CONTRA HAERESES: Heidegger, pseudo-prophet of anti-metaphysics.

 

Existentialism is a pernicious substitute for intellective contemplation and sanctity. If the existentialists – so imbued with sincerism – were really sincere, they would be saints or heroes.

Frithjof Schuon

 

I know the Psalms and I read in the Bible: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
I know modern philosophy and I read in Heidegger: Man is the shepherd (of being).

 Carl Schmitt

 

The philosophy of Heidegger marks (together with that of Kant and Nietzsche) a crucial corner stone in the decline of western metaphysics and in many ways he could be considered its final pallbearer. Even if the figure of Heidegger must thus be ultimately judged as an agent of the ‘counter-initiation’, we do not think that his oeuvre is entirely without value, furnishing many profound insights into the malaise of modernity, the inauthenticity of mass society (Uneigentlichkeit) and the cold, inhuman grasp of the machine (das Gestell), the dominion of ‘instrumental reason’ (la règne de la quantité) that sucks even the last bit of transcendent meaning from the world. And while we thus think that Heidegger (and the whole phenomenological endeavor) have a lot of valuable things to tells us about the manner in which being reveals itself to us in our immediate ‘existential’ experience (our ‘being-in-the-world’), it is when he tries to step from phenomenology to ontology, or ‘metaphysics’ in the broadest sense, that things take a turn for the worse and lead him on a course that has quite frankly been disastrous for western thought as such. So when we criticize and even polemicize against Heidegger in the following, we do not necessarily mean to attack Heidegger the phenomenologist (but then again, is his phenomenology really separable from his ontology?), Heidegger the student of Husserl who, in one of his very first lectures, had proclaimed that ‘meaning is primary’ (Das Bedeutsame ist das Primäre), but Heidegger the anti-metaphysician, the revolutionary and deconstructor, the pseudo-prophet of a new (‘fundamental’) ontology.

 

Now we for our part have neither the intention nor the competency to subject the entire Heideggerian opus to a critical examination (for we confess to have read only a tiny fraction of the 102! books that make up his complete works), instead we only want to look at one particular text that is exceedingly short (51 pages in the Klostermann edition from which we are going to cite in the following) but which nevertheless is more than telling and could be said to serve as a kind of ‘manifesto’ for the Heideggerian anti-metaphysics. This text is his 1929 inaugural lecture at the university of Freiburg, carrying the title: What is Metaphysics?.

 

So, ‘what is metaphysics’? The answer is given to us by Heidegger already on the first page: metaphysics thinks about being as beings (Sie denkt das Seiende als das Seiende)[1], meaning that it only considers ‘that which is’ (das Seiende), but never ‘being’ as such (das Sein)! In fact the whole history of metaphysical inquiry “from Anaxamander to Nietzsche” (p.11) is characterized by the fundamental limitation that being (das Sein) has never once appeared in its ‘truth’ or ‘unconcealedness’ (aletheia), but has always been ‘veiled’ by the beings (das Seiende) themselves. All philosophical discourse (logos) about being (to on) has only ever pondered what ‘the being of beings is’; it has asked for example: ‘what is a tree?’, ‘what is God?’, ‘what is the Good?’ etc. without however having posed the question what ‘is’ is, this ‘is’ that is the very foundation of all metaphysics, its fundamental condition of possibility. Instead it has either considered ‘being’ as the universality or totality all beings (as to on or ousia), i.e. as ontology, thus ‘objectivizing’ it (this tendency towards ‘objectification’ is synonymous to what Heidegger refers to as ‘Platonism’), representing it in its Vorhandenheit (‘presence-at-hand’) and turning it into a mere ‘inventory’ (Bestand), thereby alienation us further from being itself (hence why ‘Platonism’ is identified by Heidegger as the root-cause of technological thinking), or it has stopped its inquiry at some ‘highest being’, the summum ens or theon (i.e. theology).  In short: Metaphysics has never been meta-physical (or ‘trans-ontic’). All western thought from Plato onwards is guilty of ‘onto-theology’ (the original sin of philosophy as such!), meaning that ‘metaphysics’ is nothing but the fall away from being (Ab-fall), a fall into Seinsvergessenheit (‘the forgetfulness of being’), ye in a ‘forgetfulness of thinking’ even (Gedankenlosigkeit); in fact it certainly doesn’t go too far to say noone has ever really ‘thought’ at all! (that is: until Heidegger came along and woke us from our dogmatic slumber). Such is at least is the opening thesis of Heidegger’s address.  

 

Is this assessment justified? We think not. Now Heidegger constantly refers us back to Aristotle and his conception of being as a ‘substance’ (ousia) and while it is highly debatable if Heidegger’s account of Aristotelian ontology is accurate (his neo-platonic, muslim and scholastic commentators would’ve certainly begged to differ) he nevertheless seems to touch on a true point. Indeed if there was ever a thinker to which Spengler’s characterization of the ‘Apollonian soul’ and its tendency towards ‘plasticity’ applied, it has to be Aristotle. There is in the Stagirite an undeniable tendency to ‘substantiatize’, from whence also his incomprehension of Platonic idealism (in short: he cannot conceive how the ideas are not ‘things’[2] thus concluding that the only reality of the ideas must in fact lie ‘in the things’ themselves, which is the Aristotelian doctrine of substantial forms – but then again, doesn’t Heidegger make the same exact mistake when he accuses Plato of ‘objectification’?).

 

However even if we were to concede that Heidegger were correct in convicting Aristotle of ‘onto-theology’, it doesn’t follow at all that the entirety of the western tradition should be guilty of this as well. In fact the claim doesn’t even seem to hold for the Greeks themselves, for, as many commentators have noted, “Heidegger could have never constructed his thesis of the historical trajectory of thinking in this way if he had truly faced up to the demands of neoplatonic philosophy” (Beierwaltes, Heideggers Rückgang zu den Griechen, IV). Ye, one cannot help but conclude that the whole concept of ‘metaphysics’ as Heidegger understands it is but one big philosophical-historical construction which takes larges liberties in its interpretations and proofs to be highly selective in choosing what to include in its narrative and what not. As Beierwaltes goes on to say:

 

Heidegger’s construction of ‘metaphysics’ and its history is merely a philosophical-historical sketch (ein philosophiegeschichtlicher Entwurf) … Such a construction would indeed be negligible if it didn’t come from the author of Sein und Zeit, who has shaped the present and the future of philosophy in a substantial manner … There is a need to uncover the concepts and theories that have been suppressed or  ignored in this construct, a suppression which makes Heidegger’s own limited point of view only possible in the first place … Among those who have been ousted by this limited conception are especially: Plato himself, Plotinus, Augustine and Hegel[3] … as well as Dionysius and his followers: Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Cusanus (ibid.).

 

While there seems thus to be a blind-spot in Heidegger for the tradition that is commonly referred to as ‘Neoplatonism’ (which really is just Platonism plain and simple), things become even more clear once we reach the scholastic adaption Aristotelian-Platonic philosophy. In fact one has to wonder how Heidegger, who often boasted that he was himself ‘not wholly ignorant of such matters’ (cf. Zollikoner Seminare, 06.11.51), having studied theology for two years in seminary, could, in his collective denunciation of ‘onto-theology’, so easily pass over Thomistic metaphysics, in which there is a clear distinction between ‘universal being’ (ens) and ‘being as such’ or ‘isness’ (esse).[4] A fact that has often been noted and criticized by prominent Thomists such as Etienne Gilson:

 

For Heidegger all metaphysics are that of Aristotle and Brentano taught him that the metaphysics of the Philosopher concern themselves with being qua beings (l’étant en tant qu’étant), but, being ignorant of it himself, he didn’t teach Heidegger about the existence of another metaphysics, namely that of St. Thomas, which, even though it deals with being qua beings as well, nevertheless proposes to push through the beings (l’étant) to being itself (l’étre). Thomism is a philosophy of Sein in so far as it is a philosophy of esse. When the young folks invite us to discover Martin Heidegger, they invite us, without their knowledge, to rediscover the trans-ontic metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas (Les Tribulations de Sophie, III).

 

Being a philosophy of esse, Thomism is not so much an ‘ontology’ (as that of Aristotle operating primary with the concepts of ‘substance’ and ‘accident’) but rather an ‘energology’ of act and potency. Thomistic esse (‘isness’) is not conceived of as ousia (‘substance’ or ‘essence’, i.e. ‘whatness’) but as actus purus essendi, the pure act of beingness (in fact Gilson argues that there is in Thomas even a priority of esse over essentia which even prompts him to speaks of a ‘Thomistic existentialism’, a reading that seems to us highly debatable; however this is a discussion we do not wish to enter at the present moment).

 

Understood thus, one quickly sees that being (esse) is not a ‘something’, a transcendent ‘reality’, a ‘metaphysical form’ which would somehow combine with a thing from outside, something with which the thing would be endowed or which it participates in: Being is not an accident. As actus, being is unknowable, because it is the actuality of things; it is not the thing itself but the fact that it effectively exists: ‘being is the actuality of all forms or natures; goodness and humanity, for example, are spoken of as actual only because they are spoken of as existing’ [S.Th. I.3.4]. Thus the form or essence of a thing is not its being, even if a thing couldn’t exist without its form. The substance in itself, that is to say that ‘something’ which is entirely constituted and thus capable of exercising by itself the act of existence (a tree, a cat, a man, an angel) is not its being, ‘but it’s being (esse) is that by which the substance is called a being (ens)’ [Contra Gentiles, II.54]. The esse of a creature is at the same time exterior to its nature and ‘that which is most intimate and profoundly inherent to it’ [S.Th.I.8.1]. ‘That which I call being, concludes St. Thomas in De Potentia  [VII.2.9], is the actuality of all acts and the perfection of all perfections’ (Borella, Penser l’Analogie, IX).

 

Heidegger seems not aware of this; whenever he speaks about God he does so as if He were ‘a being’: ‘a grain of sand and God’ (p.14), ‘a rock, a horse, an angel or God’ (p.35), all these things (so tells us Heidegger) as are said to ‘be’ (i.e. to ‘have being’), as if ‘being’ were merely some universal category (or form), a kind of all-encompassing substrate that envelops both creatures and God. However as we have seen this is precisely not the case; being is not a form in which all beings (from the rock to the Most High) participate in (God does not participate, He is the Amethekton), but a participation in the divine Act of being (‘isness’) itself. This is also why there is absolutely no equivalence between the being of beings (which is participated to the extent that the finite essence of the creature allows it), which only ever ‘are’ secundum quid, and the infinite Act of isness that God Himself is (finiti ad infinitum nulla est proportio), so that Thomas says (Contra Gentiles, II.15) that when call God ‘a being’, or predicate ‘being’ (ens) of Him, this predication is not equivocal but can only ever be strictly analogically (per analogiam), for He is the Giver and Principle of all being (esse).

 

Not only seems Heidegger thus (willfully?) ignorant of the Platonic tradition and its emphasis on the apophatic way (‘First, by the Cataphatic, we predicate all things of Him, then we deny by the Apophatic that He is any of the things which are predicated of Him, only this time not metaphorically but properly: God is and He is not, and therefore the only definition that can be predicated of Him is that He is He Who is HYPEROUSIA, More-than-being’ – cf. Erigena, Periphyseon, 522A, 487B)[5] but also of the crucial notion of the analogy of being (analogia entis). [6]

 

Now it is not here our intention to furnish a complete Thomistic critique of Heideggerian ontology (we refer the reader to Gilson, Borella and others who have written on the topic with far more competence than we could ever hope to) but simply to uncover some of the blind spots seemingly ignored by the Heideggerian narrative. Would Heidegger have accepted these criticisms? It seems doubtful at least. He probably would’ve said that even Neoplatonists and Thomists never got to the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ being that he was proclaiming (‘There is no Sein except das Sein and Heidegger is it’s prophet!’).

 

Another thing that seems to have eluded him is that he was far from the first one to note the inherent ‘paradox’ of metaphysics, i.e. that in defining a being, or even being in itself (‘being is …’) one already presupposes being as such (the ‘is’). Thus one reads in Pascal:

 

One cannot undertake to define being without falling into absurdity: for a word cannot be defined without beginning with the words ‘it is’, whether they are expressed or implied. Therefore in order to define being it would be necessary to say it is, and so to use the word to be defined in formulating its own definition (Pensées et Opuscules)

 

If being must in this in a sense remain ever undefinable, this is precisely because it is that which defines all other beings (the Word) and stays as such ever ‘unknowable’ for there is no ‘whatness’ in God or rather: His ‘whatness’ (essence) is His ‘isness’ (esse): He is what he is (Ex. 3:14)[7], He is is, and we thus see that being (esse) is not only the universal definition, that which defines everything, but also that which defines (or ‘names’) Itself, for being itself is the definition (or determination) of Non-being, the ‘possibility of being’ [8], the ‘unitary space’ of the mêontological Essence in which God eternally utters forth His Word and in which the Trinitarian relations are deployed from all eternity.

 

Now, given that Being is determination in relation to Beyond-Being [or Non-being] and the source of every attribute in relation to the world, every determination and every attribute can be expressed by means of the verb ‘to be,’ hence by ‘it is,’ so that Pascal’s difficulty can be resolved thus: ‘being’ manifests (or ‘is’ the manifestation of) an aspect of its own inner limitlessness, thus a possibility, an attribute. When we say: ‘The tree is green,’ this is, by analogy, like saying: ‘Being comprises such and such an aspect,’ or again in the deepest sense: ‘Beyond-Being determines itself as Being’; the thing to be defined – or determined – serves analogically as ‘Being,’ and the definition – the determination – serves as ‘divine attribute.’

Instead of speaking of ‘Being’ and of ‘attribute of Being,’ we could refer to the first distinction: Beyond-Being and Being. When the verb ‘to be’ designates an existence, it has no complement; on the other hand, when it has a complement it does not designate an existence as such, but an attribute; to say that a certain thing ‘is,’ signifies that it is not non-existent; to say that the tree ‘is green’ signifies that it has this attribute and not some other. In consequence, the verb ‘to be’ always expresses either an ‘existence’ or a ‘character of existence,’ in the same way as God on the one hand ‘is’ and on the other ‘is thus,’ that is to say Light, Love, Power, and so forth. Saint Thomas expresses this well by saying that if Being and the first principles which flow from it are incapable of proof, it is because they have no need of proof; to prove them is at once useless and impossible, ‘not through a lack, but through a superabundance of light’ (Schuon, Orthodoxy and Intellectuality).

 

Being (esse) is unknowable (as an ‘object’) we have said, it is not provable, it simply and self-evidently is. And here we come back to Heidegger’s lecture, for having rejected the entirety of past metaphysics he now sets out to ‘overcome’ it and lay the foundation for a new way of thinking about being – not by giving it a new definition (‘metaphysics is this or that’) but (in keeping with his phenomenological principles) by ‘doing it’, experiencing it and thereby letting it ‘reveal itself’ by itself.  He does so by posing the question which is, according to him, ‘the deepest and most fundamental question there is’, namely: Why is there something rather than nothing?  (Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?).

 

Now, due to the limitations of his own method, Heidegger can obviously never even approach an answer to this question; it is a thinking that is (like Dasein itself) condemned to stay ever ‘suspended’ (in der Schwebe) without reaching a definitive resolution (for every answer that places itself outside of being would of course fall again into the ‘objectivities’ of ‘Platonism’, the onto-theological sin of posing a causa sui or ‘first mover’ etc.). Instead the question (ye ‘being’ itself) must for him end in an aporia: ‘The rose is without why’, as Silesius says; however for the ‘Cherubinic wanderer’ this is only so because it is absolutely gratuitous, a pure gift of God with no other reason that His infinite Goodness itself[9] (and, furthermore, if the rose ‘is’ this means that it corresponds to some possibility or ‘aspect’ of the Essence which God know in its infinite ‘imitabilty’, for as Silesius likewise tells us: ‘the rose that thou seest here with thine external eye, hath bloomèd thus in God from all eternity’). Of course Heidegger categorically rejects all such answers, which obviously stop all “true thinking” dead in its tracks. He thus has nothing but disdain for the notion of creatio ex nihilo[10] (however one interprets it) which represents for him nothing but a ‘laziness (Bequemlichkeit) of faith (cf. Einleitung in die Metaphysik, §1).

 

Instead, by pondering this timeless question, Heidegger finds himself confronted with the possibility of non-being (Denn das Nichts ist die Verneinung der Allheit des Seienden, das schlechthin Nicht-Seiende; p. 28) and thus ‘encounters’ (dare we say it is ‘revealed to him’?) the two central notions of ‘the nothing’ (das Nichts) and ‘anxiety’ (die Angst), which occupy most of the second half of his talk.

 

Now what is this ominous Nichts that is revealed to Heidegger, is it simply nothing (ouk on) or Non-being (mê on), is it Buddhist sûnyatâ or the Tao, Hegelian negativity or Eckhart’s ‘groundless ground’ (gruntlose grunt)?[11] many interpretations have been proposed; let us simply say it remains ambiguous. It could be characterized a vague ‘feeling’ or ‘intuition’, an ominous ‘presence’ that is revealed in the ‘state’ or ‘mood’ (Befindlichkeit or Gestimmtsein) of anxiety (and here we see the clear limitations of trying to get to any real metaphysical insight by way of pure phenomenology). In our own opinion it seems as if Heidegger is pointing us here to the ‘unknowability’ of being (esse) that he have pointed out earlier, for being ‘the eye by which we see’ it can never be seen (or ‘represented’), being ‘most intimately present’ as Aquinas observed while at the same time staying utterly transcendent: interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, according to the celebrated expression of St. Augustine. We cannot ‘see’ being, we cannot ‘think’ it (and in this sense Hegel is right when he says that [the thinking of] ‘pure being and pure nothingness are identical’, cf. p.39). However this of course doesn’t mean that being is nothing but simply that it transcend all manifestation (it is ‘no-thing’), being the principle all being (das Seiende or universal existence) and staying as such ever unmanifested.

 

The nothing, says Heidegger, is not simply the negation of all beings (das Seiende) but ‘even more primordial that the ‘not’ and every negation’ (p. 28), more primordial than existence itself and in a sense ‘beyond’ it (and even though Heidegger rejects creatio ex nihilo we may conclude that, for him, all being ultimately originates from the nothing as its source and ‘foundation’). The nothing is not (how could it be something?) it simply ‘nothings’ (das Nichts nichtet, p. 34); we don’t have to search for it because it is always immediately present. However, we suppress it, ‘veil’ it with beings and flee from it into the ‘bad faith’ of the ‘they’ or das man (cf. Sein und Zeit, I.4). Only in boredom (wenn ‘es einem langweilig ist’, p.30) when our interest is, as it were, withdrawn from all external objects or in anxiety (which Heidegger distinguishes from ‘fear’, for we always ‘fear something’, whereas anxiety as such is always a pure Gestimmtsein without object) when our immediate existence is radically threatened, there is revealed or ‘opened to us’ (offenbart) the void of the nothing (‘anxiety disconceals the nothing’, p. 32). However because of Heidegger’s refusal to ‘objectivize’ or ‘conceptualize’ these notions they remain mere data of ‘existential experience’, such that Schuon is not entirely wrong when he calls the Heideggerian concept of Angst “completely anti-metaphysical and hysterical” (Letter on Existentialism). [12]

Nevertheless there is one interesting observation which Heidegger stumbles on (almost malgré lui) in his ‘hysterical’ ramblings, namely that we can only approach existence (das Seiende) on the ground of the nothing (auf dem Grunde der ursprünglichen Offenbarkeit des Nichts, p. 34):

 

Insofar as it is the nature of human-existence (Dasein) to relate to some-thing (Seiendem) that it is not and which is itself, it comes forth as such an existence (Dasein) from the revealed nothing (dem offenbaren Nichts). Dasein means: being extended into the nothing (Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts). Extending into the nothing, the Dasein is always already beyond universal existence (das Seiende) as a whole. This being-beyond being (Hinaussein über das Seiende) is what we call transcendence. If the Dasein would not be fundamentally of a transcendent nature, were it not already extended into the nothing, then it could not relate itself to being (Seiendem) and so not even to itself. Without the fundamental manifestness (Offenbarkeit) of the nothing, no identity (Selbstsein) and no freedom (p.35).

 

Let us first note that every Christian (or Platonist for that matter) would have to agree that nothingness is the foundation of all identity (A is A because it is not B or C), the very condition that there can exist anything outside of God in the first place, for ‘all creatures are tainted by shadow of nothingness’ as Meister Eckhart tells us, and if they didn’t partake of this nothingness (or potentia) they would simply be God and, being thus the basis for existence as such, it is also the basis for our existential freedom (if we already were in actu what we are called to become – what we are called to make ourselves – we couldn’t become what we are).

 

However this traditional Christian interpretation is obviously not how Heidegger wants his ‘nothing’ to be understood (cf. p.39), for this nothing is not merely a limitation but precisely that by which man transcends being (das Seiende) itself. Now what is it in us that transcends being if not the intellect (or more precisely: the person), the ‘eye of the heart’ (ayn al-qalb) or the ‘thread-spirit’ (sutrâtman) that connects us to the pure isness of the Divine Sun (Âtmâ) itself? This is the very centre of our being, the ‘hub’ or ‘nave’ (kha or nâbhi) of the wheel, the ‘hole’ (âkâsha) [13] or ‘opening’ (spiraculum vitae) where the creature opens up to the Divine, where the shell or ‘husk’ of our existence is pierced by a ray of uncreated Light. Now, from the standpoint of manifestation this ‘infinitesimal point’ is really a nothing, ‘smaller than a grain of sand’ (Chân. Upan. III ), but in reality it is (by inverse analogy)  indeed ‘greater than all these worlds’, being That in man which infinitely transcends him (the nothing that is everything) and ‘if everything in the soul was like this spark it would be uniform with God Himself’ (Meister Eckhart).

 

Man transcends being; and as such Heidegger is right when he states that ‘metaphysics is inherent to the nature of man’ (p.41), or as Borella says: nous sommes condamné à la metaphysique. In fact it is only due to this transcendence, our participation in the infinite – and not, as Heidegger proposes, because we are plunged into some existential nothingness or suspended (schweben) in a latent anxiety that is ‘always present, albeit asleep’ (p.37) – that we can relate to beings (Seiendem) as beings, that we can ‘know’ and be aware of the finitude of the finite (and also of our own ‘shadow of nothingness’), for a limit can only be known from a position that surpasses it (cf. Guénon, Principles of infinitesimal Calculus). Every act of knowing takes us in a sense already ‘beyond’ formal existence, and it is in this ‘beyondness’ (au-delà) that we become aware of the inherent finitude (en-deçà) of our existential condition, of our ‘incompleteness’. However this should not plunge it into some paralyzing existential Angst, but rather serve as a metanoia that wakes us from the illusion of aseity (‘remember man that thou art dust!’), as well as an anamnesis, an invitation to follow this ‘thread’ (sutrâtman) and journey back on the via salutis to our intelligible homeland; for flowing from an infinite Source the intellect can only find its fulfillment in the infinite gnosis of the visio beatifica (‘My Heart is restless until it rests in Thee’ – St. Augustine) and  ‘never can our intellect be sated, unless that Truth shine upon it, beyond which no truth has range’ (Dante, Paradiso IV.124). To put it simply: in the (atemporal) act of knowing, we realize that our completeness, our ‘true being’, lies beyond time. Pursuing this completeness or ‘wholeness’ (our uncreated archetype) is thus not a merely ‘existential’ but in a sense an ‘essential’ project (L’homme doit, non pas ‘se cultiver’, mais se preparer à recevoir la Verité, par la jeûne et la prière!, as the Abbé Stéphane so succinctly put contra Satre et al.).

 

Because of our participation in intellect we can know being (ens), can truly know it, for the intellect is the ‘sense of being’, just like the eyes are the sense of the visible. And this is precisely why ‘meaning is primary’ and ‘gives itself to us immediately’ (i.e. from ‘outside of time’), as the young Heidegger proclaims in his 1919 Freiburg lectures (cf. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie), for if numerus stat ex materia as the medieval schoolmen tells us, it is the ‘form’ that gives being (forma dat esse rei), what bestows on things their ‘semantic’ or qualitative dimension; and through this semantic reality (it’s intelligible ‘meaning’) each thing is connected to being as if by an umbilical cord (pure quantity is not). To affirm that the sensible world ‘makes sense’ is to affirm that this ‘sense’ is ultimately found not in the sensible world itself but in the ‘intelligible word’ of which it is but the symbol[14]; and here we see that beings not only ‘conceal’ being but (by their symbolic quality) reveal it, such is the nature of the veil.

 

Now, we do not venture to give an exposition here of things that have been developed more thoroughly in other places; it was simply our intention to show how the Heideggerian inquiry actually opens a gateway to ‘true metaphysics’ (one should in this context compare Guénon’s 1925 lecture on the topic of Oriental Metaphysics to that of Heidegger at hand to see the chasm that divides traditional metaphysics from his pseudo-ontology).

 

But obviously Heidegger’s refusal of ‘objectification’ or of ‘Platonism’ (i.e. his refusal of the Real) closes all such doors to him. A contrario: instead of opening our existence to any real transcendence he radically closes us off to it (isn’t Dasein precisely characterized by its ‘horizontal ecstasy’; cf. Sein und Zeit, II), he confines it to its own finitude and enslaves it to time (which is alien to our true being, ye alien to being itself)[15] and the (purely contingent) existential conditions that we were ‘thrown into’  (Geworfenheit). Thus locked away in the prison of its own existence and cut off from all verticality, is it any wonder that the Heideggerian Dasein succumbs to a constant sense of anxiety and nihilism?

 

However that may be, Heidegger seems more than satisfied with himself and ends his address with the certainty that, having shown the errors of all prior thinking and revealed to us the nothing, he has now ‘freed us from all idols’ (Freiwerden von den Götzen) and brought metaphysics on its way (In-Gang-bringen der Metaphysik), that is: from the crooked path of Seinsvergessenheit to the bright future of true being (p.42).

 

In the end, what are we to make of the Heideggerian project? Despite all that we have said we cannot help but think that Heidegger’s main intuitions were often not entirely misguided and point us in the right direction, for example when he perceives the ‘fall’ of western thinking to occur in what he (wrongfully) calls ‘Platonism’ or (with Nietzsche) the ‘Socratic rationalism’ and urges us to seek in the Presocratics a more authentic way of thinking and of being as such (Eigentlichkeit). Without a doubt there is a kind of rupture, a discontinuity with the ‘poeto-prophetic’ modus operandi of the thinkers we call (quite tellingly) the Pre-socratics and the Platonic mode of philosophizing. Those early thinkers, often priests, magicians and poets (hence Heidegger’s turn towards poets like Hölderlin, Rilke, or Trakl) were inheritors of a true sophia (the word philos-sophia goes back to Pythagoras), they had their eyes firmly fixed on the divine Centre, poised in gnostic contemplation. This ‘sapiential regime’ of presocratic philosophia is radically disturbed by the appearance of the Sophists, who, having definitively cut themselves off from the Centre, represent a definitive rupture with all that had come before. The Platonic method responds merely to the demands of this crisis, for if the Sophists tried to reduce all truth to language (logos), Plato wanted to lead his listeners back to the truth ‘by means of the logos’ (dia-logos). The Platonic dialectic is a ‘sophism’ (for contrary to the modern sense of the word, there is also a ‘benefic sophism’; Plato himself speaks of an ‘authentic and veritably noble sophistry’; Soph. 231B) , a ‘rationalism’ that has the aim of  leading dianoia out of the ‘cave’ back to the pure contemplation (noesis) of truth. Thus Plato taught nothing essentially new but merely gave new form to an ancient sophia.

 

According to (neoplatonic) tradition, Plato himself received the complete science of the gods from Pythagorean and Orphic writings The science of dialectic advocated by Plato is not found in the Orphico-Pythagorean theology, but both Orphism and Pythagoreanism are viewed as being based on ancient Egyptian and Babylonian revelations. The divine Plato only gave it scientific form combining the ‘revelatory style of Pythagoreanism with the demonstrative method of Socrates … (he) simply reshapes and rationalizes the mythical and religious ideas of esoteric Orphism and its Bacchic mysteries of Dionysius (Uzdavinys, Orpheus and the roots of Platonism, III, X).

 

Is Heidegger thus right to identify Plato as the father of Seinsvergessenheit? We think not (a true assessment of Plato requires knowledge of ‘esoteric doctrines’ or agrapha dogmata which we doubt Heidegger was aware of; did he know about the esoteric dimension of Pre-socratics such as Empedocles, Parmenides and others? This too seems highly unlikely). It is only with Aristotle that the definitive step from sophia to sophistry, from gnosis to a-gnostic science, or from  ‘metaphysics’ to ‘philosophy’ in its later, profane sense is made. Thus the emergence of (‘post-socratic’) philosophy, the ‘Greek miracle’, often heralded as the birth of philosophy and science as such, is in many ways the death of sophia and in this way Heidegger’s intuition that ‘something went wrong’ is not entirely misguided (however, as we already pointed, due to his anti-Christian bias he remains completely ignorant to the rebirth of a true sacred intellectuality during the middle ages).

 

The ‘Greek miracle’ is in effect the substitution of reason for the Intellect, of fact for principle, of phenomenon for Idea, of form for essence, of man for God, and that in art as well as in thought (Schuon, Descartes and the Cogito).

 

Thus the Heideggerian project is in a sense justified, however only in a sense. For instead of a return to a true sophia the Heideggerian philosophy with its ad hoc etymologizing and sometimes outright ridiculous neologism constitutes merely a new, more idiosyncratic kind of sophistry; instead of return to true and sacred intellectuality he loses himself in an indefinite circling around the question of ‘being’, a pseudo-mystical obscurantism that really leads nowhere and to which the Platonic ‘dianoesis’ seems much preferable. 

 

Heidegger ‘seeks’ a mode of knowledge which goes beyond discursive thought; this is all very well, but discursive thought is worth infinitely more in itself than anything that a Heidegger can conceive of, seek, or find (Schuon, Letter on Existentialism).

 

In his attempt ‘to think that which has hitherto not been thought’ (a kind of reverse Hegelianism), he rejects everything, the good and the bad alike, and, tearing down the very base on which he stands, is it really a surprise that his whole endeavor ends in a bunch of Holzwege (‘paths that lead nowhere’)? All of metaphysics is for Heidegger but an alienating edifice erected over “true being”, a philosophical construction that has consequently to be ‘deconstructed’ and violently torn apart, ‘philosophy with the sledge-hammer’ as Nietzsche called it. Is this whole project not from the start founded on a giant arrogance? As Schuon says (with regards to Heidegger):

 

A man has to have very little imagination to believe, with the satisfaction of a schoolboy who is promoted, that he has at last discovered what hundreds and thousands of years of wisdom did not know, and that on the level of pure intelligence. Before seeking to ‘surpass’ any ‘scholasticism,’ one should at least understand it! (Orthodoxy and Intellectuality).

 

The Heideggerian rebellion against ‘metaphysics’ thus contains (like every rebellion) a truly satanic element (non serviam, non credam, non orem!) and for all his supposed ‘conservatism’ or even ‘reactionism’ Heidegger appears to us as one of the biggest revolutionaries of the 20^th century, the father of a vapid nihilism (Satre) and an anti-metaphysical sophism (Derrida) that we suffer under to this very day. In fact one has to wonder how this, in many way ridiculous, figure could have ensnared some of the brightest minds of his generation and even today manages to charm many with his murmuring mystifications. Maybe Heidegger really was a prophet after all, the mere medium of a dark revelation that had already been poisoning the souls of modern man.