Being and Truth (Studies in Continental Thought) by Martin Heidegger

Author:Martin Heidegger [Heidegger, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2010-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

§17. On the concept of the idea

a) Preliminary remark on the significance of the doctrine of the ideas in the history of spirit14

What is the connection between idea and light? What does idea mean?

With this question, we touch upon a fundamental element—indeed, upon the fundamental constitution—of our Western historical Dasein. With the help of what Plato’s doctrine of the ideas prepared, the Christian concept of God was conceived. This became the standard for the next millennia, for what is genuinely real and unreal. The doctrine of the ideas became the standard for the conception of the Being of things in general.

Secondly, at the beginning of modernity, Plato’s doctrine of the ideas developed and helped to form the modern concept of reason and of rational natural science. Even Romanticism depends on the reign of the idea.

Rationalism and the idea of God come together in the highest completion of Western thinking, in Hegelian philosophy. It is no accident that Hegel himself identified himself as the one who had completed Western philosophy, to the extent that it is the Greek world reconstructed in a Christian way.

From here, there developed in the nineteenth century: 1. Marxism’s doctrine of ideologies, which can be understood only on the basis of Hegel; 2. the new interpretation of Christianity through Kierkegaard. These ideas, blended and made innocuous, produced the characteristic picture of cultural philistinism that finally drove Nietzsche to despair.

Nietzsche saw the coming struggle in advance. Nietzsche struggles on three fronts: a) with humanism; b) with a baseless Christianity; c) with the Enlightenment. In keeping with the urgency of the circumstances, he drew his weapons from these three armories themselves.

Since then, there has been no further clear, originary, spiritual-historical position or attitude left for human beings. Only mishmash! Human beings today are no longer able to see and to experience their own position on the earth. They will once again be able to do so from the moment that they experience the fundamental condition for doing so, namely, the necessity of coming to a decision in the face of the essential powers of humanity in general, Dasein itself, in so far as the powers of humanity press upon them and compel them to a choice.

This tremendous moment into which National Socialism is being driven today is the coming to be of a new spirit of the entire earth. In this perspective, it must become plain what it means to get clear about this and about much else.

The doctrine of the ideas contains living powers that still dominate us even today, even if they are entirely flat and unrecognizable. We are asking ourselves systematically about the connections from which something like the idea of the doctrine of the ideas grew.

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