I. The Historicity of Art

Although the epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art” is quite short — only two and a half pages in Holzwege — it tries to give a thumbnail sketch of the history of metaphysics. While such laconism is in some ways absurd, the text is so closely related to other texts — especially those in which Heidegger’s central concern is with Hegel — that a coherent and intriguing view of the relation of philosophy and art in history is readily obtainable.

At the end of the main body of the essay Heidegger raises the question about the place of our own time in history. Are we at the beginning of a new period of art and of history, he asks, or are we merely lingering in a worn-out inspiration?⁶ Is art for us today capable of revelation and truth, or is it essentially connected with the past?

The epilogue raises these problems again in relation to Hegel’s account of the connection of art and the historical world spirit. Heidegger is aware, of course, of the ambiguity in Hegel’s claim that art is past. The thesis that spirit has passed art by as a locus of truth is not disproved by pointing out that there have been developments in art since Hegel’s time. In this sense the term “death of art” is a misnomer. Art certainly continues to occur, but how it signifies may well change from the way it previously signified (for instance, in the Romanesque period, where art and religion are entwined). Indeed, art may even cease to signify, and this event is itself significant.

The essence of phenomena is not unhistorical and there can be such changes in the manner of signifying. Hegel in the Phenomenology sees each successive form of consciousness as having its own truth criterion or Maßstab, and Heidegger maintains that there has been change in the nature of truth throughout the history of philosophy. In fact, Heidegger is suggesting another sense of understanding Hegel’s dictum that art has become something past for us. Art can be past not in the sense that it is over, but in the sense that much of its value for us comes from its belonging to the past, to an inherited tradition comprising the history of art.

What exactly does Heidegger mean by the pastness of art? Hegel’s word describing art in German is ein Vergangenes. Heidegger also uses this word (Holzwege, 65), but one must remember that the “past” receives a special analysis in Being and Time. There Heidegger restricts the term Vergangenheit to the historical being of present-to-hand things and derives this sense of “pastness” from a more primordial sense in which the existence of human beings is past as Gewesenheit.⁷ When the purely antiquarian historian forgets the meaning of his research for the present — and the future — and simply loses himself in an aesthetic contemplation of the past for the past’s sake alone, then he is objectifying the past (as Vergangenheit) and treating it like a thing that is merely no longer present-to-hand (vorhanden)⁸ The past, however, includes human beings, and individuals cannot treat their pasts (or the pasts of others) in that way. The meaning of the past can still change with present or future actions. Thus, Heidegger can even say that the past (as Gewesenheit) is still operant in the present, and indeed, even “arises from the future” (SZ, 326).

To say that art for us has the character of the past as Vergangenheit is to imply that we have reduced art to a specific temporal dimension. The greatness of art is now inseparable from the historical aura surrounding it. Art now belongs in the museum. Even modern art, as Karsten Harries shows, takes some of its character from being the first to do something new.⁹ In this regard, one can notice how the act of producing the artwork becomes more important than the final result itself — a large, yellow, but otherwise blank canvas in the museum may be surprising at first, but does not provide the opportunity for study or wonderment as does, say, a Vermeer. Other happenings, such as wrapping up a skyscraper, and then unwrapping it shortly thereafter, may be an interesting technological act, showing wonderful “free play of the imagination,” but it also acts to destroy the very notion of art as object or product. This use of technology to parody technology is thus an invaluable antidote to the obsession with progress. Nevertheless, its effect depends on surprise, and its temporal character is very much that of a succession of “nows” rapidly retreating into the past as it searches for new kinds of things to wrap.

Heidegger’s analysis of art involves a useful interpretation both of Hegel’s death of art thesis and of the temporality of art. That art gradually dies does not mean that it will cease altogether, but rather that its essence changes.¹⁰ Karsten Harries describes this change for Hegel as involving a shift from an ontological to an aesthetic conception of beauty.¹¹ In the aesthetic mode art is contemplated for its own sake and is viewed independently of its other possible functions. In religious art, for instance, the artwork is closely connected to other beliefs about the world — beliefs which in the aesthetic mode of perception are bracketed in such a way that they are known and understood, but not necessarily shared. The temporal nature of religious art, such as that of the Romanesque period, should also be described differently. It clearly is connected to the past insofar as it often depicts the life of Christ or the saints, yet there is no concern about anachronism — the settings are not Roman but contemporary. The art deals more with future expectations. It announces rather than simply depicts, and the early Romanesque sculptors are clearly concerned with the expressive and evocative portrayal of their themes, perhaps even moreso than with mimetic or realistic reconstruction of ideal forms (as is more typical in Gothic sculpture). While this Romanesque art may appear formally quite primitive, it is in fact quite refined and rich in regional variation. The art could be more adequately described as a new beginning, a rediscovery of the origins of art and of artistic technique. Heidegger’s own statement about the difference between primitive or unhistorical art and a genuinely historical beginning is controversial, but it is worth repeating in this regard:

A genuine beginning, as a leap [Sprung], is always a head start [Vorsprung], in which everything to come is already leaped over [übersprungen], even if as something disguised. A genuine beginning, however, has nothing of the neophyte character of the primitive. The primitive, because it lacks the bestowing, grounding leap and head start, is always futureless.¹²

The German text plays with the movements and meanings of the root word Sprung, which is also contained in the title of the essay — “The Origin,” Ursprung, “of the Work of Art.” While this particular passage does not explain the fascination of the primitive, nor take into account the influence primitive art has had on modern art (e.g., on Picasso), it does point out an important difference in the temporality of the two art forms.

The genuine beginnings Heidegger is discussing are not merely those of periods in art history. Art can also function as the foundation and beginnings of history as such: “Whenever art happens — that is, whenever there is a beginning — a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again.”¹³ While this definition of art may appear to be a normative one, it clearly shows an ontological conception of art, and a refusal to reduce art to the merely aesthetic.

If Heidegger’s interpretation of the death of art thesis is in many respects similar to, or indeed only an explication of, Hegel’s, in what ways does it differ? Heidegger links the historical change in the essence of art to the change in the essence of truth. In Heidegger’s historical overview Hegel occupies a place in this philosophical change — a place that now needs to be surpassed. In order to grasp the meaning of Heidegger’s epilogue on art, then, it is necessary to understand his critique of Hegel’s notion of truth.

II. The Historicity of Truth

Two important texts clarifying Heidegger’s understanding of Hegel are the essay “Hegel and the Greeks” and the second essay in Identity and Difference, entitled “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics.”¹⁴ The latter results from a seminar given in 1956/57 and a lecture given in 1957, while the former is a lecture originally delivered in 1958. Other texts, of course, also discuss Hegel to some extent, as do the “Letter on Humanism” and Being and Time. The two texts mentioned above, however, complement “The Origin of the Work of Art” and clarify not only the epilogue but also its often overlooked Zusatz, written in 1956 and published in 1960.¹⁵

In the Zusatz Heidegger points out a possible misinterpretation of his statements about the truth of the artwork, and again begins his self-interpretation with a reference to Hegel (and to his own essay “Hegel and the Greeks”). Heidegger wishes to avoid any suggestion that the truth of art involves the positing of something completely determinate by a particular subject. He is aware, however, that a statement like “art is the fixing in place [feststellen] of a self-establishing truth in the figure” possibly implies a willed creation, as by the poet, of a discursive truth. Yet the truth of art cannot be so determinate and “fixed” (fest); art is more a continuous act of appearing, a letting-happen.

Heidegger attempts to clarify his view with reference to the Greek word thesis (in German stellen), which involves immediate manifestation. In the German idealist tradition, however, “thesis” has precisely the sense of being something posited by a subject. So Heidegger must distinguish his term from Hegel’s. Hegel is correct, Heidegger believes, in seeing the thesis as untrue because it is not yet mediated by the antithesis.

How can Heidegger affirm the correctness of Hegel’s insistence that mediation is essential to truth and then fall back on the immediacy of thesis in explicating his own notion of truth? The Zusatz does not explain this point, and Heidegger offers clarification only by citing the entire essay “Hegel and the Greeks.” Reflecting on this latter essay, one infers that Hegel’s notion of truth is correct as far as it goes, but also that it does not go far enough, even for its own purposes. Heidegger’s procedure here in criticizing Hegel is thus dialectical, if by “dialectical” one means the discovery that the criterion for knowledge avowed by a particular consciousness is not adequate to or does not satisfactorily explain the knowledge it actually has.

When discussing Hegel, Heidegger in fact uses the language of dialectical method — speaking of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and thereby distorting Hegel’s actual procedure. Hegel’s treatment of the Greeks, Heidegger argues, posits their philosophical beginnings as the thesis that remains incomplete without the antithesis and synthesis (WM,271).¹⁶ Heidegger maintains that by viewing the Greek notions of truth and being from the perspective of the end of a philosophical tradition, Hegel misconstrues these beginnings and is “historically incorrect” (WM, 268).

To hear Heidegger accuse another philosopher of inaccurate historical scholarship is an interesting twist, since this charge is raised so often against Heidegger himself. Indeed, this accusation involves methodological problems of which Heidegger is well aware. Heidegger thinks Hegel distorts the Greek view by seeing it from a later philosophical perspective, yet Heidegger’s own view is also perspectival. Is Heidegger’s philosophical interest more valid simply because it is more recent? Of course not, and appropriate criticism should be based on an immanent reading of the Greeks. For both Hegel and Heidegger, however, the notion of a purely immanent reading is an illusion. Both philosophers insist on the historicity of thought, and on the contribution to the meaning of texts made by the tradition of their reception. In “Hegel and the Greeks” Heidegger gives the classical argument for the determination of thought by history:

Nun bewegen sich aber schon jede historische Aussage und deren Begründung in einem Verhältnis zur Geschichte. Vor dem Entscheid über die historische Richtigkeit des Vorstellens bedarf es daher der Besinnung darauf, ob und wie die Geschichte erfahren wird, von woher sie in ihrem Grundzügen bestimmt ist. (WM, 268)

(Now every historical assertion and its justification, however, already moves within a relation to history. Before the decision about the historiographical correctness of the manner of conceiving, there must be reflection on whether and how history is experienced, and from whence it is determined in its basic features.)

As important as Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks is, then, it also needs to be complemented by an argument that Hegel’s method, on its own terms, is inadequate to the interpretive task and therefore that Hegel’s results are inconsistent.¹⁷

Although Heidegger follows this procedure, he still does not claim absolute certainty for his own historical judgment. He thus remains a consistent and thoroughgoing historicist:

Freilich kann auch eine solche Prüfung niemals sich selbst als der Gerichtshof gebärden, der schlechthin über das Wesen der Geschichte und ein mögliches Verhältnis zu ihr entscheidet; denn diese Prüfung hat ihre Grenze, die sich so umschreiben läßt: Je denkender, d.h. von seiner Sprache beanspruchter ein Denken ist, je maßgebender wird für es das Ungedachte und gar das ihm Undenkbare. (WM, 268)

(Admittedly, even such an examination can itself never serve as the tribunal that decides in an absolute manner about the essence of history and a possible relation to it. For this examination has its limit, which can be defined as follows: the more ratiocinative an act of thinking is, that is to say, the more it is claimed by or caught up in its language, the more decisive for it will be the unthought and even that which for it is unthinkable.)

This belief that thought is conditioned by something unthought or unthinkable is, of course, unconfirmable. Heidegger is not, however, thereby condemned to an irrational, completely relativist brand of historicism. The reminder that one’s own judgments are not absolutely certain does not entail that there are no good reasons for them.

How, then, does Hegel’s historical place condition his perception of the Greeks? The very fact that Hegel has a historical vision in which the Greeks have a particular position is, of course, a factor to take into account, especially since Hegel’s notion of history is itself a new development in history — one that appears antithetical to Greek thought. Heidegger himself, though, rejects Hegel’s theory of history as the dialectical development of the consciousness of freedom:

Allen richtigen oder unrichtigen historischen Aussagen voraus geht, daß Hegel das Wesen der Geschichte aus dem Wesen des Seins im Sinne der absoluten Subjektivität erfahren hat. Es gibt bis zur Stunde keine Erfahrung der Geschichte, die, philosophisch gesehen, dieser Geschichtserfahrung entsprechen könnte. (WM, 269)

(Prior to all correct or incorrect historiographical assertions is the fact that Hegel experienced the essence of history from the essence of being in the sense of absolute subjectivity. Up until now there has been no experience of history that, philosophically speaking, could correspond to this historical attitude.)

Heidegger does not argue the point that there has been no experience of history confirming the Hegelian theory, and it remains merely a statement of opinion. The opinion is widely shared, but the Hegelian reply is easily imaginable. When Heidegger says the Hegelian historical experience is not confirmed or confirmable, he does not explain what evidence would count as confirmation. Nor does Heidegger’s own picture of history include such a theory of evidence, and his statement is equally telling against his own historical speculations. Since Hegel and the Hegelian tradition (including Marx, Lukacs, and others) offer interpretations of historical data, and since these accounts have in fact been found appealing by some people, Heidegger’s claim that there has been no such experience of historical development is gainsaid.

Heidegger perhaps guards against this line of reply by saying that “philosophically speaking” there has been no confirming experience. What this phrase means is unclear, but Heidegger has advanced arguments of a different sort against Hegel. These arguments challenge Hegel’s notion of history on the basis of the way this notion is grounded in Hegel’s understanding of being as absolute subjectivity.

With this point Heidegger comes to the heart of his criticism of Hegel. Before testing his analysis both as an interpretation of Hegel and as an argument against Hegel’s view of philosophy, two common charges against Heidegger’s own philosophy should be mentioned. In dealing with Hegel, Heidegger is at the same time indirectly defending and clarifying his own views.

The first charge has a long history, including Carnap’s diatribe against Heidegger, and concerns the apparent abstractness and even meaninglessness of Heidegger’s notion of being. Hegel’s analysis of being is an important precedent in this regard, for he too maintains that being is abstract and the poorest of concepts despite its apparent richness.

The second charge against which Heidegger is defending himself while at the same time criticizing Hegel develops from their differences on the concept of being. Heidegger maintains that his own attempt to free being from any trace of subjectivism is itself not to be charged with subjectivism. For instance, it might seem that there is implicit subjectivism in Heidegger’s emphasis on the poet as the subject who sees into the real meaning of being and thus founds the new historical beginnings. Heidegger must reply that it is not the poet per se who is responsible for this disclosure.¹⁸ Heidegger himself, in “Hegel and the Greeks,” makes this point in more general terms. He mentions as a possible misinterpretation of his notion of the unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of being that unconcealment must be unconcealment “for somebody,” and is therefore subjective (WM, 270). Heidegger maintains that this interpretation still persists in thinking of man as a subject, and therefore falls back into the philosophical antinomies Heidegger’s language intends to avoid. Must “for somebody,” he asks, necessarily mean “posited or determined by somebody”? The Greeks, he thinks, would not have made this subjectivizing inference. Hegel, on the other hand, does infer it, at least insofar as he sees subjectivity or spirit in all manifestations of being. Heidegger’s self-defense, then, turns on his interpretation of Hegel, and that must now be examined more closely.

III. Dialectic and the History of Being

Hegel’s error in interpreting the Greek notion of being, Heidegger argues, stems from his inability to think of being except in relation to subjectivity. The Greeks, however, did not have a conception of the subject in the same way. Therefore, Heidegger believes, Hegel cannot grasp the true essence of the Greeks’ understanding of being (WM, 269).

Leaving aside the question of the validity of Heidegger’s own often-criticized interpretation of the Greeks, one sees that this argument is clearly grounded in a different attitude toward the history of thought. Hegel begins the history of philosophy with the Greeks’ explicit language and concepts. Heidegger, on the other hand, believes that the explicit theorizing of philosophy occurs only in response to a claim by or concern with something that remains inexplicit and inadequately conceptualized by philosophy. His analysis of the Greek notion of aletheia develops the point that “unser Denken von etwas angesprochen wird, was vor dem Beginn der ‘Philosophie’ und durch ihre ganze Geschichte hindurch das Denken schon zu sich eingeholt hat” (WM, 272). (Our thinking is claimed by something that before the beginning of “philosophy”and throughout its entire history already comprehends this thinking.) Thus, whereas Hegel attributes inadequacy to the Greeks, and sees his own thought as no longer inadequate because completely self-certain, Heidegger maintains that the inadequacy of the Greeks’ thought is also our own inadequacy (WM, 272).

In Identity and Difference Heidegger also discusses this difference in attitudes toward the history of philosophy. Heidegger rejects Hegel’s basic dialectical principle of Aufhebung, which is the movement wherein the negation of a position does not completely cancel it, but preserves its essential truth in making a step forward to a greater or more complete truth. Instead of this step forward, Heidegger wants a step backward (Schritt zurück) (ID,49ff.). His goal is to rediscover the skipped (übersprungen) region from which we derive our idea of truth.

Truth, for Heidegger, is thus not a primitive term, but follows from an understanding of prior conditions. These conditions are what philosophy aims to reveal, what it wishes to get back to, but this stepping back is not a going back in time — for instance, to before Plato and Aristotle. Rather, it is a getting away from the ordinary involvement with things and a getting back to the very essence of what a thing is — and for modern man this means seeing through the technological way of thinking to the essence of technology itself.

In the German idealist tradition truth is understood ultimately as self-certainty. Yet for Heidegger the question about what is involved in establishing something as a certainty or truth does not deal with the more fundamental question about how that of which we are certain itself even comes to be. While the idealist tradition does not separate these questions, Heidegger thinks they are clearly distinct, and he believes the Greek notion of aletheia indicates this. If aletheia is most fundamentally disclosure (Entbergung), then the idealist concept of truth as correctness and certainty depends on aletheia, but aletheia does not depend on truth.¹⁹ In other words, the question of how the subject can ascertain his judgments is a later question than the one as to the conditions for the existence or nonexistence of states of affairs. Instead of thinking of the absolute subject as the origin of the disclosure of being, Heidegger suggests this disclosure be considered as the place wherein the very notion of a subject first comes to be (WM, 268).

Is this question about being so general as to be meaningless? Hegel thinks of being as indeterminate generality, and therefore as the concept in its “most empty emptiness” (ID, 56). Heidegger in one sense agrees that being, if so conceived, is indeed an empty concept. He appeals to Hegel’s own example about the man who wants to buy “fruit,” but finds only apples, pears, peaches, etc., and thus cannot obtain what he seeks (ID, 66). For Heidegger this indicates the limitations of Hegel’s logic and his conceptualization of being. Being appears in a light, says Heidegger, that comes from the illumination of Hegel’s thought. Yet this thought is historically formed, and being in fact only appears in a determinate, epochal historical form (e.g., as logos, idea, substance, objectivity, will, will to power, etc.). The inquiry into the meaning of being is thus not abstract and formal, but rather, historical and concrete.

Is the procedure of this inquiry actually so different, however, from Hegel’s own method of inquiry into the history of thought? Heidegger uses different words and spellings in an attempt to make a difference. Thus, the word “historical” in German is spelled with a “t” (Geschichte, geschichtlich) whenever Heidegger is referring to the ordinary, “Hegelian” way of thinking about history as a progression in a series of moments, and with a “k” (Geschick — often translated as “mittence” — and geschicklich) when speaking of his own later analyses. The word Geschick indicates that the meaning and course of history is not determined by man himself, but rather that history is “sent” to man and grounds human self-consciousness.²⁰

This attempt to outstrip Hegel’s thought is complemented by explicit rejection of other concepts. The attack on Aufhebung has already been mentioned, and Heidegger likewise avoids speaking of lawlike necessity in history. This creates a problem, as he is well aware, since he must explain how his history of being could have a continuity (Durchgängigkeit), an all-pervading character (ID, 67-68). He posits such an initial issue or “perdurance” (Austrag) lying at the beginnings of philosophy and governing the history of philosophy even while being covered-up and forgotten (ID, 68). While this ontological cover-up is the thread running through the history of being, its status is difficult to investigate and clarify: “Yet it remains difficult to say how this all-pervasiveness [Durchgängigkeit] is to be thought, if it is neither something universal, valid in all cases, nor a law guaranteeing the necessity of a process in the sense of the dialectical” (ID, 67-68). The claim in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (pp. 77-78) that history is grounded in art and therefore only moves by a leap (Sprung) makes continuity seem almost impossible.

In view of these difficulties it is not surprising that Heidegger often expresses his speculations about history in a subjunctive mood or as a “possibility.” With the rejection of history as a dialectical progression of self-consciousness goes a disavowal of any absolute certainty about achieving the philosophical goal of the Schritt zurück. At the end of Identity and Difference, therefore, Heidegger admits that the step back may in fact never escape modern metaphysical-technological thinking (ID, 72-73). Such a philosophy can only explore its possibilities in the subjunctive, and this tone of the later writings contrasts with the ontological ambitions toward a positive theory marking the more assertory tone of Being and Time (which is subjunctive only insofar as it remains incomplete). Heidegger appears to have actually experienced the consequences of his potentially relativistic claim in Being and Time that “higher than actuality stands possibility” (SZ, 38). The step back and the attempt to think history as originating from a now-forgotten Austrag is only a possibility, he admits in Identity and Difference (p. 68). The subjunctive mood of Heidegger’s historicism thus makes it impossible for him to state precisely his predictions about the aftermath of the overcoming of our technological metaphysics. In fact, the overcoming of metaphysics is not something that occurs by projecting a standpoint outside of metaphysics — Heidegger’s “overcoming” (Überwindung) is indeed much like Hegel’s Aufhebung in that it does not simply negate something, but rather goes beyond it by seeing more deeply and essentially into it, thus transforming it from within.²¹ Heidegger is forced into a poetic mode, one that is constantly forced to take back its language so that it is not frozen into mere terminology (see ID, 74-75).

IV. Hegel and Heidegger: Identity in Difference?

Strangely enough, the philosopher to whom Heidegger is most akin in this philosophical mood is Hegel — although not the Hegel who is terminologically frozen into later Hegelianism. Heidegger’s interpretation is itself influenced by the Hegelian tradition insofar as he thinks of dialectic as a method aiming at unity through the synthesis of opposites.²² Heidegger speaks of dialectic as “die Methode” which believes itself identical with “die Seele des Seins,” and he even sees modern science, with its emphasis on the method of total computability and its search for a unitary basis of matter, as still manifesting Hegelian dialectic (WM,260).

To dispel these metaphysical illusions Heidegger insists that the original issue of philosophy is the difference between being and beings, and that this difference is never overcome. The difference is, rather, constantly at issue and continually generating new understandings of this difference: “Speaking in terms of the difference, this means: perdurance [Austrag] is a circling, the circling of Being and beings around each other” (ID, 69). The hermeneutic circle of human understanding and interpretation analyzed in Being and Time thus reappears at the more fundamental level of the question of being.

Heidegger’s circular movement in Differenz is not, however, so far removed from Hegel’s dialectical movement. Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose own philosophical hermeneutic can be said to mediate between Heidegger and Hegel, challenges Heidegger’s reading of Hegel’s notion of the absolute. Gadamer raises the question whether Heidegger does not go too far in characterizing Hegel’s dialectical self-transparency (Selbstdurchsichtigkeit) as result rather than as the whole process itself. Seen as a continual, self-renewing process, dialectic does not culminate so much in a final, totally determinate synthesis as in an “unresolved tension.”²³ Dialectic, according to Gadamer, is not only reason’s grasp of the whole — the moment Heidegger emphasizes — but also the maintenance of contradictions in their tension and opposition. This latter moment achieves a unity of the contradictions, but only by preserving their difference. Heidegger’s own notion of the Differenz constituting the unifying Austrag of history is thus quite close to Hegel’s actual philosophical practice.

Gadamer does not hesitate, therefore, to claim that in important respects Heidegger’s thought is as dialectical as Hegel’s. Most significantly, Heidegger’s notion of the history of metaphysics as unified by the growing oblivion of being (Seinsvergessenheit) is equally as encompassing as Hegel’s absolute and his notion of reason in history.²⁴ Furthermore, since what has been forgotten in the “forgetting of being” is posited as returning again and thus casting new light on the whole of the preceding process, it serves the dialectical function of allowing one to see the actuality behind the apparent arbitrariness of the present. This seeming negation through forgetting that then returns with even greater significance again shows more proximity to Hegelian Aufhebung than Heidegger would like to acknowledge. In fact, it undercuts his claim that history and the step back depends upon a leap. As Gadamer remarks, is not the step back inevitably mediated, in the Hegelian sense of the term, by metaphysics? Certainly Heidegger’s own subjunctive hesitancy about the very possibility of success for the step back indicates that the leap always gets entangled in the thicket of present philosophical language.

Gadamer’s observations encourage further reservations about Heidegger’s critique of Hegel. In the essay “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,”²⁵ Heidegger himself indicates parallels between his own thought and Hegel’s. In fact, he translates dialectical terms from the Phenomenology into terms used in Being and Time. Natural consciousness, which for Hegel is consciousness wherein the subject is directly concerned with an object, is said to be ontic, as opposed to ontological, consciousness (HCE, 105). This natural consciousness, furthermore, is identified with modern technology, with its claim to absoluteness through “its irresistible transformation of everything into an object for a subject” (HCE, 62-63). When the subject becomes aware of itself in the act of beholding the object, when it grasps the object qua object (or objectivity per se), consciousness becomes ontological (HCE, 106-108). The ontic, natural consciousness is itself pre-ontological because it contains the conditions for objectivity implicitly in its knowledge.

From these definitions emerges the basic concept of the historicity of being and of thought as understood by both Heidegger and Hegel, for it follows that as the ontic changes, so does the ontological (HCE, 106). This is the basic principle of change in the movement of the Phenomenology: as thinking gradually becomes aware of its basis, the emergence of the basis alters the basis itself. Thinking, the ontological, always comes too late — like the owl of Minerva — since the change that thinking itself produces remains still to be thought. Or in Heidegger’s terms, thinking is measured by the as yet unthought and even unthinkable (see WM, 268).

In this essay Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel’s dialectical movement is closer to the Phenomenology not only in spirit but also in its explicit statement. In contrast to the essays previously discussed, Heidegger here rejects the attempt to explain dialectic in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (HCE, 117). He likewise rejects discussion of whether dialectic is merely a method, or whether it describes a real process. He does, however, suggest that dialectic is more than an arbitrary, conceptual schematization into which experience is stuffed and crammed. Rather, Heidegger believes that Hegel in fact truly understands the nature of experience: “Hegel does not conceive experience dialectically; he thinks of dialectic in terms of the nature of experience” (HCE, 119).

Of course, “experience” is a negative concept for both Hegel and Heidegger. It means that a subject stands over against an object in the attempt to obtain knowledge of that object. Both thinkers wish to overcome the subject-object antinomy, and it has been seen that Heidegger interprets Hegel as an idealist who resolves the antinomy in favor of subjectivity, albeit absolute subjectivity. Yet the question must be raised whether Heidegger does justice to Hegel’s own self-understanding in this regard. Hegel himself has as little use for subject-object language as Heidegger and is equally concerned with overcoming the traditional metaphysics of experience usually associated with Kant’s transcendental enterprise. In discussing Kant, Hegel says that the terms “subjective” and “objective” are only “convenient expressions in current use,” and he in fact goes on to argue against the ultimate value of the distinction.²⁶

Hegel does not want his philosophy confused with a transcendental idealism that begins and ends with the truth of the cogito. In fact, recent interpretations²⁷ of the Phenomenology find that Hegel changes his conception of the book in the course of writing it and moves away from the merely epistemological and transcendental concern with experience characterizing the “Introduction” — the only section Heidegger explicates in “Hegel’s Concept of Experience.” Similarly, Heidegger’s Kehre, the break between the earlier and later writings, is said to involve the disavowal of a “transcendental self-interpretation” whereby the question of being depends upon its understanding in Dasein.²⁸ Heidegger certainly shares Hegel’s reservations about transcendental, purely critical philosophy and admits that Hegel’s dialectic is not this kind of thinking (WM, 259).

Is Hegel still caught in subjectivity in that he, as a philosopher, claims insight into the absolute and into the meaning of history? Does he attribute a role to the individual in creating or understanding history that Heidegger would not? Certainly Hegel’s “world-historical individuals” — figures like Napoleon — are essential to the movement of history. As is often pointed out, however, although their willing may be constitutive of what happens, history itself does not develop as they will it.

Perhaps the individual poet for Heidegger has more constitutive force than Hegel’s historical agents. Yet it is always difficult to identify in the ordinary, historical world — in the ontic realm — particular individuals or occurrences that could satisfy Heidegger’s ontological claim that a totally new world is created through poetry. This difficulty is not merely ontic but also philosophical, in that Heidegger cannot specify how a true manifestation of being could ever be recognized as such. His subjunctive tone in this regard makes clear that we must wait not only to find out the truth of Hegel’s claim about the death of art but also to find out whether Heidegger’s pathway is the right one. In fact, one wonders whether the wait for Heidegger’s Geviert is not an indefinite one. Does not such a postulation of the “end of history” function merely as a regulative principle, one that serves as a critical measure for the present but is itself not actually capable of instantiation?²⁹

Heidegger would not be content with this construal of his project as mainly critical and regulative. Yet this conclusion is forced on one insofar as Heidegger appears to have given thinking an impossible task. How could rational thinking with constitutive ambitions overcome the claims that poetry is the founding force of history and that the mystery of being has been lost precisely through “Hegelian” obsessions with reason, method, and scientific completeness? On the other hand, if thinking does at least have real critical force, then its pathway becomes worthy of being explored.

By a curious twist it appears that Heidegger’s critique of Hegel has the consequence that what must be criticized most is not Hegel’s thought but the interpretation of it that also misleads Heidegger. Or at least Heidegger’s thinking confrontation with Hegel must itself be rethought. Hegel’s famous owl of Minerva passage does not show the self-certain, self-satisfied thinker of the absolute Heidegger often portrays. Rather, it expresses an attitude shared with Heidegger toward the relation of philosophy and history — a mood of resignation, indicating a desire for a critical, realistic grasp of the present accompanied at the same time by a refusal to project in detail a more ideal state of affairs in the future. Both thinkers find themselves in the twilight of an age, painting the “grey in grey” that comes too late. Even Heidegger is unwilling to claim that the owl of Minerva has yet been superseded by a new poet.

Barnard College

Columbia University

NOTES

1 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik; quoted by Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 80.

2 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 72.

3 Heidegger, Erläuterung zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971), p. 43; quoted by Karsten Harries, “Das befreite Nichts,” in Durchblicke: Festschrift für Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970), pp. 51-52.

4 For a particularly enlightening discussion of this point, see Werner Marx, “The World in Another Beginning: Poetic Dwelling and the Role of the Poet,” in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 235-59, esp. p. 257.

5 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 12-13.

6 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 78.

7 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963), pp. 326-28 and 380-81. Although the English translation of Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) will be used, pages will be cited from SZ since the translators give the German pagination in the margins.

8 SZ, pp. 396-97; for further discussion see my article “History, Historicity, and Historiography in Being and Time,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 329-53.

9 See Harries, “Das befreite Nichts”; also his book The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968).

10 See H.-G. Gadamer, Hegels Dialektik: Fünf hermeneutische Studien (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1971), p. 84.

11 Karsten Harries, “Hegel on the Future of Art,” The Review of Metaphysics, 27 (1974), 677-96.

12 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 76; the German words have been added to the translation.

13 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 77.

14 Heidegger, “Hegel und die Griechen,” reprinted in Heidegger’s Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), pp. 255-72; cited as: WM (translations are my own). “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); cited as: ID.

15 See Hofstadter’s translation, pp. 82-87; for the German see the Reclam edition (Stuttgart: 1960) containing an introduction by H.-G. Gadamer.

16 Hegel’s actual feelings about the Greeks, however, are much more rich and ambiguous than this formulation suggests. Clearly the discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology shows that the Greek conception of existence contained its own antitheses in ways still problematic for modern moral and social life.

17 Heidegger himself should not object, of course, if a similar procedure is used to criticize his own readings (although the insistence of his being only “on the way toward” something may remove the very basis for criticism, or even for comprehension).

18 Heidegger remarks in his commentary on the line of poetry “Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht” that the origin of the thing to be named is obscure — it is certainly not created by the poet in any case, but is granted to him. (See Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 226, or Joan Stambaugh’s translation in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), pp. 145-46.) Heidegger appears to have overlooked a problem with this account of poetic inspiration that, however, Werner Marx has discovered: “If the works of the poets find access to Saying — that is, to Saying in the form it has in withdrawal — and if they are to transform it into an essence of Saying which can be called ‘the poetic,’ then the power of affecting the granting nonhuman sphere would be attributed to the human sphere of the poem after all, which was itself granted as such by Saying: the power of affecting the ‘granting’ sphere would be attributed to the ‘granted’ sphere” (p. 248).

19 See WM, 270; compare SZ, 213-14.

20 See Hegels Dialektik, p. 91.

21 Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 85; compare the translator’s note on “overcoming,” p. 84.

22 See Walter Kaufmann’s criticisms of this misleading and overly systematic interpretation of Hegel in Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1965), p. 154.

23 Hegels Dialektik, pp. 91-92.

24 Hegels Dialektik, p. 91.

25 Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); cited as: HCE.

26 Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Section 48, p. 68.

27 Hans Friedrich Fulda, Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1965), and O. Pöggeler, “Die Komposition der Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in Hegel-Studien, Beiheft 3 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966), 27-74. But Werner Marx, in his book Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), remarks in his discussion of this recent literature that “it was questioned even by the older Hegelian scholars whether Hegel had adhered to this intention, or whether — as I.H. Fichte thought — the First Part had been composed from the standpoint of a transcendental philosophy, while the Second Part — as Haym saw it — had been conceived in terms of a philosophy of history and ‘Realphilosophie’ ” (pp. x-xi).

28 Gadamer (Hegels Dialektik, p. 86) finds this Kehre similar to Hegel’s movement beyond subjective spirit, beyond consciousness and self-consciousness.

29 Kant’s reflections on history, and his postulation of the perfect constitution toward the achievement of which history necessarily progresses, generate such regulative principles. The end or goal is something for which we can hope, but not something we can know. See, for instance, “An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” in Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1963), p. 150.