The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking

First, a few words about the context of this particular lecture. According to Heidegger, it represents an attempt to shape the question of {Being and Time }in a more primal way; or, in other words, to subject the point of departure of the question in {Being and Time }to an immanent criticism, the sort of philosophising which Adorno (Heidegger's most trenchant contemporary German critic) developed in response to the problematically reflexive character of thinking about thinking. The idea behind immanent criticism is that, if you give a piece of metaphysical (identity) thinking enough rope, it will hang itself, leaving the individual object of thinking at least the possibility of asserting/revealing itself in the full and unoccluded particularity of its Being. Heidegger appears to be proposing a further 'deconstruction' of the language of {Being and Time} (something which, as he says, he has undertaken again and again ever since 1930) in order to get the question into better shape for the task of thinking.

What does Heidegger mean by 'the end of philosophy', his assertion that philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage?

Heidegger identifies philosophy as metaphysics, which thinks beings as being in the manner of representational thinking which gives reasons or 'grounds'. In metaphysics, ever since its inception and in its constitution as a project, the Being of beings - what it means to say that something (anything) 'is' - has been represented as the 'ground' from which beings are what they are and in virtue of which they can be known. In the history of philosophy, this ground or 'presencing' has itself been represented in several different ways: as the 'ontic causation of the real' (Plato and subsequent Christian theology); as the 'transcendental making possible of the objectivity of objects' (Kant); as the 'dialectical mediation of the movement of the absolute Spirit' (Hegel); as the 'historical process of production (Marx); as the 'will to power positing values' (Nietzsche); &etc.. What generally characterises metaphysical thinking, according to Heidegger, is that it departs from 'what is present in its presence' (ie the Being of beings themselves), representing it as something else - namely, 'its ground as something grounded'. It is this project, which Heidegger conceives as a forgetting of the question of Being, that Heidegger asserts as having 'entered its final stage' in the sense of attaining its completion.

The end of philosophy is marked by several features.

First of all, it has been brought about by the reversal of metaphysics in the work of Marx and Nietzsche. Following this reversal, any attempt at metaphysical thinking has managed only an 'epigonal renaissance'.

Secondly, it manifests itself also in the transformation of metaphysical thinking into an empirical science of man, in the sense that these sciences, which developed within metaphysical thinking, have now established their independence from that thinking. As Heidegger points out: while this development appears to be the mere dissolution of philosophy, it is in truth its completion, the fruition of the forgetting of the question of Being by Platonism.

Thirdly, the end of philosophy is reflected in the current determination of man as an acting social being. The forgetting of the question of Being culminates in what Heidegger describes as 'the new fundamental science of cybernectics', which is the theory which informs 'the steering of the planning and arrangement of human labour', the transformation of language into an exchange of news, and the transformation of the arts into 'regulated-regulating instruments of information'; in other words, the metaphysics of what Adorno and Horkheimer refer to as 'adminstered life'. The end of philosophy (metaphysics; Platonism) lies in its own fruition as 'representational-calculative thinking', a sort of thinking which - moreover - liquidates any attempt to question its own metaphysical origins.

So, in this situation - in the end-days of classical philosophy (philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato) - what is the task of thinking, 'a thinking which [as Heidegger puts it] can be neither metaphysics nor science'?

It is, according to Heidegger, a task 'which has concealed itself from philosophy since its very beginning, even in virtue of that beginning, and... has withdrawn itself continually and increasingly in the time to come'; a task 'which includes the assertion that philosophy [ie metaphysics; Platonism] has not been up to the matter of thinking and has thus become a history of mere decline.'

The task of thinking in the end-days of philosophy is, furthermore, 'only of a preparatory, not a founding character. It is content with awakening a readiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whose course remains uncertain.' The task of thinking is to recall us to the question of Being in a scientific-technological world; it is not to speculate on, let alone anticipate, any answer which might be forthcoming to that question. It is to 'lighten' or 'open' a 'clearing' (phenomenologically speaking) into which the Being of beings - what it means to say that something (anything) 'is' - can reveal itself; a process in which thinking itself is transformed from the representational-calculative/metaphysical to the meditative/edifying, to a thinking which attends with care and solicitude to the Being of the beings themselves rather than to their representative or instrumental value alone. The task of thinking is not eschatology (it 'does not wish and is not able to predict the future'); and it is certainly not metaphsical speculation about the 'ground of Being', since (as Heidegger points out in {Being and Time }'our investigation [of the meaning of Being] does not then become a "deep" one, nor does it puzzle out what stands behind Being. It asks about Being itself insofar as Being enters into the intelligibility of Being-there.' In his lecture, Heidegger also approvingly quotes Goethe who, in {Maxims and Reflections}, n 993, writes: 'Look for nothing behind phenomena: they themselves are what is to be learned'. If anything, the task of post-metaphysical thinking is a phenomenological analysis of the Being of beings, of what it means to say that something - anything - 'is'; the 'lighting' or 'opening' ({Lichtung}) of a 'clearing' in which the Being of beings can show itself - but this is to anticipate the remainder of the lecture.

According to Heidegger, when we ask about the task of thinking, we are seeking 'to determine that which concerns thinking, which is still controversial, which is in controversy'; to determine what matters for thinking, the matter at hand, to {pragma auto}. And the matter at hand Heidegger identifies as 'the things themselves'. So, the task of thinking is the things themselves. But it is also to find a method appropriate to the task. Again to anticipate: the method appropriate to the task is a phenomenological analysis of the Being of beings; the 'opening' of a 'clearing' in which 'the things themselves' can show themselves for what they 'are' and what it means to say that they 'are'.

The task of thinking is also to question 'what remains unthought in the call to "the thing itself"', 'what remains unthought in the matter of philosophy as well as in its method'. In his critique of the 'speculative dialectic' of Hegel and the 'originary intuition' of Husserl and Plato's 'presentation of the Being of beings' as '{eidos}?, Heidegger argues that what each presupposes, but does not think either materially or methodologically, is the 'primal matter' of 'opening', which {Dasein} provides, 'within which alone pure space and ecstatic time and everything present and absent in them [may] have the place which gathers and protects everything', and without which 'the things themselves' - 'what is' - and what it means to say that they 'are' - the Being of beings - remains hidden. The task of thinking in the end-days of philosophy is therefore to meditate upon what remains unthought in the matter of philosophy (namely, the 'opening' which lets beings radiate their Being), and to become itself the 'opening' of that 'opening'.

Heidegger avers that this 'opening' was spoken of, but remained unfulfilled by presocratic thinking. The opening was spoken of by Parmenides as '{aletheia}', which Heidegger now 'stubbornly' translates as 'unconcealment' rather than truth; and translates it thus 'not for the sake of etymology', but 'for the matter which must be considered when we think that which is called Being and thinking adequately'. Unconcealment is 'the element in which Being and thinking and their belonging together exist'. But, while {aletheia} is named at the beginning of philosophy, it is not explicitly thought by philosophy afterwards. 'For since Aristotle it became the task of philosophy as metaphysics to think beings as such onto-theologically [rather than aletheically]'.

Why does Heidegger not translate '{aletheia}' with the usual name: 'truth'? Because, he says, 'insofar as truth is understood in the traditional 'natural' sense as the correspondence of knowledge with beings... unconcealment in the sense of the opening nay not be equated with truth. Rather, {aletheia}, unconcealment thought as opening, first grants the possibility of truth. For truth itself, just as Being and thinking, can only be what it is in the element of the opening.... Aletheia... is not yet truth.' The precise relationship between {aletheia} and {adequatio} and {certitudo} is a question which Heidegger leaves to thinking as a task. But he questions whether thinking can even raise this question while it thinks philosophically, 'in the strict sense of metaphysics', which questions beings only with regard to what they are and not with regard to what it means to say that they 'are' at all.

But how is it, Heidegger asks, that {aletheia }appears to man's natural experience and speaking only as correctness and dependability? Is it because man's ecstatic (out-standing) journey into the opening of {aletheia}, in which the thinking of beings and the Being of beings become one, is oriented only toward what is present (beings) and the representation of what is present, leaving the Being of what is present unheeded? Not necessarily: for it is only what is shown in unconcealment (the phenomenon) that can be experienced and thought, not what it is as such.

Our inability to experience and think what beings are as such, the 'what' of the 'What is...?', the goal of metaphysical thinking, but only what is shown in unconcealment, is not a consequence of 'human carelessness' but a structural feature of {aletheia }itself; 'because self-concealment, concealment, {lethe}, belongs to {a-letheia}' Metaphysical truth, an accurate representation of what things are as such, is thus unattainable; since all we have access to in {aletheia }is what things are as they show themselves, their appearances.

If this is so, Heidegger concludes, then with the questions raised in the last three paragraphs we reach 'the path to the task of thinking at the end of philosophy'.

But isn't this all unfounded mysticism or even bad etymology and, in any case, a ruinous irrationalism? A denial or {logos }or {ratio}? These are questions which Heidegger again leaves to thinking as a task: What does {ratio}, {nous}, {noein}, perceiving mean?; What does ground and principle and, especially, the Husserlian 'principle of all principles' mean? He doubts that these questions can ever be sufficiently determined unless we experience {aletheia }(as the presocratic Greeks did) as unconcealment, and then think {aletheia }(as the Greeks and all subsequent philosophy failed to do) as the opening of self-concealing. Until these questions are answered, all talk about 'irrationalism' is unfounded.

Heidegger brings his lecture to a close with another series of questions which are raised by the end of philosophy, which have become (in his reading) the [new, post-metaphysical] matter of philosophy; questions which, indeed, bring philosophy to its end. And, again, he leaves them as tasks for post-metaphysical thinking. For...

'The task of thinking would then be the surrender of previous [metaphysical] thinking to the determination of the matter of thinking'; a surrender which is to be achieved through the 'lighting' of a clearing by phenomenological analysis of the implicit understanding we already have, in virtue of our own being, of what it means to say that something - anything - 'is', in conversation with the immanent criticism of its results.

(Heidegger's Essay can be read at http://www.msu.org/e&r/content_e&r/texts/heidegger/heidegger_endphil.html