The Logos of Being: Attention as Worship in Heidegger’s Ontochronology

Being is the real and only subject of philosophy.

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1926 

The Logos of Being: Attention as Worship in Heidegger’s Ontochronology

While Heidegger saw himself as an Ontologist, as the bulk of his work is on the nature of Being, he has been most influential in the 21st century in the line of existentialists and phenomenologists. He is a brackish admixture of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the Scholastics. He pivots around the Kierkegaardian "Thrownness", and like Kierkegaard, sees religion through a Phenomenological and Existential lens rather than Ideology or as external presuppositional truth. At the same time, he throws out the "genealogy of morals" and advocates for finding and eliminating any metaphysical remnant of Christian metaphysics in Nietzschean mimicry. Heidegger echoes Nietzsche that human philosophy has been all downhill since the pre-Socratics, and like Nietzsche, disregards all of Continental Philosophy, but necessarily binds his philosophic project within the amalgamations and antinomies of the continentals. There has been little to no progress in the field of philosophy since the time of Aristotle to him. Heidegger rejects both Metaphysics and Anti-Metaphysics, and wants to drive us towards a primordial state, like Nietzsche, but not towards a super-human state of raw creative power, but towards pre-Socratic innocence and engagement with the only essential question, the question of Being. He wants humanity to return to the ancient modes of thinking, which lay at the bedrock of civilization, a return to a sort of de-mythologized garden of Eden. He is the enigmatic result of Nihilism clashing with Existentialism; Anti-Metaphysics seeking purpose within Metaphysics. There are few answers in Heidegger, which is rather the point, but there are a handful of good questions.

Heidegger personifies Parmenides' belief that Ontology is the foundation of human knowledge, and all philosophy must originate from and return to the question of Being. Ontology is the only question that gives life meaning. In his 1919, Introduction to Philosophy he writes:

prehistoric understanding of being holds out a light to us, to be able to encounter being. We understand being and understand it in advance.

Heidegger started out life as a Jesuit seminarian, and this intellectual rigidity follows his entire philosophic project. In line with Jesuit philosophy, he speaks in absolutes and when he pursues a line of thought, he takes it to its furthest possible apotheosis. While he abandoned transcendental belief, even to the point of joining the militant atheist Nazi movement, this absolute pursuit of the essence of truth resounds throughout every word of his works. Religion, Heidegger mimics Kierkegaard in opposition to Nietzsche, is the only thing that can answer what Humanness is, as it is not dogmatic presuppositionalism, but is the Phenomenology of Existential dread. Heidegger is important to understand the secular Existentialists who developed similar solipsistic systems (Sartre, Camus) and late 20th century Protestant systematic theologians developing ever-new systems of though (Paul Tillich & co.). His engagement with the works of Aristotle, particularly the concept of 'physis,' and his interpretation of Kant's 'transcendental schema' played a significant role in his thought. His dialogue with Edmund Husserl's phenomenology was crucial, as evidenced by his assertion: "Phenomenology, this means to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself" (Introduction to Metaphysics). His contemporaries, such as Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre, were significantly influenced by Heidegger's existential analysis as was the later Albert Camus and Marcel Proust. Their reading of Heidegger gave an intellectual foundation to their subjectivism and moral relativity. Sartre's existentialism, for instance, drew heavily from Heidegger's concept of 'being-in-the-world.'

Carl Jung and Heidegger never met or engaged with each others' works (that we have a record of) but they would have agreed on the importance of analyzing Mystical and Moral-Theological writings to understand Psychology. Both were heavily fixated on the Phenomenology of the Self- Jung published his "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self", and Heidegger published a paper around that time titled "The Phenomenology of the Self". Metaphors and narratives are also not thrown out the window by Heidegger, in opposition to the English Positivists. Rather, as Jung says, "Myth is not fiction", but participation in Myth is instrumental in the creation of a value-laden worldview. Both Jung, Freud and Heidegger follow in Schopenhauer's footsteps with the understanding of Being as subconscious. The "constellation" or collection of human psychic States, which Jung calls the collective unconscious, Freud the subconscious, is to Heidegger the content of Dasein. Dasein centralizes the individual in existential analysis. Dasein is not just any being but a being who is aware of and questions its own existence. This self-referential nature of Dasein reflects Kierkegaard’s idea of the individual who is constantly engaged in the process of becoming, striving to realize its potential in the face of existential realities.

Heidegger makes a virtue out of uncertainty and is very forthright with the fact that he has no answers and his philosophy is always underway. He is a positivist in that he rejects the religious or mythological answers to the "thrownness" of human existence, but as an existentialist he condemns the positivist view that questions of Being should not or cannot be asked, as Nietzsche asserted. Heidegger moves in the opposite direction of the English three great English Empiricists, back to an obscure philosophy of negation. Heidegger is Nietzschean in his recognition that "god is dead", in other words that mankind will no longer accept mythological accounts of reality, but this reality could mean the death of humanity- for if the human experience is merely matter experiencing itself ("How does and Atom Think?" as Voltaire said), how can the Object exist in any real sense and know the nature of the Object?

Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, based on the hermeneutics of existence, which, as the analytics of existence, has fixed the end of the thread of all philosophical questioning at the point from which it springs and to which it returns

In Being and Time, he asks a question 526 times throughout the whole document. To Heidegger, Philosophy is a process, and can never be a complete process or provide any complete answer to the questions of life. Heidegger's Obscurity and enigmatic language is purposeful, for this is how Heidegger sees the human experience; darkly without seeing clearly even the possibility of a solution to Thrownness. He makes it clear in his dialectics on the antinomy of Being and Non-Being that Nothing is not a negation, it's the source of negation. Since there is no source of reality apart from the self, one can easily see how Heideggerian Ontology subjects itself to the accusation of Solipsism.

Heidegger himself admits that he, like all modern philosophy, is a student of Descartes and Kant, who builds the binary system of antinomies upon which all modern philosophy rests. Heidegger's emphasis on the temporal and finite nature of human life challenged the prevailing Cartesian and Husserlian emphasis on the detached, objective observer. Humean positivism and the resulting empiricism, which drives one out of obscurity and into clear and technical rationality, as Heidegger argues, erases the more existentially important questions of Being and the source of the desire for truth in the first place. Even Nietzsche, in his more existentialist and phenomenological moments admits this in The Joyful Science:

“Will to truth" might be a hidden Will to Death… In this way the question: why science? leads back to the moral problem-what is the use of morality at all, if life, nature, history are "immoral"?... we recognize that we godless and anti-metaphysicians, also still take our fire from the fire kindled by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato's faith that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But how, if this just becomes more and more implausible, if nothing more proves to be divine, except error, blindness, lies, - if God himself proves to be our longest lie?

In keeping with the Continentals, Heidegger insist on understanding Being as dynamically intertwined with the experience of the individual, hence his legacy as an existentialist. Being cannot be known through formal or abstract categories but must be understood by Phenomena. His great work Being and Time is an existential analysis and re-interpretation of the continental concept of Dasein, particularly through a Phenomenological view of Time. Even death itself is re-understood as a living Phenomena. He is the greatest of the modern pre-socratics, an admixture of Nietzschean anti-metaphysics, Heraclitean metaphysics and Kierkegaard Existentialism. He denies that the Telos of the Socratic command to know thyself is possible, but that Authenticity is the purpose of human striving. He rejects the logical positivism of the English Empiricists in the vein of Neo-Kantianism, but also rejects the possibility of a coherent and universal metaphysical system, as the Continentals tried to establish. The basic element of your consciousness is Care (Sorge)- manifested through attention. Maybe the universe is agnostic to our existence, but our existence is not agnostic at all.

Duns Scotus meets Parmenides

On the whole, philosophy of all times may be regarded as swinging back and forth, like a pendulum, between rationalism and illuminism, i.e. between the use of the objective and the subjective source of knowledge.

Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena 

Martin Heidegger's dissertation on Duns Scotus, entitled "Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning" (original German: "Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus"), was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation in 1915. . This work is significant because it represents an early foray into Heidegger's lifelong philosophical concerns, particularly the question of being in the guise of the problem of categories and the question of language in the guise of the doctrine of meaning. Duns Scotus, a medieval scholastic philosopher, developed a metaphysical framework characterized by a nuanced understanding of being, individuation and universals. His approach is marked by a distinctive emphasis on the principle of 'haecceity' or 'thisness', which holds that individual entities possess a unique, unrepeatable essence that distinguishes them from other entities. This principle implies a metaphysical structure in which individuality and particularity play a central role, suggesting a universe teeming with distinct, individual beings, each with its own essence. Scotus' metaphysics therefore navigates a complex terrain of multiplicity and distinction, where the existence of individual entities and their unique characteristics are paramount. Despite the depth of Scotus, Heidegger still believes that Philosophy really has not progressed further than the Pre-Socratic enigmatic and predicate-less musings on being.

Heidegger focuses on the problem of categories in relation to modern logic, and highlights Duns Scotus' role in developing this theory, noting his significance in the history of scholasticism. Remember, Heidegger in his youth started out as a Jesuit Seminarian before abandoning religion, establishing a rigorous Scholastic Medieval adherence to Aristotelian logic which we see here in his Ph.D. Thesis and throughout his entire Ontological-Phenomenological philosophic project. He also draws connections between Scotus' theory of categories and Husserl's "theory of forms of meanings", where we can see the influence of his academic advisors' Phenomenology on his theory of meaning.

He begins his thesis with an examination of Duns Scotus' "Grammatica Speculative". The Grammatica Speculativa is a work of medieval grammar now known to have been written by Thomas of Erfurt. He elaborates on the categorical theory beyond Duns Scotus, moving beyond the Aristotelian categories to a broader categorization of realms of reality, with the aim to synthesize scattered elements into a coherent Gestalt (Whole). He adopts a historical-philosophical approach, meticulously analyzing and interpreting Duns Scotus' theories in the context of both medieval scholasticism and modern philosophical thought. He stresses the need to go beyond a purely historical analysis and to engage with the systematic philosophical content inherent in Scotus' work. He believes strongly in the integration of historical context with philosophical interpretation to fully grasp the theory of meaning, which is a belief that leads him to structure all of his works in a similar fashion- always starting with a historical-philosophical approach and then moving in word. Heidegger adopts a historical-philosophical approach, meticulously analyzing and interpreting Duns Scotus' theories in the context of both medieval scholasticism and modern philosophical thought. He stresses the need to go beyond a purely historical analysis and to engage with the systematic philosophical content inherent in Scotus' work. Here Heidegger places a strong emphasis on categorization, not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a critical tool for understanding the structure of reality and knowledge. The analysis delves into the nuances of Scotus' categories, exploring their implications for the conceptualization of reality and the formation of meaning. This exploration is grounded in a clear understanding of the historical development of these ideas, providing a rich context for their appreciation and critique. History itself is only context; it does not contain the core questions, and we quickly move from being to Being; from externality to internality.

Here Heidegger places a strong emphasis on categorization, not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a critical tool for understanding the structure of reality and knowledge. The analysis delves into the nuances of Scotus' categories, exploring their implications for the conceptualization of reality and the formation of meaning. This exploration is grounded in a clear understanding of the historical development of these ideas, providing a rich context for their appreciation and critique. Heidegger examines concepts like "unum" (unity), "multum" (multiplicity), and their relationship between these concepts, focusing on the idea of contrariety as a fundamental aspect of object thinking. The concept of modi significandi (modes of signifying), which are intentional acts of consciousness determined by certain material aspects and is crucial in Scotus' Epistemology for understanding the doctrine of the categories of meaning. Scotus acknowledges the limitation in recognizing the individual through general concepts, pointing out that the individual contains more than what the lowest concept of species can capture. He calls this "Ungaspable Individuality" This leads to the conclusion that individuality remains an unspeakable residue, only partially approachable but never fully exhausted. The medieval mindset is described as being in constant metaphysical tension, with a worldview deeply bound to transcendental principles and the recognition of the supersensible.

The relationship between the metaphysics of Duns Scotus and Parmenides could only be drawn by a metaphysical system as enigmatic and complex as Heidegger's Ontology. Parmenides, a pre-Socratic philosopher Heidegger elevates to a position higher than Plato or Aristotle, presents an ontology of being that is strikingly in its simplicity and absoluteness. Parmenides' philosophy is based on the idea that reality is one, unchanging and indivisible, in contrast to Heraclitus. He posits that change, multiplicity and even emptiness are illusory, arising from the limitations of human perception. In his famous poem which Heidegger constantly quotes throughout his life, Parmenides draws a sharp distinction between the way of truth, which acknowledges the unchanging, eternal nature of being, and the way of opinion, which is caught up in the sensory illusions of change and diversity. Parmenides' ontology thus revolves around the notion of a singular, unchanging reality, negating plurality and change as mere appearances rather than true aspects of being.

Heidegger credits Parmenides with first opening up the question of Being, but sees subsequent philosophers as having obscured this question - the question on which all knowledge rests. He interprets Parmenides' famous dictum "For the same is for thinking and for being" as a profound statement about the inseparability of being and thinking. Heidegger sees in Parmenides an early recognition of the primacy of the question of being, a question that Heidegger believes has been neglected in Western philosophy. Parmenides' assertion of the unity of Being (what is) and thinking (the act of conceptualizing or understanding what is) resonates deeply with Heidegger's own philosophical concerns. Heidegger interprets this not just as a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality, but as an ontological insight into how human beings relate to and understand their existence and the world around them. Heidegger's concept of "ontological difference" - the distinction between "Being" and "Being" - is influenced by his reading of the Parmenides. Heidegger argues that the failure to recognize this difference has led to a "forgetting of being" throughout the history of philosophy. He interprets Parmenides as someone who glimpsed this difference, but whose message was subsequently lost or misinterpreted.

Whereas Duns Scotus embraces a universe of plurality and individual essences, Parmenides advocates a monistic view of existence in which change and diversity are mere illusions. Scotus' metaphysics acknowledges and delves into the complexity and diversity of the actual world, focusing on the particulars that distinguish entities. Parmenides, on the other hand, elevates the abstract, unchanging concept of Being above the sensory world of change and plurality, arguing for a reality that is fundamentally singular and static. Scotus, within the medieval Christian framework, sought to reconcile faith with a detailed and nuanced understanding of the natural world, leading to a metaphysics that acknowledged the richness and diversity of creation. Parmenides, rooted in the pre-Socratic tradition, was driven by a rationalist quest for the ultimate nature of reality, leading to an ontological perspective that transcended sensory experience and posited a unified, unchanging essence of all things.

All Philosophy concerns itself with Being, Heidegger argues, and the explicit recognition of this began with Parmenides. Core to this discourse is an examination of the tension between Unverborgenheit and Verborgenheit, which is central to the Greek understanding of truth/ Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) and reality. In his book on Parmenides, Heidegger emphasized the distinction between aletheia as Unverborgenheit and the common, perhaps superficial, perception of truth in the context of veritas. This distinction is not merely semantic, but underscores a profound shift in the philosophical understanding of truth from the Greek to the Roman and then the modern interpretation. The Greek interpretation of aletheia as unveiling is not merely the absence of falsehood or concealment, but a more fundamental state of being revealed or unveiled. This state is intrinsically linked to the Greek conceptualization of reality and being, where truth is not merely a property of statements or propositions, but a fundamental aspect of existence and reality itself.

Once again he first approaches the topic as Nietzsche would; a historical-philosophical approach, taking us through the historical transformation of the concept of ἀλήθεια, tracing its journey through various philosophical epochs, including its encounters with Roman thought and its development in the context of Western philosophy. The focus on Aletheia in the context of the work of Parmenides reveals a meticulous examination of how this concept is central to understanding the nature of early Greek philosophy, particularly in its contrast with later philosophical developments.

The discussion of the goddess "truth" in Parmenides' work is an engagement with the metaphysical and epistemological dimensions of truth as it was understood in early Greek philosophy. This is not just about understanding a philosophical term, but about appreciating a worldview in which truth, reality, and existence are deeply intertwined. Heidegger sees the Western Philosophic Tradition of Being as useless, not because the Metaphysical realm does not exist as Nietzsche believed, but because it has obscured and moved away from this core question of Being:

Philosophy has always combined truth with being. Parmenides' first discovery of the being of the existent 'identifies' being with the perceptive understanding of being: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι. In his outline of the history of the discovery of ἀρχαί, Aristotle emphasizes that the philosophers before him, led by 'the things themselves', were compelled to question further: αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα ἠνάγκασεν αὐτοὺς καὶ συνήγαγε ζητεῖν.

The Shadow of the Anti-Metaphyician

Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi regime renders his legacy marred at best, and is a significant ongoing topic as more research continues to reveal previously unknown facts. Modern intellectuals have a wide range of opinions on how much guilt Heidegger shares for not seeing the writing on the wall.

Heidegger's teacher Edmund Husserl, to whom his first great work Being and Time is dedicated, was a Jew. When he was forced out of his position at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger publicly disassociated himself with him and quietly his chair. In several lectures at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger echoed Nazi propaganda on the purity of German social life. He was appointed as head of the Rectorship of the Third Reich, the most esteemed position in German Intelligentsia. Certainly, there is an element of the "Phenomenology of Careerism" in his engagement with the Nazis. Nietzsche criticized Hegel's Philosophy of Right (his theories of the state) as being rooted in self-interest, and clearly this happened with Heidegger. The Nazi party raised Heidegger to the position of the greatest intellectual in Germany, and this clearly blinded him. Heidegger subsequently failed to fully and explicitly denounce the Nazi party. Although he never participated in any of the horrors, spending much of the war years in a library, he failed to recognize the signs and while he did resign from his post and withdraw from the Nazi party after a year, this moral failure throws a deep shadow over all of his philosophy. And to add insult to injury, later in his life he advocated for Socialism and Communism, like all former Nazis did, despite knowing about the genocides of Lenin and Stalin.

Heidegger's Ontological-Existentialist Philosophy is passionately individualistic, which is why his involvement with the Nazis is so surprising. Heidegger's concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity bear the imprints of Kierkegaard's exploration of the authentic self- a Socratic command which is deeply anti-collectivist. For Kierkegaard, authentic existence involves a passionate, subjective engagement with one's own existence, a theme that Heidegger develops further. In Heidegger’s analysis, Dasein's authentic mode of being involves recognizing and embracing its finitude and potentiality-for-being, resonant with Kierkegaard's notion of the individual confronting the existential realities of life. So how does such a robust intellectual with an Existentialist bent, clinging to a worldview which violently rejects Collectivism, Fascism, and type of groupthink, end up becoming entwined with the Nazis? How does such a deep and individualistic thinker succumb to the Zeitgeist?

Heidegger's treatment of Nietzsche reveals a deeper answer than mere self-interest. As a Nietzschean, Heidegger sought a primordial return to a state of pure creative will and to be free of the tyranny of the genealogy of Christian morals. From his Nietzschean foxhole, the Nazis looked like the Super-men that would bring about this shift. Across his career, Heidegger engaged Nietzsche's works more than any other modern philosopher, writing some of the most authoritative tomes on Nietzsche and his work. Heidegger was enchanted by Zarathustra, the man beyond Good and Evil, the man who has transcended humanness. Heidegger, likewise, saw the Catholicism of his youth as a disease, and the movement towards trans-humanism as the medicine. In his early work on Duns Scotus, he praises Nietzsche: 

Nietzsche, in his relentlessly harsh way of thinking and vivid ability to depict, summed up this determination of all philosophy from the subject in the well-known formula of the "drive that philosophizes". 

Nietzsche was the perfect inverse of Kierkegaard, who literally believed himself to be the Anti-Christ, and who advocated for "eradicating millions of failures" in the goal of Trans-Humanism. Perhaps we should disregard Nietzsche's perspectives on morality, considering his pro-genocide positions. But with Heidegger, there is no attempt at moral philosophy, for herd morality asserts trans-personal absolutes, and "good" and "evil" are Christian beliefs that must be eliminated. Clearly, despite Heidegger's condemnation of Christianity as viewing himself, like Nietzsche, as it's enemy, he kept the Phenomenological structure and only substituted the contents. Being sounds an awful lot like de-personallized Theism, and "thrownness" a de-mythologized Fall of Mankind. In his 1929 "What is Metaphysics?", he admits that Ontology has a Theological nature, but argues that it has a trans-religious nature that preceded this facade: "The theological character of ontology is not based on the fact that the Greek metaphysics was later taken up by the ecclesiastical theology of Christianity and was transformed by it.". Still, this de-peronalization and de-divinization of Christian Phenomenological concepts is in keeping with Nietzsche and the other Nazi philosophers, but with Heidegger, he should have known better. He partly understood that there is nothing new under the son, but his famous dictum:

You can drive nature out with a broom, but she will always come rushing back in.

...rings true, but too late from him. Heidegger tried to drive Religion out with a broom, but it came back with a new face. Jung was writing at the same time as Heidegger about the inevitability of Politics becoming infused with religious energy without active participation in religious rites:

What psychologists call psychic identity, or "mystical participation," has been stripped from our world. But it is exactly this halo of unconscious associations that gives a colorful and fantastic aspect to the world…yet the emotions that affect us are just the same. In fact, the terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that "primitive" people attribute to demons.... [our object of veneration] has changed its name and nature for the worse... [the modern man's] gods and demons have not disappeared at all: they merely have new names.

Heidegger saw Nietzsche as a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, marking the end of Continental Metaphysics. Heidegger's engagement with Nietzsche was not merely a scholarly examination but a profound confrontation with the ideas that Nietzsche put forth, particularly the proclamation of the "death of God" and the concept of the "will to power." Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche's philosophy as the ultimate expression of the metaphysical tradition, a tradition that Heidegger himself sought to question and move beyond. In his lectures and writings, Heidegger extensively discussed Nietzsche's works, perceiving Nietzsche's thought as a critical juncture in the history of Western philosophy. Heidegger's four-volume work, "Nietzsche," published posthumously, reflects his intensive engagement with Nietzschean thought. In these texts, Heidegger critiques Nietzsche's metaphysical stance, particularly his understanding of truth, values, and the nature of being. Heidegger argued that Nietzsche, despite his radical critique of traditional values and metaphysics, remained within the confines of metaphysical thinking. Heidegger saw Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' and 'will to power' as extensions of metaphysics rather than a departure from it.

Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche played a crucial role in his development of fundamental ontology and the critique of modern technology. Heidegger believed that Nietzsche's insights into the nature of power, nihilism, and the Super-Men were essential in understanding the trajectory of Western civilization and its technological domination. For Heidegger, Nietzsche's philosophy illuminated the crisis of modernity - a crisis rooted in the forgetfulness of being and the dominance of a technological worldview. Heidegger's later work, particularly his critique of technology and his concept of the 'turning' (Kehre), was deeply influenced by his engagement with Nietzsche. He writes in his Forward to "What is Metaphysics?": 

Nietzsche, in whose light and shadow every contemporary thinks and writes with his "for him" or "against him", heard a command which demands a preparation of man for the assumption of an earth rule. He saw and understood the burning struggle for dominion. It is not a war, but the Πόλεμος, which makes gods and men, free and servants, appear in their respective essence, and brings up a separation of the sovereign. Compared with it, world wars remain superficial to the question of being . They are able to decide less and less, the more technically they equip themselves.

Being and Time is an important text in the field of Ontology, but serves also as a clear historical example of the deliberate reinterpretation of Hegelian philosophy to support National-Socialist ideology ('correcting Hegel in the Spirit of Hegel', as Zizek puts it). The whole of German Idealism is summarized, analyzed, and pilfered for its usefulness to the cause of the ultimate question of Being. Yet he still maintains a Hegelian basis of his metaphysical models, despite trying to re-engineer the whole field 'from the roots up'. Hegel wrote “Particularization of the absolute, universal being is the profound task of Metaphysics” (Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, introduction) and Heidegger maintains this tension: "Since the meaning and the concept "Being" have the highest universality, meta-physics, as "physics", cannot rise any higher to define them more precisely. Thus, it has only one way left: away from the universal, to the particular beings". (Question three, the Question of the Essence of Being). Within this antinomy, Heidegger argues that Being is authentic when it lives in relation to its temporality, which in the human context means Morality. The 'Thrownness' of the human ontological condition necessitates that Dasein has no meaning outside of its relation to temporality and language.

At Points, Heidegger reads like a summary of BG&E, with extensive quotations from across the Nietzschean corpus. He re-tools the Will-to-Power into a "Will-to-Know" and has Schopenhauerian themes when speaking about the logos of life -"the fundamental tendency of life is more life". Heidegger calls Christian philosophizing "a round square and a misunderstanding" for the exact same anti-platonic reasons Nietzsche does- that Christian Theology obscures "greatness" and authentic, unrestrained creative power. Heidegger notes he has to restrain himself from "blind hero worship" of Nietzsche but is not able to identify any error on Nietzsche's part. Take this passage for instance, Heidegger here somehow sounds more like Nietzsche than Nietzsche ever did:

When the creators have disappeared from the people, when they are barely tolerated as irrelevant curiosities, as ornaments, as eccentrics alien to life, when authentic struggle ceases and shifts into the merely polemical, into the intrigues and machinations of human beings within the present-at-hand, then the decline has already begun. For even when an age still tries just to uphold the inherited level and dignity of its Dasein, the level already sinks. It can be upheld only insofar as at all times it is creatively transcended.

Unlike the de-mysticized Marxist path of Hegelian Progressivism, Heidegger does keep super-rational elements and defends them. He specifically attacks Marxism on this front, in Hegelian mimicry:

Spirit, thus falsified as intelligence, is thereby reduced to the role of a tool in the service of something else, a tool whose handling can be taught and learned...the spirit of intelligence becomes the powerless superstructure to something else, which because it is spirit-less or even hostile to spirit, counts as authentic reality. If one understands spirit as intelligence, as Marxism in its most extreme form has done... this ordering becomes untrue... as genuineness and ingenuity of the understanding are grounded in spirit... Spirit is what sustains and rules, the first and the last, not merely indispensable third element

But this 'Geist'/ Spiritual world is understood by Heidegger not as Hegel did within a Judeo-Christian framework, but through Nietzschean primordial polytheism- specifically earth-worship as the Omnipotent deity which must be worshiped above all others.

He saw the National-Socialist movement as maintaining the potential to restore an ancient, illuminating struggle to mankind that could override the Platonic foundations of the west hitherto. As time went on, he became more openly critical as the Nazi party saw Race as the end-in-itself and not a return to authentic, temporally cognizant culture. Heidegger demands that Being be understood in the world-historical context. The human-historical nature of Dasein is critical to restoring and fixing the metaphysics of the western world. He takes this Hegelian idea in a terrifying direction and justifies Fascism. Here he is in lock-step with the fear-mongering of the Nazi regime about the imminent demise of Europe, the West, and the whole of Humanity if the 'Geist' of the world is not restored to an authentic will-to-power. But where he turns against the Third Reich is his criticism of how the State is aiding the vaporization of authentic Being by institutionalizing culture, which is one of the few times he turns against Hegel.

Heidegger chose the wrong option in Either/ Or when he demythologized Kierkegaard. Both Heidegger and Kierkegaard position the subjective experience of the individual as the foundational aspect of understanding existence. For Kierkegaard, this subjectivity is where truth and authenticity reside; for Heidegger, it is the lens through which the nature of Being can be interrogated. The individual's experience of anxiety, despair, joy, and hope becomes the crucible for existential and ontological understanding. Heidegger adopts this notion, placing the individual's being-in-the-world (Dasein) at the center of his ontological exploration. Heidegger's Dasein, an entity for whom being is a question, reflects Kierkegaard’s view of the individual confronted with the profound responsibility and anxiety of choice and existence. For Kierkegaard, anxiety (or 'dread') is a critical component of individual existence, a means through which the self becomes aware of its possibilities and limitations. Heidegger’s interpretation of anxiety (Angst) as a fundamental mood reveals to Dasein the nothingness and the inherent contingency of its existence, propelling it toward an authentic understanding of its being-in-the-world. Kierkegaard's emphasis on the temporal, finite nature of human existence, characterized by moments of decision and existential crises, informs Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as fundamentally temporal, existing in a state of becoming, stretched along the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future. But, Heidegger re-imagines death not as an event or an inevitability, but a function of life itself, a relationship of the individual to Being. For Kierkegaard, truth is phenomenological subjectivity; understanding is not merely a cognitive process but is deeply entwined with the individual's existential state. But for Kierkegaard, "only in relationship with the Other am I free"- the Ontological divide is breached by God as the source of Being and Truth, but for Heidegger there is no god higher than the unknowable Self-Being, so there is no escape from the endless return into the Self.

In his Existentialist bend towards the Delphic Oracle's command, Heidegger disagreed with Nietzsche's dismissal of Metaphysics entirely. Certainly he agreed with Nietzsche that the Metaphysicians of Continental Philosophy were useless, but the quest of introspection he upheld. Despite the influence of Kierkegaard, Heidegger managed to completely disregard morality. With this godless version of Kierkegaard's self-referential authenticity where the individual is fully aware and accepting of one's ontological limits, ethics becomes secondary at best. For the truest path of human life is merely authenticity, then ethical moral behavior becomes a footnote to manifesting Greatness in Nietzschean terms, or authenticity of being, in Kierkegaardian terms, which then sweeps aside the question of good and evil with callousness. Voltaire, in his Treatise on Tolerance, predicts men like Nietzsche and Heidegger:

Such is the weakness of the human race, and such is its perversity, that it is undoubtedly better for it to be subjugated by all possible superstitions, provided they are not deadly, than to live without religion. Man has always needed a brake; and although it was ridiculous to sacrifice to the Fauns, the Sylvans, and the Naiads, it was much more reasonable and useful to adore these fantastic images of the Divinity, than to indulge in atheism. An atheist who would be a reasoner, violent & powerful, would be a scourge as fatal as  bloodthirsty superstitions.

Nietzsche defines Nihilism as the process "that the highest values devalue themselves". As such, the essence of nihilism is rooted in Being as Σοφία. Heidegger posits that nihilism, in its positive conception, is the metaphysics of the truth of being as conceptualized in the Will-to-Power. Nietzsche, Heidegger argues, is a critical shift in the understanding of value-setting as an inherent aspect of the will to power and this forms the crux of nihilism. This shift represents a significant metaphysical transition, deeply rooted in the understanding of being, truth, and value as articulated through Nietzsche's philosophical lens. The Nietzschean dictum "God is dead" is interpreted as a theological, seemingly negative formulation of his metaphysical understanding of nihilism. The fundamental notion that the concept of "nihil" (nothing) is central to nihilism, asserting that nihilism denotes a state in which "being" amounts to nothing, not only in isolated instances, but in its totality. He argues that only Nietzsche's metaphysics has truly experienced nihilism, thereby recognizing it as a metaphysical concept. This recognition necessitates a rethinking of Nietzsche's metaphysics, a task that the paper suggests is not yet fully possible with respect to either Nietzsche's work or any metaphysical work that preceded him.

In some of his late works he expands upon the interrelationship between being and truth (ἀλήθεια, alētheia), examining in particular how the notion of truth has been construed and misconstrued throughout the historical development of metaphysics. He continues to challenge the traditional metaphysical stance that positions truth as a static, objective property of propositions within the φύσις (physis), suggesting instead that truth is dynamically intertwined with the unfolding of being itself. As such, the nature of truth cannot be fully grasped by mere propositional correctness; rather, it must be understood as an event in which being reveals itself. He advocates for a return to the question of the nature of being and truth beyond the confines of traditional metaphysical structures. This reorientation seeks to rediscover the primordial roots of philosophical inquiry that have been overshadowed by the historical trajectory of metaphysical thought, particularly the Judeo-Christian moral structures which forbid, among other things, mass-murder for the good of society:

The assertion of "eternal truths", as well as the blending of the phenomenally based "ideality" of existence with an idealized absolute subject, are among the remnants of Christian theology within the philosophical problematic that have not yet been radically exorcised. 

There is no argument that can expiate Heidegger of moral culpability for participation in the Third Reich. Even in his intellectual works as late as the 1960's he continued to expound a fundamentally amoral worldview, even after seeing the bloodshed of the 20th century done in the name of his god: Progress beyond “religious delusions”.

Jung witnessed the horrors of the Third Reich, and spent the rest of his life building a philosophy rooted in absolute morality, while Heidegger doubled down on not merely the subjectivism of human experience, but the Absurdity of the pursuit of true Humanness, and the restoration of the Imago Dei, resorting instead to a modified amoral transhumanism at the enigmatic telos of humankind. Heidegger is a golden example of the chasm between intellectualism and goodness; that the essence of goodness dwells in the uncreated light which bind reality to itself, and not the eternal return of seeking self-knowledge outside of the Archetype of Self-consciousness.

The Absolute Spirit of Hegel in Heidegger: The Owl of Minerva Sets Flight at Dusk

Nietzsche once wrote "The whole of Hegel is a misunderstanding, but an interesting misunderstanding. Likewise Heidegger was enamored by Hegel, although he spent significant time writing against him. Heidegger wrote to Jaspers on June 25, 1929 about his main lecture in the summer semester of 1929: 

At the moment I am reading about Fichte, Hegel, Schelling for the first time - and a world opens up to me again; the old experience that the others cannot read for you. 

Carl Schmitt, a philosopher and prominent intellectual in the Nazi party, wrote that "Hegel died" in 1933 when Hitler took power. Schmitt, who had renounced Catholicism and joining the Atheist-Nazi religion, saw Naziism as a repudiation of Hegelian Theism. Heidegger disagreed and wrote here 

It has been said that Hegel died in 1933; on the contrary: he has only just begun to live. 

For the Anti-Metaphysicians, even Heidegger observed, religion simply takes on a new and self-deceptive face, as Hegel explicitly warned. Heidegger in his early years strove to prove that the National-Socialist party was the manifestation of the perfect state in a Hegelian sense, despite Hegel arguing that a monarchy, not a führer, was the ideal form of government. He criticized liberal democracy and communism because they did not stay true to the depth of a people's “shared heritage”, which he saw as critical for the world-historicity of the individual and culture, but rather were abstract concepts existing above the particulars of a society. After the fall of the Third Reich (he didn't die until 1974), he placed his hope in Communism and Socialism, as these intertwined religions maintain the basic philosophic Hegelian-Feuerbachian Marxist dialectal patterns of Nazism. In other words, they are religious Eschatology.

Hegel situates Greek thought within the overarching narrative of his own philosophical system, exactly as Heidegger does. Central to this discourse is Hegel's conception of the dialectical process, Platonic in origin, which he applies retrospectively to the history of philosophy, asserting a progressive unfolding of mind or spirit toward an ultimate self-realization. This preliminary stage of Philosophy in the Greeks, characterized by Hegel as the stage of the thesis, is contrasted with the antithesis and synthesis that supposedly define later philosophical developments. Heidegger, rather, sees the enigmatic origins of philosophy as not foundational, but more complete than any modern philosophic system. Heidegger wants to return to this primordial meditation of Being, which Heidegger’s dialectics see as merely a stepping stone towards absolute knowledge and absolute Spirit (Being).

Heidegger engages Hegelianism many times throughout his career. His Ph.D. Thesis is headlined with a motto from Hegel and on of his last works is a tome titled “Hegel and the Greeks”. Hegel's specific readings of key Greek philosophical concepts such as Εν (the One), Λόγος (reason), Ίδέα (idea), and Ένέργεια (reality or actus). These terms, central to the philosophies of Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle, respectively, are reinterpreted through Hegel's dialectical-phenomenological lens as he attempts to integrate them into his speculative system. Heidegger challenges the notion that Hegel's speculative dialectic can fully capture the essence of these Greek philosophical concepts, suggesting instead that Hegel's approach may oversimplify or misrepresent the nuanced and sometimes incommensurable nature of ancient Greek thought. This critique extends to a broader interrogation of Hegel's philosophical project, considering the extent to which his system truly captures the spirit and depth of Greek philosophy, or whether it imposes a teleological narrative that distorts the original intent and richness of these ancient philosophical systems.

Hegel, like any philosophical mind, was struck by the contradictions of human thought. It was not he, nor his master Kant, who invented the antinomies as we know them now, but they brought them out with admirable depth. Ever since the beginning of the Judeo-Platonic continuum, philosophers have struggled in vain to move from the real to the ideal, from the finite to the infinite. To Hegel, this connection could not be found under the rule of ancient logic, because there is a contradiction between the ideal and the real. In the same way, all the Newton and the Physicists sought the passage from thought to being, from subject to object, and they have not been able to find it. Instead of pausing or looking for a roundabout way around the obstacle, we had to resolutely go over it, Hegel resolved. Matter and spirit, subject and object, finite and infinite, are contradictory, that is true; but at the same time they are identical. All Being is both material and spiritual, finite and infinite, immutable and in motion, mortal and divine. Life is but the struggle and harmony of contradictions. Matter gradually transforms into spirit; the infinite, by its very nature, comes out of itself: it breaks, it contradicts itself, it becomes finite. Eternity becomes time, immensity becomes extension, abstract being becomes concrete, the absolute positive negates itself by determining itself, and this primitive contradiction, far from preventing creation, is its true motor. It is in order to escape from the contradiction which is at its core that being begins to move towards reconciling the rebellious elements of its essence. Contradiction and identity, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, this is the law of creation, this is the eternal and universal rhythm of the idea.

Similarly, if you put limits on the universe, Descartes will tell you that you are enclosing the work of God in a sphere; but if, on the faith of Pascal, you venture to conceive of the universe as an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, you will be accused of rashness and contradiction. What can I say about the antinomy of spirit and matter? If God is spirit, how did He create matter? If He is material, how did He make spirit? And the antinomy of providence and free will? If God acts on the world, how does he not do everything? and if man does something, is not Providence omnipotent? The list of antinomies would certainly be long, and I do not wish to exhaust it; but I will mention one which perhaps contains them all: it is the opposition of the finite and the infinite. If there is a God, that God is the infinite, unlimited, perfect Being; He is all thought and all action. How then is there room for anything else? The infinite, by its very perfection, cannot escape from itself. If it cannot come out of itself, then creation is impossible and the finite is only an illusion. If, on the other hand, you posit the world as finite, it is clear that it is not sufficient in itself. The finite, therefore, presupposes the infinite; but at the same time it excludes it, because, being outside it, it limits it, and by limiting it it destroys it.

In his 1951 Hegel and the Greeks, Heidegger muses on the inescapable pull of the Hegelian answer to the antinomies of reality:

One is offended by Hegel's sentence of the completion of philosophy. It is considered presumptuous and is characterized as an error that has long since been refuted by history. Because after the time of Hegel there was and there is still philosophy. The sentence of completion alone does not say that philosophy has come to an end in the sense of a cessation and a termination. Rather, the completion just gives the possibility of manifold forms down to their simplest shapes: the brutal inversion and the massive opposition. Marx and Kierkegaard are the greatest of the Hegelians. They are it against their will.

The completion of philosophy is neither its end, nor does it consist in the separate system of speculative idealism. The completion is only as the whole course of the history of philosophy, in which course the beginning remains as essential as the completion

Hegel was so enchanted by this Kantian answer of the ancient metaphysical contradictions that he undertook the immense task of applying his idea to the whole system of existence. And he was not discouraged for a moment, for twenty years, until the day he died at work. Starting from a first contradiction, that of nothingness and being, he reconciles these two ideas in that of becoming, and then, moving from the abstract to the concrete, from pure logic to physics, to astronomy, to physiology, then from the physical world to man, passing through religion, art, politics, philosophy, Hegel explains the entire history of nature and all of humanity through a system of contradictions, all of which are linked to that of nature. Being and nothingness, the first contradiction, the mother of all others. And in this way he believes he has pacified the human spirit, reconciled all systems, explained all religions, finally founded absolute science and spoken the last word on the Telos of Philosophy. Heidegger believes that Philosophic questions are inherently unsolveable, and any hope of even finding the right question to ask is found not in history, but in the individual's experience of Being.

Heidegger sees this pursuit of the absolute in Hegel as admirable, but like all Western philosophy, obscuring the true question of Being. Heidegger says of Hegel, 'he who does not know these Antinomies is a little philosopher; he who thinks he has the key is not modest; he who thinks that, in the absence of philosophy, the dogmas of this or that sect will make them disappear is under an illusion. Hegel, for trying to resolve the antinomies of reason; that was his right as a great metaphysician. I only say that he did not resolve them, and that even in his error he was much less original than he thought.'

The motto of his Ph.D. Thesis on Duns Scotus is from Hegel:

„ ... in Rücksicht aufs innere Wesen der Philosophie gibt es weder Vorgänger noch Nachgänger"

" ... with regard to the inner essence of philosophy there is neither predecessor nor successor"

Spirit-Time and Being: Hegelian Ontology and the Shadow of Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle! These are not only the two systems, but also the types of two different human natures, which have been more or less hostile to each other under all guises since time immemorial. Such a struggle has been waged in particular throughout the Middle Ages, right up to the present day, and this struggle is the most essential content of Christian church history. There is always talk of Plato and Aristotle, albeit under different names. Enthusiastic, mystical, Platonic natures reveal Christian ideas and the corresponding symbols from the depths of their minds. Practical, organizing, Aristotelian natures build a fixed system, a dogmatics and a cultus from these ideas and symbols. The Church finally embraces both natures, of which the one is mostly entrenched in the clergy and the other in monasticism, but is constantly at war with each other.

Heinrich Heine 

With the aim of forging a new Ontochrony, Heidegger throws out the whole history of Ontology since Heraclitus, including Descartes and Kant, as being faulty due to its conception of time, as all of Continental Philosophy it is rooted in Aristotle’s definition of time, not the Ontologic or Being-centric definition. To Heidegger, the existential-ontological constitution of the wholeness of being is grounded in temporality, and it seeks to explore whether time itself, as the horizon of being. He admits, however, that in Kant, Descartes and Hegel, the Ontology of Temporality does shift throughout their works. Later in Time and Being, he explores the complexity of Hegel’s usage of Time and acknowledges that at points uses a fully embodies concept of Being-Time:

All research - and not least that which revolves around the central question of being - is an Ontic possibility of existence. Its being finds its meaning in temporality… “Time" has long functioned as an ontological or rather Ontic criterion for the naive differentiation of the various regions of existence. One distinguishes a "temporal" being (the processes of nature and the events of history) from an "untimely" being (spatial and numerical relationships).. Aristotle's treatise on time is the first detailed interpretation of this phenomenon that has come down to us. It has essentially determined all subsequent conceptions of time - including Bergson's. From the analysis of Aristotle's concept of time, it also becomes clear that Kant's concept of time moves backwards within the structures emphasized by Aristotle, which means that Kant's basic ontological orientation - despite all the differences of a new question - remains the Greek one. 

He posits that space and time are not merely adjacent concepts but are intrinsically linked, with space being the undifferentiated exteriority of points, which he refers to as "pointuality." Hegel's dialectical approach leads him to view space as the abstract multiplicity of points, each point representing a negation of space yet remaining within it. This conceptual framework allows Hegel to assert that space, when thought dialectically, reveals itself as time, which is quite advanced for his day and proceeds the Space-Time understanding of 20th century Physics. Immanuel Kant was the first intellectual to predict Quantum Entanglement in his early works on Newtonian physics, as well as correctly describing planet-formation before anyone else. Here Hegel likewise makes philosophized predictions about Physical laws, several of which have proven to be mostly true. He argues that space is time's "truth," and through the negation of negation - where points set themselves apart within the spatial continuum - time emerges. This dialectical process culminates in the concept of "becoming looked at," where time is perceived as the continuous transition from being to non-being, represented by the ever-changing 'now.' Hegel's analysis aligns with the traditional, or "vulgar," understanding of time, emphasizing the primacy of the 'now' and its role in the perception and experience of time.

Heidegger argues that Hegel's perspective is grounded in the concept of the spirit as the self-conceiving conceptuality of the self. He views the spirit as absolute negativity, a process of constant self-overcoming and progression. This dynamic process is what Hegel identifies as the essence of the spirit, characterizing its development as a negation of negation. In this framework, time becomes the immediate manifestation of this negation, making the spirit's appearance in time an essential aspect of its realization. He equates the progression of the spirit with historical development, viewing world history as the spirit interpreting itself in time. However, the exact ontological nature of the spirit's "falling into time" and its realization remains somewhat obscure in Hegel's analysis. Despite this, Hegel's work represents an effort to grasp the concretion of the spirit, positing that the spirit doesn't fall into time but exists as the original temporalization of temporality, giving rise to world time and allowing history to emerge as an intra-temporal event. Hegel, then, despite understanding Aion as an Archetype and that God resides in the "Archetype of Time", still doesn't fully understand Time of Being according to Heidegger:

From the primacy of the leveled now, it becomes clear that Hegel's definition of time also follows the course of the vulgar understanding of time and, at the same time, the traditional concept of time. It can be shown that Hegel's concept of time is even drawn directly from Aristotle's "Physics". In the "Jenenser Logik" (cf. the edition by G. Lasson 1923), which was drafted at the time of Hegel's habilitation, the time analysis of the "Encyclopaedia" is already developed in all essential pieces. The section on time (p. 202 ff.) reveals itself, even under the roughest scrutiny, as a paraphrase of Aristotle's treatise on time. Hegel already develops his conception of time within the framework of natural philosophy in the "Jenenser Logik" (p. 186), the first part of which is entitled "System of the Sun" (p. 195). Following the definition of ether and motion, Hegel discusses the concept of time. The analysis of space is still subordinate here. Although the dialectic is already breaking through, it does not yet have the later rigid, schematic form, but still enables a loosened understanding of the phenomena. On the path from Kant to Hegel's fully developed system, Aristotelian ontology and logic once again make a decisive incursion. This has long been known as a fact. But the path, nature and limits of the influence are just as obscure. A concrete comparative philosophical interpretation of Hegel's "Jenensian Logic" and Aristotle's "Physics" and "Metaphysics" will shed new light on the subject.

The Aristotelian categories which Heidegger begins his academic career analyzing in his thesis on Duns Scotus he maintains in opposition to the Platonic forms. Medieval Scholasticism utilizes the concept of transcendence to apply these Aristotelian categories. These categories are seen as forms of order within a delimited area, peculiarly incorporated into the metaphysical worldview of the time. This forms a metaphysical foundation with the modern scientific approach, which seeks to homogenize empirical reality for theoretical analysis. Duns Scotus' approach, and most of Western philosophy including Catholicism and Protestantism, is characterized by an empirical orientation, understanding that forms of meaning originate from empirical reality. This relationship between forms of meaning and categories of natural reality, Heidegger realizes, collapses reality in on itself, as it did in Nietzsche's rejection of Plato. Aristotle's four causes (αἰτία), especially on the material and formal causes naturally lead to the Aristotelian view that the essence of a being, especially a natural being, is intimately linked to its inherent principles of motion and rest, underscoring the idea that the nature of a thing is not an external attribute but an intrinsic quality that defines its very being.

Hegel in his youthful 1793 university thesis defense "On the Calamities of the renaissance of the Wurttemberg Church" writes about this influence of Naturalism in the West:

In short, Aristotle was only the leader of Morals, Physics, Metaphysics, Logic, and all philosophizing of the time, and not really Aristotle, who at least we know was a very great genius both in the science of nature and in that of spirit and customs, but his translators and commentators, whom we have already seen, have corrupted him so shamelessly.

In his 1918 "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism, Heidegger writes about the replacement of Platonic Ontology with Aristotle's naturalism in the medieval and scholastic ages as a critical shift which led to both Catholicism and Protestantism becoming fundamentally Materialistic and laying the foundation of Atheism. The scholastic-Aristotelian view held by the Augustinian-medieval monk Luther became purified in the new dichotomies of faith verses works and scripture verses tradition- dichotomies which were foreign to the early Christian Judeo-Platonic mindset. Heidegger writes in his 1921 "Augustine and Neoplatonism "Luther was strongly influenced by Augustine during his decisive years of development. Within Protestantism, Augustine has remained the most highly esteemed church father." Augustine's reading of Plato is nothing new, Heidegger mentions "Christianity at Augustine's time was already strongly permeated by Greek and Neoplatonism" as even Paul's metaphysics are fundamentally rooted in the Platonic interpretation of Heraclitus' Logos. Rather, Augustine represents a shift in the understanding of Sin and Grace in relation to the existing Neoplatonism of early Christianity, leading eventually to Luther’s new dichotomies. This shift represents the beginning of the metaphysical schism between East, which kept the Biblical iteration of Platonism intact, and the West, which made significant revisions first with Augustine, then in the Scholastics, and then finally perfected in Protestantism's full adoption of Subjective Materialism still under the guise of absolutism. This metaphysical Atheism is shown in Anselm of Canterbury's proofs for the existence of God, starting a tradition in Western Christianity of trying to prove with medieval-Aristotelian logic the existence of God, which has had the opposite intended effect. This desire to prove the existence of God puts on display the deeply Materialistic, Naturalistic and ultimately Atheistic foundations of European Christianity after the Great Schism of 1054:

The predominance of the theoretical is already inherent in Aristotle's strongly scientific, naturalistically theoretical metaphysics of being and his radical elimination and misjudgment of the problem of value in Plato, which was renewed in medieval scholasticism, so that scholasticism, within the totality of the medieval Christian world of experience, strongly endangered the immediacy of religious life and forgot religion through theology and dogma.

As Plato notes in his discussions on the divide the line, Being is like light in that it discloses the world to us but it is not known to us through externality. And this is the militantly introspective nature of Heideggerian ontology, it nearly sees Newton and scientific developments as harmful to humanity. Technological progress merely obscures the critical question of Being and knowing one's Being. Ontology is a nebulous and enigmatic undertaking, like trying to bite one's own teeth, and Heidegger in particular is even more dramatic than any given historical ontologist.

Heidegger sees Platonism as critical to preserving even the possibility of metaphysics and a super-rational realm of being, in opposition to Nietzsche, who, as a passionate self-described Anti-Christian, hated Platonic Ontology. Plato's conception of truth (άλή&εια) keeps the importance of Being intact, unlike Aristotelianism. Heidegger discusses how Plato's allegory goes beyond a simple narrative to serve as a metaphor for the transformative power of education and the pursuit of truth. The process of enlightenment, as represented by the ascent from the cave, is not merely about the acquisition of factual knowledge, but involves a fundamental change in the way one perceives and understands the world. This transformation is central to Plato's concept of education, which is not merely the transmission of knowledge but the cultivation of the capacity for critical thinking and philosophical inquiry. The purpose of the allegory is to highlight the limits of sensory experience, and thus, the invalidity of the Empirical view of meaning. Duns Scotus' approach is characterized by an empirical orientation just like the rest of Scholasticism, including Luther and his Claritas Scripturae, recognizing that forms of meaning originate from empirical reality. This de-mythologization of reality forced the creation of a Mysticism in externality, establishing the foundation of Atheism that we see in Protestant communities which inevitably secularize due to this medieval inheritance where subjectivity is misunderstood as Absolutism. Heidegger borrows heavily from Platonism, but still wants to eradicate the idea of "absolute" truth found in the Platonic-Judeo continuum.

Speech as Reality-Creation 

Speech is existentially of the same origin as state of mind and understanding...The utterance of speech is language.

In Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism, language is elevated to a nearly mythical place as the heart of Discourse, one of the three core elements of Dasein. It is a primordial phenomenon that underlies the very possibility of Dasein's disclosure of the world and the self. Since language is the "house" of being, as Heidegger famously postulated, language is not merely a reflection or representation of a pre-existing reality; it is a dynamic, constitutive act that produces and shapes reality.  This cosmogonic element of language is inherent in Heidegger's strong emphasis on Parmenides and Heraclitus. Before the Greeks, in the "Enuma Elish," the Babylonian god Marduk's ability to "speak magic words" and thus order the cosmos is a central theme. This act of naming is not merely a passive labeling, but a powerful, world-structuring, constructive activity. Marduk's naming, foreshadowing the Judeo concept of language as Genesis itself, brings forth reality, organizes "chaos" into a "cosmos," paralleling how Dasein's linguistic articulation shapes and structures the world.

Fast-forward a millennium, and Heraclitus's concept of the Logos offers another layer to articulation as reality-building. He molded this ancient concept into the Logos as we know it today, a nebulous world spirit, the underlying principle of order and knowledge, a fundamental, unifying reason that governs the cosmos; the central animating force of reality. While Heraclitus's logos has been interpreted in various ways and has been incorporated into several religions, Heidegger's perspective on language broadly echoes this ancient notion, albeit co-opted into his existential and phenomenological project. It is through language that the underlying structures of reality are both revealed and concealed, where the chaos of existence is ordered and made intelligible.

But unlike the static, unchanging logos of Heraclitus, Heidegger's conception of language is dynamic, an ongoing interplay of revealing and concealing that is intrinsic to the process of being in the world. This elevation of language intersects fundamentally with Heidegger's tripartite conception of Dasein, in which being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) constitutes the core of human existence alongside being-with-others (Mitsein) and being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode). In this scheme, discourse (speech), as one of the existential constituents of Dasein, is not merely an activity that Dasein engages in; it is a mode through which Dasein realizes its being. The spoken word becomes a site where the world is revealed, where the interplay between revealing and concealing, a central motif in Heidegger's thought, unfolds.

Heidegger's approach to language also challenges the traditional dichotomy between the subjective and the objective, for language is neither wholly subjective nor merely an objective tool. Rather, it is through language that the boundary between subject and object is navigated and transcended. Language is the medium through which the world comes into being for us, and we come into being in the world. It is a reciprocal process in which being and the world co-constitute each other, and language is the central element in this co-constitution. Heidegger's treatment of language as a mythic, almost sacred, element at the heart of the existential structure of Dasein profoundly reconfigures our understanding of speech, language, and reality.

Poetry, in this sense, becomes the ultimate expression of language's reality-creating power, where the fusion of word and world transcends mundane communication and opens up realms of meaning and being that remain hidden in everyday discourse. In his early 1910 work “Explanations of Holderlin's Poetry” he writes: 

Our existence is basically poetic, that cannot mean in the end, it is actually only a harmless game.... The reason of the human existence is the conversation as a proper happening of the language. The original language, however, is poetry as the foundation of being. Language, however, is "the most dangerous of goods". Therefore, poetry is the most dangerous work and at the same time the "most innocent of all businesses".

Beyond Good and Still Evil

Heidegger accused Nietzsche of not being a true Materialist, in the same way Nietzsche accused Schopenhauer’s platonism as being not truely anti-metaphysical, as Stalin accused Lenin of not being fully materialistic, as Lenin accused Marx, as Marx accused Feuerbach (in his “thesis on Feuerbach”) and Feuebach accused Epicurus. Rather, his meta-psychological concepts of the Super-man, Apollarian/ Dyonesian and especially Will-to-Power, which Heidegger sees as still deeply Schopenhauerian, are inherently metaphysical concepts. While Heidegger borrowed large swaths of his philosophy from Nietsche, he rejected his condemnation of Being, arguing that this is the absolute core of all intellectual life. In his thesis dissertation, he argues:

Philosophy cannot do without its actual optics, metaphysics, in the long run. For the theory of truth this means the abandonment of a final metaphysical-philosophical interpretation of consciousness. In this, the value actually already lives, insofar as it is a meaningful and meaning-realizing living act, which is not remotely understood if it is neutralized into the concept of a biological blind factuality. 

Christos Yannaras, who did his thesis dissertation on Heidegger in 1971 before Heidegger himself passed away, has parsed thousands of pages on the meaning of Heidegger in the East and West. In the Schism in Philosophy: The Hellenic perspective and it’s Western Reversal, Yannaras notes: 

The dynamic character of truth in Heidegger’s philosophy is confined to the apprehension (Verstandnis) of Being as temporality or absence, as the manifestation or the nothingness of a being. It has to do with a mode of understanding Being by the human subject, not with an interpretation of Being as Being.

Yannaras understands Heidegger's existential ontology as a renunciation of post-Cartesian abstract rationalist thought. Heidegger replaces Cogito Ero Sum with Dasein, in a move that mimics the Christian completion of Heraclitus' Logos. The Heideggerian ontological distinction between (entities) and Being (the essence or existence of those entities) is difficult to interpret outside of a religious framework, namely the distinction between the created world and God. Heidegger argues that the essence of human existence is not in the rational mind (as Descartes proposed), but in being-in-the-world, which is awfully close to the critique of Eastern Orthodoxy against the post-scholastic West.

Heidegger is accused by Yannaras of deliberately ignoring patristic apophatic theology in order to remain in the atheistic-nihilistic tautology of his own making. Heidegger and his disciples Sartre and Camus have fully demonstrated Nietzsche's bold anti-metaphysics; the inevitability of philosophical self-destruction of the tautologies created in the Great Schism and manifested in "Bible-believing" rationalist Christianity. The Western metaphysical tradition is bankrupt, but neither Heidegger nor Sartre were able to formulate an alternative to the nihilistic end. Heidegger's manifestation of a stark contrast between unparalleled intelligence and academic rigor and his lifelong moral cowardice rather proved this nihilism.

A year before Heidegger's death, Yannaras published a powerful response from the Orthodox Church entitled "Person and Eros," which redirected Heidegger's broken, nihilistic existentialism toward the ancient Christian solution to the problem of the knowability of being - the solution that the early Church Fathers, especially St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Thomas Aquinas, offered. Maximus the Confessor and St. Dionysius the Areopagite knew well: we become known and knowable beings by reaching out to the other (in Kierkegaardian terms), a self-transcendence of a noetic-conscious conceptualization that finds a universal existential relation to the essence of being. Yannaras writes:

The West, in its youthful enthusiasm or youthful immaturity, identified (and still identifies) the comprehension of the signifiers with the knowledge of what is signified. It accepted and cultivated an “ontic” version of being, as Heidegger very astutely envinced. That is, the West saw being always as onticity, brought to accomplishment as objectively defined with a sense of finality by the individual intellect (the adaequatio rei et intellectus defines and exhausts the truth, the veritas, of reality’s every given). 

The East repeats its 11th century warning to the West within the criticism of Heidegger, who was always inevitable once subjective interpretation of Holy Tradition becomes the nexus of Truth. The proclamation of the "death of God" by Nietzsche is the inevitable historical outcome that clarifies the entire theological development of Western Christianity since the warnings of Mt. Athos at the Great Schism. The replacement of ecclesial experience with intellectual certainty via Luther’s Claritas Scriptura, prepares the way for rational argument about that certainty. Rationalism, freed from the metaphysical guarantees of scholasticism by Protestant Pietism and further intellectualized in the following centuries by the Kantian school, was the preparation for the dominance of an individualistic. This is the foothold of Nihilism.

The contrast between Roman Catholic fideism and Protestant pietism, at the same time, generated Utilitarianism. This new field of justification by value, ensures the survival and application of Western Christianity’s creation of materialistic skepticism and ultimately the Nihilism of the current age. Heidegger documents this path from the Great Schism to Luther to the “renunciation of all values” carefully, just like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer do:

The diminished authority of God and the teaching authority of the church is replaced by the authority of conscience, by the authority of reason. Against this, the social instinct rises. The flight from the world into the supersensible is replaced by historical progress. The otherworldly goal of eternal bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of most people. The cultivation of the cult of religion is replaced by the enthusiasm for the creation of a culture or for the spread of civilization. The creative, formerly the own of the biblical God, becomes the distinction of the human activity. Its creation finally passes over into business.

What in such a way wants to bring itself to the place of the supersensible world, are modifications of the Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world, which has taken over its scheme of the ordo, the graduated order of being, from the Hellenistic-Jewish world, whose basic structure was founded in the beginning of the occidental metaphysics by Plato.

The area for the essence and the event of nihilism is metaphysics itself, always provided that by this name we do not mean a doctrine or even only a special discipline of philosophy, but think of the basic structure of being in the whole, as far as this is distinguished into a sensuous and a supersensuous world and the latter is carried and determined by the latter. Metaphysics is the historical space in which it becomes a fate that the supersensible world, the ideas, God, the moral law, the authority of reason, the progress, the happiness of most people, the culture, the civilization lose their building power and become void. We call this decay of the supersensible its decay. Therefore, unbelief in the sense of apostasy from the Christian doctrine of faith is never the essence and the reason, but always only a consequence of nihilism; for it could be that Christianity itself is a consequence and outgrowth of nihilism.