the hidden, the covered up, the disguised".
§29-30: two kinds of the concealed, and what truth is wrested from.
§30. Concealment as what truth is wrested from
The 15 February 1934 recap: unconcealment exists "only insofar as it happens as the history of human beings", the "total history of a people". For the Greeks, it ran from Homer to the states, worship, tragedy, architecture and philosophy, a "projection of the world". Then: "If today the Führer speaks again and again of reeducation for the National Socialist worldview", that means "a total transformation"; "National Socialism is not some doctrine, but the transformation from the bottom up of the German world, and, as we believe, of the European world too".
Every openness is limited; its limit is the concealed, so "untruth begins only then". "Truth, for the Greeks, is nothing but the assault on untruth."
| Word | Heidegger's gloss | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ψεῦδος | Distorting, covering; then the null; the lie | "Pseudonym": a covering name, not a false one |
| ἀτρεκής | Unturned, undistorted (from τρέπω) | Democritus |
| λήθη | Remaining concealed, an objective power | Thucydides II.49: plague survivors seized by oblivion |
| ἀ-λήθεια | Un-concealment, wrested from λήθη | Being-true and Being as synonyms in Plato |
λήθη "came over people like φόβος, ἄλγος, ὕπνος" (fear, pain, sleep). In λανθάνω ἥκων, "I come unnoticed", concealment is "a characteristic of my Being itself". "Forgetting" is a later subjectivization. So "the true can substitute for Being".
§29-30 expanded: care, yoke decay, Führer reeducation, trepo
Care and the political (§29, 1 February 1934 recap). The good, παιδεία, and the shift from "What is man?" to "Who is man?" rest on man as a self whose Being is an issue for it: care, the ground of "resoluteness, labor, heroism" and also of "innocuousness, busy-ness, cowardice, slavery, money-grubbing". "Care is the condition of possibility for man's ability to be a political entity." Categorial determinations address beings whose Being is closed off to them (organism, procreation, propagation); existential ones name tradition, decision, struggle, insight. Only humans exist; "the self is the originary source that makes I and you possible".
How the yoke decays. Plato never explains the yoke. Because what it joins was posited in advance as two juxtaposed things, the idea slips from "what is seen" to a content (table, house, mountain) set apart by a χωρισμός, a gap, as an "objective stratum". Things become images of prototypes, and truth becomes ὁμοίωσις, adaequatio. Aristotle still equates ἀλήθεια with ὄν, οὐσία, but unconcealment itself is "not really questioned anymore". Why retrieve? (1) "This chalk is white" can correspond only if the chalk is revealed in advance: "the assertion already presupposes the openness of things". (2) Correctness cannot grasp "conviction, inner decision, or the truth of a work of art". (3) The question must be retrieved "in the context of the historical situation of our Dasein", neither cut off from the tradition nor "reaching blindly back". Two kinds of the concealed: what has not yet been unconcealed, and what was unconcealed and sank back: "the hidden, the covered up, the disguised".
§30 and the Führer sentence (15 February 1934). Unconcealment exists "only insofar as it happens as the history of human beings", the "total history of a people". For the Greeks, it ran from Homer to the states, worship, tragedy, architecture and philosophy, a "projection of the world". Then: "If today the Führer speaks again and again of reeducation for the National Socialist worldview", that means "a total transformation"; "National Socialism is not some doctrine, but the transformation from the bottom up of the German world, and, as we believe, of the European world too". Every openness is limited; its limit is the concealed, so "untruth begins only then". "Truth, for the Greeks, is nothing but the assault on untruth."
§29-30: from unasked yoke to truth as assault on untruth.
An Interpretation of Plato's Theaetetus with Regard to the Question of the Essence of Untruth
Preliminary Considerations on the Greek Concept of Knowledge
§31. The question of ἐπιστήμη
"We have no logic of error", because error is always taken as merely negative; that is "the fundamental error" in the history of truth. ἐπίσταμαι means "I place myself in front of something" to be "a match for it": preparing equipment, a military undertaking, teaching. Science is "one mode of this know-how", not the whole. Asking what knowing is asks about man "as one who knows" and the measure he sets himself. It is "an attack" on the man who "hunkers down in the familiarity of his views", and "this attack... is nothing other than the essence of philosophy". Hence the dialogue's agonistic form.
§32. Fundamental points on the Greek concept of knowledge
Today the question of science has sunk to "idle scribbling, where every journalist is allowed to jump in"; "we want to reeducate ourselves for real seriousness".
- ψεῦδος. Twisting, a front with something else behind it, as in "a false person"; then the null, with nothing behind.
- The old puzzle. "What is, is; what is not, is not": then falsehood cannot be, yet lies are "a power in human Dasein". Grasping this forced "a transformation of the essence of Being", "carried out only in its first stages".
- Errancy. Is there error because errancy subsists somewhere, or because man "in the ground of his Being, is errant"? "Among the Greeks... the question does not reach this level."
- τέχνη. Not "art" or fabrication but know-how in producing; art was "the fundamental way in which reality was discovered". Aristotle first separates ἐπιστήμη and τέχνη.
- Essence. The essence of Frederick the Great is no universal; one asks for "the inner possibility of a thing".
| Greek | Usual rendering | Heidegger's gloss |
|---|---|---|
| ἐπίσταμαι | I know | place myself before something, be a match for it |
| ἐπιστήμη | science, knowledge | know-how in every region of life |
| τέχνη | art, craft | know-how in producing; a way of discovering the real |
| ψεῦδος | falsehood | twisting, a front with something else behind it |
| essence | universal concept | the inner possibility of a thing |
§31-32: what the Theaetetus question asks, on Heidegger's reading.
§§31-32 expanded: know-how, people-relative questioning, why Theaetetus
Greek knowing as know-how (§31). ἐπιστήμη is not first "science" in the modern sense. For the Greeks it is a being able, a knowing-one's-way-around: the cobbler, the general, the mathematician each have ἐπιστήμη of their domain. Heidegger reads the dialogue's question "What is knowledge?" as asking about this know-how and its essence, not about a theory of justified true belief. That is why every offered definition will be rejected: each answer ruins the question by turning a mode of disclosedness into a present-at-hand property of a subject.
People-relative scope (§32). Questioning is not free-floating. What can be asked, and how far a people can press a question, belongs to that people's historical Dasein. Heidegger swipes at journalists who chatter about "problems" and calls hearers to "reeducate ourselves" for genuine questioning. The Theaetetus is chosen because it is where Plato, having set truth as unconcealment in the cave, is forced to face ψεῦδος, the false, and cannot settle it. "Behind the rejections of the answers, there in fact hides an answer": the act of questioning and persistence in questioning "allow the essence of things to open up".
§31-32: why the Theaetetus is the right place for the question of untruth.
- 1 Know-how first. ἐπιστήμη is competence in a domain before it is theory.
- 2 Questioning is historical. A people can ask only what its Dasein opens.
- 3 Untruth is the missing half. Without ψεῦδος, ἀλήθεια remains a word; the false view is where disguise shows itself.
Theaetetus's Answers to the Question of the Essence of Knowledge and their Rejection
§33. First answer: knowing is perception
The answer is not a textbook "lower faculty" nor a refutation of Protagoras. For the Greeks, being perceived is φαίνεται: something shows itself and comes into openness. Aristotle even calls the highest knowing, νοῦς, "αἴσθησίς τις", a kind of perception. φαντασία too means "the self-showing of a being as it is", not fancy.
§33: the stone, the dog and the human on the same ground.
Perception gives an openness, but "not an openness of beings". The bird song and the foliage colour show it: I hear one and see the other, yet "the difference... I can neither see nor hear". Something beyond αἴσθησις is at work: διάνοια, running through the given, and the soul that "itself, for itself" deals with beings (187a). Both taking in and involving oneself are needed.
§34. Second answer: knowing is δόξα
δοκέω means "I show myself", "I come forth to myself". At 143e Theodorus fears he might "strike anyone" as being in love with the boy; Schleiermacher turns this into "that no one may believe of me". Like λανθάνω (Odyssey VIII.93: Odysseus "remained concealed" while weeping), Greek speaks from the one who appears, German from the observer: proof of "the tremendous power" of ἀλήθεια in Greek Dasein.
| Sense of δόξα | Example | Matches |
|---|---|---|
| Look, appearance, repute, glory | A view on a postcard; δόξα θεοῦ, God's majesty | αἴσθησις: it shows itself |
| Belief, opinion | "My view is..." | διάνοια: taking it as such |
The double sense makes δόξα look like knowing. But what shows itself can create an illusion, so a view can fit or hide. Its "wavering" can go with an equal "resoluteness": "it could also be otherwise; nevertheless... it is so", which Heidegger calls "an authentic, genuine faith".
- Plato's balance. True belief gets 200b-201c; false belief 187c-200.
- Structure. A preliminary investigation (187d-191) unfolds the τέρας, the wonder; a main one (192-200) seeks a positive answer.
- The choice. Either false views cannot be, or we stand under "the power of the fact of the false". "Plato forces us to decide."
§33-34 expanded: perception, doxa's double sense, the wonder
Why perception first (§33). The interlocutors do not "babble randomly". The first answer (ἐπιστήμη = αἴσθησις) is given because for the Greeks, being perceived is φαίνεται: something shows itself and comes into openness. Aristotle even calls the highest knowing, νοῦς, "αἴσθησίς τις", a kind of perception. φαντασία too means "the self-showing of a being as it is", not fancy. Perception gives an openness, but "not an openness of beings". The bird song and the foliage colour show it: I hear one and see the other, yet "the difference... I can neither see nor hear". Something beyond αἴσθησις is at work: διάνοια, running through the given, and the soul that "itself, for itself" deals with beings (187a). Both taking in and involving oneself are needed. The stone / dog / human triad: the stone has the ground not given at all; the dog has the ground felt in its paws; the human has the ground revealed as ground.
Doxa's double sense (§34). δοκέω means "I show myself", "I come forth to myself". At 143e Theodorus fears he might "strike anyone" as being in love with the boy; Schleiermacher turns this into "that no one may believe of me". Like λανθάνω (Odyssey VIII.93: Odysseus "remained concealed" while weeping), Greek speaks from the one who appears, German from the observer: proof of "the tremendous power" of ἀλήθεια in Greek Dasein. Two senses of δόξα:
| Sense of δόξα | Example | Matches |
|---|---|---|
| Look, appearance, repute, glory | A view on a postcard; δόξα θεοῦ, God's majesty | αἴσθησις: it shows itself |
| Belief, opinion | "My view is..." | διάνοια: taking it as such |
The double sense makes δόξα look like knowing. But what shows itself can create an illusion, so a view can fit or hide. Its "wavering" can go with an equal "resoluteness": "it could also be otherwise; nevertheless... it is so", which Heidegger calls "an authentic, genuine faith". Plato's balance: true belief gets 200b-201c; false belief 187c-200. Structure: a preliminary investigation (187d-191) unfolds the τέρας, the wonder; a main one (192-200) seeks a positive answer. The choice: either false views cannot be, or we stand under "the power of the fact of the false". "Plato forces us to decide."
§34: how doxa's double sense opens the problem of the false.
The Question of the Possibility of ψευδὴς δόξα
§35. Preliminary investigation: false views are impossible
The test case (188b): in Athens I take an approaching man for Socrates when it is Theaetetus; both are snub-nosed and popeyed.
- Familiar or unfamiliar. I would have to know and not know the same object at once: impossible.
- Being or not-Being. The false is the null; to believe the false is "to believe nothing", and then there is "no believing whatsoever".
- ἀλλοδοξία. Swapping one thing for another "does not even occur in dreams": no one takes "an ox for a horse" (190c).
§35: three principles that seem to make a false view impossible.
§36. The decision for the phenomenon
"The decision is made for the facts, against the principles". In the Sophist (241d) Plato says this makes him the murderer of his father, Parmenides. Heidegger adds that "not just... for the last year, but for quite a few years" we have faced "a still greater decision", expressed in "my book Being and Time", which would "provide the framework for the spiritual history of our people": "a faith that must be borne out by history".
False views are a πάθος ψυχῆς, so the question becomes the constitution of the soul, presented in two similes. "Historians have demonstrated that Plato took these images from somewhere else", but "what is decisive is what Plato makes of them".
§37. The wax block and the aviary
- Wax block (191c). A gift of Mnemosyne, purer or harder in different people. μνημονεύειν is not storage but "making-present": we relate to Berlin or the Baltic Sea without being there. Mistaking the image for the issue made memory a store of impressions.
- The preserve. We live in what we make present "much more intensely" than in what we perceive. Forgetting is "a specific mode of making-present"; projection reaches out in imagination; the soul has εὐρυχωρία, breadth (194d).
- Aviary (197b). Doves in flocks, in loose groups, and one kind "found among all the others": unity, otherness, difference, multiplicity. One can own the birds or grasp one: absent versus present possession.
§38: the bifurcation of every view, which makes both truth and falsehood possible.
| Simile | Source | What it shows | Heidegger's twist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wax block | 191c | impressions kept or lost | memory as making-present, not storage |
| Aviary | 197b | owning versus grasping knowledge | absent versus present possession; unity and difference |
§38. The double sense of δόξα and the possibility of mistake
"All cognition has this remarkable double character": we meet what confronts us and see it as something from "the content domain of what is known in advance". The paradoxes dissolve: familiarity and unfamiliarity concern two objects; the false view is not null but a confusion, which holds both together, rather than an exchange. Because "the domain is broader than the object", truth and falsehood "stand under the same conditions".
§§35-39 expanded: three principles, wax, aviary, blood and soil close
Three principles that bar the false (§35). Test case (188b): in Athens I take an approaching man for Socrates when it is Theaetetus; both are snub-nosed and popeyed. (1) Familiar or unfamiliar: I would have to know and not know the same object at once. (2) Being or not-Being: the false is the null; to believe the false is "to believe nothing". (3) ἀλλοδοξία: swapping one thing for another "does not even occur in dreams"; no one takes "an ox for a horse" (190c).
Decision for the phenomenon (§36). "The decision is made for the facts, against the principles". In the Sophist (241d) Plato says this makes him the murderer of his father, Parmenides. Heidegger adds that "not just... for the last year, but for quite a few years" we have faced "a still greater decision", expressed in "my book Being and Time", which would "provide the framework for the spiritual history of our people": "a faith that must be borne out by history". "There is no such thing as being able to see things purely, without prejudice." The question is "whether a standpoint is genuine". False views are a πάθος ψυχῆς; the constitution of the soul is shown in two similes. "Historians have demonstrated that Plato took these images from somewhere else", but "what is decisive is what Plato makes of them".
Wax and aviary (§37). Wax block (191c): a gift of Mnemosyne, purer or harder in different people. μνημονεύειν is not storage but "making-present": we relate to Berlin or the Baltic Sea without being there. Mistaking the image for the issue made memory a store of impressions. We live in what we make present "much more intensely" than in what we perceive. Forgetting is "a specific mode of making-present"; projection reaches out in imagination; the soul has εὐρυχωρία, breadth (194d). Aviary (197b): doves in flocks, in loose groups, and one kind "found among all the others": unity, otherness, difference, multiplicity. One can own the birds or grasp one: absent versus present possession. (Editor: aviary classes partly conjectural from GA 34 p. 305.)
Bifurcation (§38). Every view joins what confronts me (the snub-nosed man) with what I make present from the preserve (Theaetetus, Socrates known in advance). Taking X as Y is possible only because the view is both at once. That bifurcation makes truth and falsehood possible together. There is no view from nowhere.
Closing (§39). Truth is struggle with untruth; a people wills knowledge or declines. "Blood and soil" are "necessary" but "not sufficient"; spirit must lead. Being and Time is offered as framework for "the spiritual history of our people". The transcript ends abruptly; the course has no formal conclusion.
§35-38: from principles that bar the false to bifurcation that makes it possible.
Notes and drafts for the lecture course of Summer Semester 1933
Notes 1-9: the fundamental question
- Not by decree. The fundamental question is found "neither by decree, nor by whim, nor by compact", but from "the real urgency of our Dasein". Spiritual action rests on "a knowing about the future of the people", never replaced by "policies and institutions".
- Already decided. The decision about philosophy happened when the Greeks set out (a reference to Helmut Berve's Greek History, 1931-33). It is "not past... just unredeemed", a "distant en-joining" we may or may not catch up with.
- Question of Being. "A powerful pronouncement! Empowered by what?" The grounding question is itself "ground-less, abyssal"; it requires bringing "present-at-hand philosophy" to an end.
- Situation. "The world is being reconstructed." The notes read "the political excitement of the youth" not as a symptom but as a path to be opened: "labor camps, militias, settlers, leagues", "seizing beings oneself, taking hold of the soil". Against them stand "the boundlessness of the sciences, the unrestrainedness of technology, the limitlessness of the free economy".
- Cessation. Auf-hören, to cease, read as hören, to listen: "to cease with philosophy, to make it hearken to its essence".
Appendix I, note 8: the plan of the summer course as drafted.
Appendix I, notes 4-9: the situation as the notes read it.
Notes 10-17: confrontation with Hegel
The historical meditation must "aim at Hegel", not as refutation but as con-frontation, a "scission" and "decision for and against". "There is all too much that is correct in philosophy; what is rare is the true."
| Determining power | Charge | Who tried to break it |
|---|---|---|
| Christian world-concept | "Had to lose and deny the fundamental question" | Kierkegaard wills Christianity but "works entirely with" Hegel's means |
| The mathematical as ideal of knowledge | "Not equal to" the question; certainty displaces truth | Nietzsche ("God is dead"), but "stuck in the biological way of thinking" |
Kant (note 11) is the preeminent stage: metaphysics of metaphysics, man's "natural metaphysics" between an impulse toward the supersensible and constant natural illusion; "Kant and Luther! Yes and no!" Even a de-Christianized worldview keeps the Christian form, "filled out with substitute forms". Note 17: "The greater the inception, the more insistent the semblance."
Notes 1-17 expanded: urgency, rift contents, Hegel confrontation
Finding the fundamental question (notes 1-4). It is found "neither by decree, nor by whim, nor by compact", but from "the real urgency of our Dasein". Spiritual action rests on "a knowing about the future of the people", never replaced by "policies and institutions". The decision about philosophy happened when the Greeks set out (reference to Helmut Berve's Greek History, 1931-33). It is "not past... just unredeemed", a "distant en-joining" we may or may not catch up with. "A powerful pronouncement! Empowered by what?" The grounding question is itself "ground-less, abyssal"; it requires bringing "present-at-hand philosophy" to an end.
Situation (notes 5-9). "The world is being reconstructed." The notes read "the political excitement of the youth" not as a symptom but as a path to be opened: "labor camps, militias, settlers, leagues", "seizing beings oneself, taking hold of the soil". Against them stand "the boundlessness of the sciences, the unrestrainedness of technology, the limitlessness of the free economy". Auf-hören, to cease, read as hören, to listen: "to cease with philosophy, to make it hearken to its essence". The rift (Riss) lists: "law, rank; leadership, following; the whole of the people; greatness, hardness, urgent need".
Hegel confrontation (notes 10-17). The historical meditation must "aim at Hegel", not as refutation but as con-frontation, a "scission" and "decision for and against". "There is all too much that is correct in philosophy; what is rare is the true." Two determining powers:
- Christian world-concept. "Had to lose and deny the fundamental question." Kierkegaard wills Christianity but "works entirely with" Hegel's means.
- The mathematical as ideal of knowledge. "Not equal to" the question; certainty displaces truth. Nietzsche ("God is dead") tries to break it but is "stuck in the biological way of thinking".
Kant (note 11) is the preeminent stage: metaphysics of metaphysics, man's "natural metaphysics" between an impulse toward the supersensible and constant natural illusion; "Kant and Luther! Yes and no!" Even a de-Christianized worldview keeps the Christian form, "filled out with substitute forms". Note 17: "The greater the inception, the more insistent the semblance." Cross-references to Überlegungen II (later GA 94) run throughout.
Appendix I: two powers the summer notes aim to confront via Hegel.
Notes and drafts for the lecture course of Winter Semester 1933-1934
Note 1: Thomas on truth
Heidegger works through De veritate, q. 1. The true is found "primarily in the intellect" and "secondarily in things" (art. 2), since truth is adaequatio, "an equality of diverse things" (art. 3). In the divine intellect truth is measuring, in the human theoretical intellect measured. Heidegger's verdict: all this is "deduced formally from the idea of adaequatio", "without a phenomenal look" at what lies in ἀ-λήθεια. If truth is a created given, "man only a functionary, a hireling".
Note 1: Thomas's ladder of measure, as Heidegger sketches it.
Notes 2-7: the course skeleton
- Obstinacy of correctness. From Aristotle to Thomas to Kant, truth is agreement. Being-true of propositions puts things "on its head".
- A historical decision. Two conceptions, unconcealment and correctness: "overpowering power" of the one, "powerlessness" of the other. Their struggle was "not brought to a resolution" in Plato.
- The idea as root. Idea as norm, value, ideal and as pure consciousness: "Everything that we must struggle against and overcome, has its roots here." Our counter-terms: "finitude, temporality, historicity, thrownness, mission, individuation".
- Recaps. The six results of the good, παιδεία as "binding-fast", the Who question and care, which "has nothing to do with... the anxiousness of neurotics".
- Why not leave it? Correspondence cannot reach "the truth of a mission and vocation", of "taking a position and deciding", of "a work of art". So: "a new inception on the ground of the fundamental experiences of our historical Dasein".
Notes 2-7: the skeleton of the winter course in Heidegger's own notes.
- 4 stages, with the high point in 3 and the fulfillment only in 4.
- 6 results from the idea of the good (note 7).
- 2 thousand years: the span over which correctness set the "spiritual forms of the world" (note 5).
Notes 8-11: Theaetetus 184-187
The turning point in Greek thought is the move "into metaphysics", grounding it on Being as ἰδέα and truth as ὁμοίωσις. At 184d the senses "converge" on "a single idea, be it the soul". So the soul is not first a thing with "a cord that connects it to things"; it is the relation itself. Not "soul inspired into the body" but "bodying let into the soul". Being (οὐσία) is what "accompanies all things most of all" (186a), the first, hence the a priori.
| Notes | Topic | Main text it feeds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thomas, De veritate q. 1 | Winter Introduction, Part One ch. 3 |
| 2-7 | Course skeleton, recaps | Part One chs. 1-3 |
| 8-11 | Theaetetus 184-187 | Part Two |
Winter notes expanded: essence, cave plan, Theaetetus drafts
Appendix II's drafts for Winter 1933-34 show the same two-track method as the delivered course: a philosophical plan for essence → struggle → unconcealment → cave → Theaetetus, and a political vocabulary that ties questioning to the people and the university.
Essence drafts. Notes press the "insidious" character of essence-questions and reject essence as Idea-look. Several fragments rewrite Heraclitus B 53 with the same father/king and ἔδειξε/ἐποίησε pair, sometimes more telegraphically than the lecture. One strand links keeping silent to the origin of language earlier than the polished §5.
Cave and Theaetetus plans. Stage divisions appear with variant Stephanus ranges (the same inconsistency the delivered headings show). Drafts for the good stress empowerment and the yoke before the Kolbenheyer occasion existed; the biologism attack is not foreshadowed here in full. Theaetetus notes sketch the aviary and the wax tablet, with classes of birds partly conjectural (editor cites GA 34 p. 305).
Political fragments. Phrases on reeducation, the European mission and the "cowardice" of those who wait recur; one note doubles "cowardice". An illegible word (note 3) and free quotation of 184d3-4 mark the limits of the draft layer. The reading of Thomas in one fragment is contested by the editor.
Appendix II: draft sequence that becomes the winter course.
Editor's Afterword
The sources
| Course | Dates | Main bases |
|---|---|---|
| Summer 1933, The Fundamental Question of Philosophy | Undated; 2 hours a week; sessions probably cancelled for rectoral duties | Manuscript (22 pp. plus inserts); Hallwachs transcript (117 pp.); Kolping transcript (35 pp.) |
| Winter 1933-34, On the Essence of Truth | 7 November 1933 to 27 February 1934 | Manuscript of the new introduction (24 pp., 14 notes); Hallwachs transcript (199 pp.); Bergsträsser transcript (44 pp.); GA 34 manuscript |
- Why a transcript. The winter course repeats GA 34 (1931-32) with a new Heraclitus introduction, longer recaps, a shorter Theaetetus, and many "political" allusions. "Historical veracity" demanded printing Hallwachs.
- The Kolbenheyer passage. The 30 January 1934 insert comes from Heidegger's own manuscript; German prints it in italics, the English edition does not.
- Headings. Section headings are mostly the editor's; part and chapter headings mostly Heidegger's. Braces mark Heidegger's additions inside quotations but editorial conjectures elsewhere.
How the winter course text was assembled (Editor's Afterword).
The editor's political reading
Tietjen grants that the courses draw "closer to contemporary political diction" but holds that the gap between Heidegger and Nazi ideology "remains unbridgeable" and that the philosophy "could also have been held in another situation". The Kolbenheyer critique shows Heidegger treating the Nazi worldview as "a derivative amalgam of modern metaphysics". Open critique was impossible without losing the chance of "being effective", so he used "a disguised way of speaking". The returning philosopher of the cave "mirrors his self-understanding" as rector. In the Nietzsche lectures of the later 1930s, Heidegger supposedly "succeeds in essentially unmasking Nazi ideology".
Source table detail and editorial practice
Summer 1933. Undated; 2 hours a week; sessions probably cancelled for rectoral duties. Bases: manuscript (22 pp. plus inserts); Hallwachs transcript (117 pp.); Kolping transcript (35 pp.).
Winter 1933-34. 7 November 1933 to 27 February 1934. Bases: manuscript of the new introduction (24 pp., 14 notes); Hallwachs transcript (199 pp.); Bergsträsser transcript (44 pp.); GA 34 manuscript as cross-check. The winter course repeats GA 34 (1931-32) with a new Heraclitus introduction, longer recaps, a shorter Theaetetus, and many "political" allusions. "Historical veracity" demanded printing Hallwachs. The Kolbenheyer insert of 30 January 1934 comes from Heidegger's own manuscript; German prints it in italics, the English edition does not. Section headings are mostly the editor's; part and chapter headings mostly Heidegger's. Braces mark Heidegger's additions inside quotations but editorial conjectures elsewhere. Thanks go to Hermann Heidegger for collation.
Afterword: three transcript layers behind the winter main part.
Main Points
Twenty-two takeaways
- Truth is first unconcealment, not correctness. A statement can agree with a thing only if the thing is already open; ἀ-λήθεια names that openness, wrested from concealment (Winter Intro, Part One ch. 3).
- Untruth belongs to the essence of truth. Every openness is limited; truth is "the assault on untruth", and the false view is possible because every view is bifurcated between what confronts us and what we make present (Part One ch. 3, Part Two ch. 3).
- Freedom is binding, not release. The freed prisoner sees only when he projects Being; the good liberates man and "precisely thereby binds him" (Part One chs. 1-2).
- Metaphysics forgot its own question. A stopgap book title became the science of the supersensible, ruled by Christian content and mathematical method, and Hegel completed it as theo-logic (Summer course).
- Philosophy is questioning, not a doctrine. "Every answer ruins the question"; the Theaetetus ends without a definition because "the questioning itself" is the result (Part Two ch. 1).
- The rector made his philosophy the ground of the revolution. The Führer, the people, the enemy, blood and soil appear inside the argument, and the Kolbenheyer speech attacks biologism from within National Socialism, not against it (Summer Intro, Winter Intro, Part One ch. 2, Part Two ch. 3).
- Essence essences. Essence is not a universal concept but what rules through a being; the essence of Frederick the Great is no class (Winter Intro, Part Two ch. 1).
- Polemos sets beings apart. Heraclitus fragment 53 is read as struggle that makes some gods, some humans, some slaves, some free: Being as struggle (Winter Intro).
- The mathematical is an inner law. It decides in advance what may count as being and true; Descartes is no new beginning but a further decline (Summer ch. 2).
- God by logical consistency. Baumgarten climbs from the possible to the richest being, so God's existence becomes a matter of non-contradiction (Summer ch. 3).
- The principle of contradiction is rooted in Dasein. Heidegger grounds it in historical, language-bound existence rather than pure logic (Summer ch. 3).
- The cave is a history in four stages. Chains off, the climb, the sun, the return; the fourth stage is "no mere appendix" (Part One ch. 1).
- To be free means to be a liberator. The philosopher returns into the cave and risks death at the hands of those "who set the standards" (Part One chs. 1-2).
- The good is empowerment, not a value. ἀγαθόν names what succeeds and stands fast: "a pair of good skis", not a moral ideal (Part One ch. 2).
- The yoke was never asked about. Plato's ζυγόν between seeing and seen hardened into subject and object, ideas into prototypes, truth into ὁμοίωσις (Part One ch. 3).
- Ask "Who is man?", not "What is man?". Man is a self whose Being is an issue for it: care, the ground of resoluteness and service (Part One chs. 2-3).
- Ψεῦδος is disguise. A pseudonym is a covering name, not a false one; λήθη is an objective power that befalls people (Part One ch. 3).
- Knowing is know-how. ἐπιστήμη and τέχνη mean being "a match for" something; science is one mode, not the model (Part Two ch. 1).
- No view from nowhere. "There is always a standpoint"; the question is whether it is genuine to the thing (Part Two ch. 3).
- The soul is the relation to Being. At Theaetetus 184d the senses converge on "a single idea"; the soul is that relation, not a container with cords to things (Appendix II).
- The text is layered. Manuscript, Hallwachs's transcript, Heidegger's notes and editorial conjectures carry different weight; gaps are marked, and some are filled from GA 34 (Foreword, Afterword).
- The apologia does not hold. The editor's "unbridgeable gap" is contradicted by the courses themselves and by the Black Notebooks (Afterword).
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Unconcealment before correctness | Agreement presupposes a prior openness of the thing | A dispute about facts is really about what was made visible |
| Four stages of the cave | Liberation runs through unchaining, ascent, sight, return | Mapping how understanding changes rather than accumulates |
| The yoke | Seer and seen are joined by an enabling medium | Neither more data nor better models produce insight |
| Projection of Being | Seeing beings needs a prior sketch of what they are | Designing schemas, ontologies, research questions |
| Two concealments | Not-yet-known versus disguised | Separating ignorance from deception |
| Bifurcated view | Every view takes what confronts us as something known in advance | Explaining a mismatch, a mistaken identity, a bias |
| Who versus what | Selves are understood by their decisions, not components | Profiles reduce people to attributes |
| Confrontation | Scission and decision, not refutation | Engaging a tradition you mean to move beyond |
How the takeaways connect: from the forgotten inception to the political wager.
Cross-course spine
Synthesis spine: inception, decline, struggle, decision.
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) | Author; rector of Freiburg April 1933 to April 1934 |
| Gregory Fried, Richard Polt | Translators; Foreword on sources and vocabulary |
| Hartmut Tietjen | Editor of GA 36/37 (2001); Afterword |
| Wilhelm Hallwachs | Student whose transcript supplies the winter main part |
| Plato | Cave allegory (Republic VII), sun analogy (VI), Theaetetus, Sophist |
| Heraclitus | Fragment 53, polemos as father of all |
| Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas | Truth as correctness and adaequatio |
| Descartes, Wolff, Baumgarten, Kant | Modern metaphysics under the mathematical |
| Hegel | Completion of metaphysics as theo-logic |
| Kierkegaard, Nietzsche | Failed breakouts from Hegel (Christianity; biology) |
| E. G. Kolbenheyer (1878-1962) | Völkisch novelist attacked in the 30 January 1934 speech |
| Werner Jaeger | Paideia (1933), dismissed as humanistic |
About this book
Being and Truth: The Fundamental Question of Philosophy and the Question of Truth by Martin Heidegger, 2010. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- Truth is first unconcealment, not correctness. A statement can agree with a thing only if the thing is already open; ἀ-λήθεια names that openness, wrested from concealment (Winter Intro, Part One ch. 3).
- Untruth belongs to the essence of truth. Every openness is limited; truth is "the assault on untruth", and the false view is possible because every view is bifurcated between what confronts us and what we make present (Part One ch. 3, Part Two ch. 3).
- Freedom is binding, not release. The freed prisoner sees only when he projects Being; the good liberates man and "precisely thereby binds him" (Part One chs. 1-2).
- Metaphysics forgot its own question. A stopgap book title became the science of the supersensible, ruled by Christian content and mathematical method, and Hegel completed it as theo-logic (Summer course).
- Philosophy is questioning, not a doctrine. "Every answer ruins the question"; the Theaetetus ends without a definition because "the questioning itself" is the result (Part Two ch. 1).
- The rector made his philosophy the ground of the revolution. The Führer, the people, the enemy, blood and soil appear inside the argument, and the Kolbenheyer speech attacks biologism from within National Socialism, not against it (Summer Intro, Winter Intro, Part One ch. 2, Part Two ch. 3).