Introduction to Metaphysics

Overview

Introduction to Metaphysics is two hundred and sixty pages, delivered as a lecture course at Freiburg in the summer of 1935 and published, with some revision, in 1953. Heidegger said he issued it because it made the ground of Being and Time easier to reach, and for most readers that is true: the sentences are shorter, the argument is carried by examples, and the vocabulary of the earlier book is largely absent.

Do not mistake accessible for easy. Heidegger writes a German full of coinages and hyphens, leans on etymology at every turn, and expects you to accept that the difference between two Greek words is a philosophical event. Reading him requires a tolerance for being told that a question you thought was simple has been misposed for two and a half millennia.

The political question cannot be bracketed. Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, served as rector of Freiburg, gave a rectoral address welcoming the new order, and never publicly repudiated any of it afterwards. These lectures were given two years later. When he published them in 1953 he left in a phrase about the inner truth and greatness of the movement, adding a parenthesis that redefines what he meant by it. Readers have disagreed ever since about whether the philosophy is contaminated, whether the contamination is total, and whether a reader can take the questions and leave the man. What is not arguable is that the sentence is in the book and that he chose to keep it.

The argument

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? The opening question, which Heidegger calls the first of all questions in rank, and which he says every person is grazed by at least once, in despair, in rejoicing, or in boredom.

He then does something unexpected with it. The question is not answered and is not meant to be. Its function is to open a prior one: in asking why there is anything rather than nothing, we use the word is constantly and have no idea what it means. So the real question is what Being means, and Heidegger’s charge is that this question has been forgotten.

The forgetting. His history runs like this. The early Greeks, Parmenides and Heraclitus, had a live experience of Being as physis, which he takes to mean emerging and standing forth rather than nature in the modern sense. With Plato and Aristotle, Being became a matter of what a thing is, an idea or a substance, and the question slid into questions about beings. The Romans translated the Greek words into Latin, physis into natura, logos into ratio, aletheia into veritas, and the translations lost what the originals carried. Two thousand years of metaphysics then proceeded as an inquiry into beings conducted with immense skill and without ever raising the question it depended on.

Heidegger calls this forgetting the fundamental event of the West, and he ties it to the present: technology, the reduction of everything to resource, and what he calls the darkening of the world and the flight of the gods are its consequences rather than separate problems.

The grammar and etymology of Being. A long central chapter on the word itself: its grammatical form as an infinitive, its inflections, and its Greek and Indo-European roots. This section tries most readers’ patience and it is doing real work in Heidegger’s terms, since his method is to recover the question by recovering what the language once carried.

Four distinctions. The book’s spine. Being has been marked off in the tradition against four things, and each opposition reveals something.

Being and becoming: what is, as against what merely passes, which is Parmenides against Heraclitus, and Heidegger argues the two were closer than the textbooks say.

Being and seeming: the Greek experience in which appearance and being are not simply opposed, since a thing shows itself and can also dissemble, and truth as aletheia means unconcealment rather than correspondence between a statement and a fact.

Being and thinking: the longest and most important. Here Heidegger reads Parmenides on the belonging-together of thinking and Being, and then the ode from Sophocles’ Antigone, the one beginning with the word deinon, usually rendered as wonderful or terrible. Heidegger translates it as uncanny and reads the chorus as a statement about the human being as the strangest of all things: the one that breaks out, crosses the sea, wears down the earth, is everywhere underway and nowhere at home, and is the site where beings are brought into the open. This is the best writing in the book and the passage most worth the price of entry.

Being and the ought: how values became a separate realm once Being had been reduced to mere presence, and why Heidegger regards the language of values as a symptom rather than a solution.

How to read it

Read chapter 1 and chapter 4 and, if the rest defeats you, stop there. Chapter 4 contains the Antigone reading, and it is the most rewarding forty pages Heidegger wrote for a general audience.

Use the Fried and Polt translation. Their notes explain the puns and the coinages, they flag where Heidegger’s etymology is dubious, and they discuss the 1935 text against the 1953 publication.

Expect the etymology to be contested. Classicists have objected to a good deal of it, and the question of whether the Greek words mean what Heidegger needs them to mean is a real scholarly dispute, not a quibble.

Treat the question as the gift and the answers with more caution. Heidegger’s achievement is to make the question of Being feel urgent and to show that a tradition can lose a question while refining its answers. What he builds on that is far more disputable.

Read the political material with the history in front of you and do not resolve it too quickly. Some readers hold that the philosophy is a fascist philosophy from the root; others that the man’s politics were disastrous and the questions remain good; the publication of the Black Notebooks from 2014, with their antisemitism, made the first position harder to dismiss. Arendt, Levinas and Derrida each worked out their own answer and none of them is simple.

Questions it raises

• Can the question why is there anything rather than nothing have an answer, and what would one look like?
• Heidegger says philosophy has forgotten the question of Being while perfecting its answers about beings. Is that a diagnosis or a way of making his own project necessary?
• The argument rests heavily on what Greek words meant. What happens to it if the etymologies are wrong?
• Truth as unconcealment rather than correspondence: is that a deeper account or a change of subject?
• The reading of the Antigone ode turns wonder into uncanniness. Is that recovering something in the Greek or imposing something on it?
• He gave these lectures in 1935 and published the sentence about the movement’s inner truth in 1953. What obligations does that place on a reader now?