i

A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics

edited by
Richard Polt and Gregory Fried

Yale University Press

New Haven and London
2001
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Contents

Editors’ Introduction
Bibliographical Note

The Question of Being

“Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics,” Thomas Sheehan

“The Appearance of Metaphysics,” Charles E. Scott
“Being as Appearing: Retrieving the Greek Experience of Phusis,” Charles Guignon
“The Question of Nothing,” Richard Polt
“The Scattered Logos: Metaphysics and the Logical Prejudice,” Daniel Dahlstrom
“The Name on the Edge of Language: A Complication in Heidegger’s Theory of Language and
its Consequences,” Dieter Thomä

Heidegger and the Greeks

“What’s in a Word? Heidegger’s Grammar and Etymology of ‘Being’,” Gregory Fried

“Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis in Introduction to Metaphysics,” Susan Schoenbohm
“Heidegger’s Antigones,” Clare Pearson Geiman

Politics and Ethics

“The Ontological Decline of the West,” Michael E. Zimmerman

“Conflict is the Father of All Things: Heidegger’s Polemical Conception of Politics,” Hans Sluga
“Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich,” Theodore Kisiel
“At the Crossroads of Freedom: Ethics Without Values,” Frank Schalow

About the Contributors

Index
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Editors’ Introduction

Martin Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, delivered as a lecture course in 1935

and first published, with revisions, in 1953, has long stood as a familiar landmark for students of
Heidegger’s thought. It is known for its incisive analysis of the Western understanding of Being,
its original interpretations of Greek philosophy and poetry, and its vehement political statements.
Our new translation of Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 2000)
provided an occasion to invite a group of scholars to reconsider this classic text. But aside from
this occasion, the text itself invites renewed attention. Its perhaps familiar phrases contain
unfamiliar possibilities--surprising, even disturbing thoughts. Furthermore, nearly a half-century
after its publication, our own greater knowledge demands that we return to the Introduction with
new eyes. First, the ongoing publication of the Gesamtausgabe or collected edition of
Heidegger’s writings (1975-) offers us the opportunity to locate the Introduction to Metaphysics
in the context of his developing work. The Gesamtausgabe includes Heidegger’s other lecture
courses of 1919-1945 as well as private texts, such as the Contributions to Philosophy (1936-38),
that contain his most serious and concentrated thoughts. Secondly, we now know a great deal
about Heidegger’s political acts and opinions during the Third Reich, and can benefit from a large
body of reflections on the meaning of his connections to fascism. Finally, the world’s
philosophical thinking has continued its slow course--a course that perhaps cannot be termed
progress but does generate new perspectives. From these perspectives, Heidegger’s lectures
become relevant in unsuspected ways. It is by providing this ever-renewed relevance that the
Introduction to Metaphysics proves to be a genuine classic.
The essays in this volume are grouped into three main areas: the question of Being,
Heidegger and the Greeks, and politics and ethics. These themes are all related, for in
Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger tries to provoke his audience into a confrontation with
Being by way of an encounter with Greek thinking and poetry--and this project is charged with
practical urgency. Because the themes of the Introduction are tightly interwoven, readers will find
overlaps and echoes among these essays. They will also find some disagreements, for we have
not attempted to impose uniformity on our contributors’ range of views and approaches.

The question of Being

Our first group of essays considers the overriding question of Heidegger’s thought: the
problem of how we understand what it means for any being, including ourselves, to be. This
understanding of Being gives us the status of Dasein--the entity who constitutes a “there,” a site
where beings as a whole have meaning. For Heidegger, our understanding of Being is woven into
the fabric of our actions, thoughts and speech, and it is intimately involved in the great turning
points of our history. The question of Being is also the question of appearing and nothing, and the
question of logic and language.
In the essay that opens this volume, “Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to
Introduction to Metaphysics,” Thomas Sheehan puts Heidegger’s lectures into the context of his
thought as a whole. The trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking has often been interpreted in terms of
a Kehre or “turn” that separates the thinking of Being and Time from works of the 1930s and
later, with Introduction to Metaphysics often seen as a landmark in this transition. Sheehan argues
that this scheme is misleading in that it obscures the enduring theme of Heidegger’s thinking:
“the radically inverted meaning of being, grounded in finitude, that stands over against the
metaphysical ideal of being as full presence and intelligibility.” Despite Heidegger’s critique of
the metaphysical tradition, Sheehan finds many continuities not only throughout Heidegger’s
thinking, but between Heidegger and metaphysics. While Sheehan provides highly detailed
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references to Heidegger’s texts and to his predecessors in the metaphysical tradition, the clarity of
his fundamental thesis and argument will make his essay accessible even to the reader who is new
to Heidegger.
In contrast to Sheehan’s thesis, Charles E. Scott’s “The Appearance of Metaphysics”
emphasizes the disjunction between Heideggerian thinking and its metaphysical predecessors.
Scott takes Heidegger’s lecture course, particularly its opening moves, as an opportunity to
explore how metaphysics can lead beyond itself. Metaphysics consists of “ways of thinking in
which people expect to find a grounding way of being that gives an enduring presence to
originate, sustain, and connect all ways of life.” This metaphysical foundationalism tries to
obviate the multi-relational, embodied, and mortal character of disclosure. By revealing the
history of metaphysics in a nonmetaphysical way, Heidegger’s lectures open the possibility that
metaphysics might be “turned away from its own predisposition to find a deathless ground for
truth and knowledge.” We then might discover not only a new way of thinking--a thinking that
attends to phusis as the event of appearance and emergence, for example--but also new ways of
life.
Charles Guignon, in “Being as Appearing: Retrieving the Greek Experience of Phusis,”
also takes phusis as an indication of a new kind of thinking about Being--an “event ontology” as
opposed to the traditional “substance ontology.” Guignon examines the way in which
Heidegger’s interpretation of phusis unites Being with appearance, becoming, and strife. He then
shows that an event ontology can prove fruitful in interpreting artworks, history, and human
beings themselves, allowing us to understand ourselves not as things, but as disclosive
happenings. He closes by considering Heidegger’s account of truth as appearing or
“unconcealment,” and tackles the difficult question of the sense in which an understanding of
Being can be “true.”
Taking up a theme announced in the first line of Introduction to Metaphysics, Richard
Polt’s “The Question of Nothing” explores Being by way of its constant companion and rival.
Polt places Heidegger’s references to “Nothing” (das Nichts) in the context of the history of
metaphysics and the development of Heidegger’s thought, showing that both Heidegger and his
predecessors use the term in a variety of ways. In order to make sense of this complex issue, Polt
distinguishes between “the Being of beings” (what it means for beings to be) and “Be-ing” (the
happening in which the Being of beings becomes accessible to Dasein). He argues that at the
heart of Heidegger’s uses of “Nothing” is an insight into the “temporal finitude” of both Dasein
and Be-ing. Thanks to our entanglement in “a past that we cannot change and a future that is
subject to death,” we are able to receive a fragile and contingent meaning of Being.
In “The Scattered Logos: Metaphysics and the Logical Prejudice,” Daniel Dahlstrom
considers the critique of logic that runs through many of Heidegger’s works, including the
Introduction to Metaphysics. In Heidegger’s account, the Western tradition inverts the relation
between thinking and Being. Thinking was once a logos that responded to the primal logos (or
“gathering”) of Being itself, but thinking has now become a logic (a theory of assertion) that
presumes to dictate to Being. Dahlstrom not only explores this argument, but goes beyond
Heidegger in order to consider two possible responses to it: the position that logic is
metaphysically neutral, and the position that conformity to logic is a prerequisite for all truth.
Dieter Thomä’s essay turns to logos in the sense of language. Disagreeing with the
unitarian interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophical career that is presented by Thomas Sheehan
and by Heidegger himself, Thomä reads Heidegger’s thinking as punctuated by several shifts. On
this reading, Introduction to Metaphysics represents a brief stage in Heidegger’s path that, when it
comes to the question of language, has advantages over both his earlier and his later positions.
Both before and after the Introduction, argues Thomä, Heidegger falls prey to a dichotomy
between “context” (our entanglement in a world, a totality of significations) and “name” (the
affirmation of the unique Being of ourselves or other entities). The conception of naming in the
Introduction to Metaphysics, despite its obscurities, has the merit of letting naming make room
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for beings in their mystery and uniqueness. Thomä suggests that there are ethical dimensions to
this thought that Heidegger himself does not pursue.

Heidegger and the Greeks

It is by way of a confrontation with the Greek beginnings of metaphysics that the

Introduction to Metaphysics develops its distinctive approach to the question of Being. Such a
confrontation, as Auseinandersetzung, is a respectful yet critical retrieval of the latent possibilities
of the Greek inception. This inception can be discerned, according to Heidegger, not only in the
fragmentary texts of the early Greek thinkers, but in the work of Greek poets and in the
vocabulary of the Greek language itself. The essays in the second part of our anthology focus on
Heidegger’s confrontation with Greek language, thinking, and tragedy.
Gregory Fried’s “What’s in a Word? Heidegger’s Grammar and Etymology of ‘Being’”
explains how Heidegger’s exploration of language in the second chapter of the Introduction goes
beyond conventional linguistics in order to evoke the Greek understanding of Being as constancy
and presence. Fried then compares Heidegger’s efforts to the philosophical-linguistic
investigations of Charles Kahn, particularly in reference to the theory of linguistic relativism--that
is, the position that “the very question of Being itself is an accident of the Indo-European family
of languages.” Despite their differences, both Kahn and Heidegger show that there is a way of
linking Greek reflection on Being to the Greek language without reducing metaphysical problems
to accidents of language and thus falling into linguistic relativism. Furthermore, argues Fried, we
must learn to see the question of Being as a question that is relevant to all languages, and that
calls for detailed exploration of the ways in which various languages serve as the “house of
Being.”
In “Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis in Introduction to Metaphysics,” Susan
Schoenbohm traces Heidegger’s nuanced and shifting readings of this key Greek word. Phusis
serves as the crux of his confrontation with the Greek understanding of Being and as the key to
his interpretations of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Yet the notion of phusis seems deeply
ambiguous. Does phusis name a particular sort of entity, or beings as such, or the meaning of “to
be,” or the event in which such a meaning emerges? Schoenbohm argues that the Introduction to
Metaphysics succeeds in developing “a way of thinking of the meaning of phusis which points
beyond the ambiguities of the meaning of the word (but not beyond the questioning) to an
understanding of being without substance that transforms an interpretation of being as permanent
nature.” Such an understanding has “revolutionary consequences for our understanding both of
‘nature’ in the more restricted modern sense, and of beings as a whole, including ourselves.” As
Guignon’s and Scott’s essays attest, the notion of phusis can provide a powerful impetus for our
own meditations.
Clare Pearson Geiman, in “Heidegger’s Antigones,” provides an interpretation of
Introduction to Metaphysics’ striking reading of Sophocles, contrasting it with the reading that
Heidegger was to give in 1942, in his lecture course on Hölderlin’s “The Ister.” The 1935 reading
appears to glorify the violent, creative acts of great individuals, including the statesman, thinker,
and poet. But Geiman argues that the 1942 reading reveals a decisive shift in Heidegger’s
thinking, in which Heidegger comes to interpret poetry in a way that is fundamentally opposed to
techne. In this move, Heidegger finally breaks free of the lingering subjectivism of his earlier
thinking--and thus moves beyond the tendencies that had once attracted him to totalitarian
politics. His later reading of Antigone suggests “a radical departure from politics as we have
understood it up to now, that is, as the human agent’s personal or collective attempt to
systematically order and control both physical and human nature.”
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Politics and Ethics

The political dimension of Introduction to Metaphysics is unmistakable--not only because

of its brief, disturbing reference to the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism, but
because of its continuing insistence on linking the question of Being to “the spiritual fate of the
West.” The lecture course can be read as a concerted attempt to revolutionize the Nazi revolution-
-that is, to deepen it by purging it of its own metaphysical presuppositions and bringing it into a
genuine relation to the Greek inception. Thus, Heidegger repeatedly praises recent developments
in German life, only to brand them superficial in the next breath. This political rhetoric is
accompanied by a critique of morality and “the ought” as they are traditionally conceived. The
contributors to the third part of this anthology explore the details and contexts of Heidegger’s
conception of politics and ethics--not in order to reduce his thought to his behavior, but in order
to do justice to the many aspects and implications of his thinking.
Michael E. Zimmerman’s “The Ontological Decline of the West” explores the dynamic
of inception, decline, and fall that is at work in Heidegger’s understanding of history. This
dynamic plays a crucial part not only in Heidegger’s account of the history of metaphysics, but in
his interpretation of the political situation of Germany and of the technological age. Zimmerman
compares Heidegger’s vision of history to the thought of Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline
of the West. Despite their differences, both Heidegger and Spengler were participants in a
widespread reaction against the liberal-progressive interpretation of history propounded by the
neo-Kantians, among others. Zimmerman argues that, for all its insights, Heidegger’s
understanding of history fails to do justice to the “nobility” of modernity--“its effort to foster
individual personal development by emancipating humankind from material deprivation, political
authoritarianism, and religious dogmatism.”
In “Conflict is the Father of All Things: Heidegger’s Polemical Conception of Politics,”
Hans Sluga investigates the emphatic yet ambiguous political thinking of Introduction to
Metaphysics, in its link to Heidegger’s reading of early Greek thought. Heidegger embraces the
Heraclitean concept of polemos, or confrontation, not only as a key to Being but also as a key to
authentic political action. As Sluga puts it, “Everything given calls . . . for a creative
transcendence through force. It calls also for men of force able to bring about such
transcendence.” Sluga compares such notions to the polemical political thought of Carl Schmitt,
for whom politics is based on the distinction between friend and enemy. Sluga concludes with a
sympathetic account of Heidegger’s critique of absolute values. Despite the error of Heidegger’s
entanglement with National Socialism, his thought still offers the appealing possibility of “an
‘ethics’ that shuns authoritative oughts and goods, and sets out, instead, to find particular and
historical paradigms to follow--an ‘ethics,’ we might say, that envisions possibilities of living
rather than injunctions, constraints, fixed and unquestionable blueprints of life.”
Theodore Kisiel, in “Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich,” analyzes
not only the notorious geopolitical remarks in Heidegger’s lecture course, but their counterparts
in other lecture courses and notes of the mid-thirties. Furthermore, Kisiel investigates the
controversies that were generated by the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953, and
alludes to Heidegger’s relation to companion thinkers such as Spengler, Max Scheler, Ernst
Jünger, and Friedrich Naumann. Kisiel’s “intertextual” approach provides a rich and multifaceted
account of Heidegger’s geopolitics--that is, his interpretation of his nation “in its geographical
location, spiritual position, and poietic-ontological site” at the “heart of Europe.”
In “At the Crossroads of Freedom: Ethics Without Values,” Frank Schalow sheds light on
a brief but crucial section of Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger’s discussion of “the ought.”
Anyone who wishes to reflect on Heidegger’s strengths or inadequacies as an ethical thinker must
consider his critique of the concept of value, and understand why his rejection of values is not
necessarily tantamount to nihilism. Schalow provides the background necessary to understand
this dimension of Heidegger’s thought. He begins with Heidegger’s criticisms of the value
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theories of Scheler and Heinrich Rickert, and proceeds to Heidegger’s developed account of the
history of Being and the place of values within this history. Schalow’s conclusion points out the
limitations of Heidegger’s own views as well as the potential promise of his thinking for our
future ethical reflection: “the presupposition of ethics, or freedom, must be rediscovered at the
historical juncture where Being reveals itself to human existence.”

In quoting Introduction to Metaphysics, all the contributors have used our translation as
their first point of reference. However, they have been given free rein to modify the translation in
accordance with their own reading of the text and their own rhetorical predilections. In particular,
several contributors have chosen to translate Sein as “being” rather than “Being”; Theodore
Kisiel prefers “be-ing,” and Susan Schoenbohm and Charles Scott favor a lowercase “dasein” in
addition to a lowercase “being.” Such differences in translation are a necessary part of
philosophical interpretation and conversation.