Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Martin Heidegger

to the field of that for which it is the task of philosophy to give a foundation, not only knowing in the manner of the theoretical knowledge of the sciences but also other forms of knowing—practical knowledge, both technical and moral—then it will be clear that the foundation of all these sciences must be called “science.”

      This view of philosophy, which has flourished since Descartes, has been more or less clearly and thoroughly developed. It attempted to justify itself with recourse to ancient philosophy, which also conceived of itself as a knowing, indeed as the highest knowledge. This concept of philosophy as the science became increasingly dominant from the nineteenth century to the present. This took place, not on the basis of the inner wealth and original impulses of philosophizing, but rather—as in neo-Kantianism—out of perplexity over the proper task of philosophy. It appears to have been deprived of this perplexity because the sciences have occupied all fields of reality. Thus, nothing was left for philosophy except to become the science of these sciences, a task which was taken up with increasing confidence, since it seemed to have the support of Kant, Descartes, and even Plato.

      But it is only with Husserl that this conception of the essence of philosophy—“in the spirit of the most radical scientificality”¹—takes on a positive, independent, and radical shape: With this conception of philosophy, “I am restoring the most original idea of philosophy, which has been the foundation for our European philosophy and science ever since its first concrete formulation by Plato, and which names an inalienable task for philosophy.”²

      And yet if we proceed from this connection between philosophy and the sciences and from philosophy conceived as science, we do not comprehend why for German Idealism philosophy is the science. From this vantage point we also do not comprehend the ancient determination of the essence of philosophy. Granted that the tradition of modern philosophy was alive for Fichte, for Schelling, and for German Idealism generally, philosophy for them and especially for Hegel does not become the science because it should supply the ultimate justification for all sciences and for all ways of knowing. The real reason lies in impulses more radical than that of grounding knowledge: they are concerned with overcoming finite knowledge and attaining infinite knowledge. For it is possible to meet the task of laying the foundation for the sciences, of realizing the idea of a rigorous scientificality of knowing and cognition, without regard for this specific problematic peculiar to German Idealism, namely, how philosophy unfolds of itself as absolute knowledge. If the task of founding the sciences—grasping its own intention more or less clearly—presses in the direction of absolute knowledge, then the above-named task would cease to exist and would lose its own distinctive mark. For then it is not absolute knowledge because it lays the foundation for the sciences, but rather it can be this foundation-laying in this sense only insofar as it tries to found itself as absolute knowledge. But founding absolute knowledge is a task which has nothing to do with founding sciences. In the course of our interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we shall see and understand what is positively required and what decisions must be made from the very beginning for the founding of absolute knowledge.

      In any case, we must from the very beginning confront the confusion that today very easily emerges if one connects current attempts to found philosophy as the first and essential science with Hegel and to regard him as confirming them. When we read in the preface to the Phenomenology that “the true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth” and “to help bring philosophy closer to the form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title love of knowing and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do,”³ and when Hegel states similar things elsewhere, then the word science has a different ring altogether, and its concept an entirely different meaning. And in fact, this meaning of the concept of science arises from and is the final development of that approach which Western philosophy already adopted in antiquity as its guiding question. In contrast to this very intrinsic intention of bringing the guiding problem of ancient Western philosophy to its completion, the propensity toward laying the foundation of the sciences and toward the thus oriented formation of philosophy as rigorous science is of lesser significance.

      But the guiding problem of Western philosophy is the question, “What is a being?” The shaping of this question stands in an inner, de facto relation to λόγος, νοῦς, ratio, thinking, reason, and knowledge. This does not mean primarily and simply that the question, “What is a being?” is dealt with by an intellectual procedure and is known theoretically. Rather, the thesis according to which the inquiry into beings is related to λόγος says something about the factual content of this question, namely, that a being as a being, i.e., regarding its being [Sein], is grasped from the λόγος and as λόγος. It maintains that fixing an interconnection between a being, ὄν, and λόγος already represents a decisive (not a random) answer to the guiding question of philosophy.

      This answer, which was of necessity prepared at the start of ancient philosophy, was brought to completion in a radical way by Hegel. That is, by really carrying through the answer, he brought to real completion the task which was implied in ancient philosophy. (Accordingly, a being as such, the actual in its genuine and whole reality, is the idea, or the concept. The concept, however, is the power of time, i.e., the pure concept annuls time.⁴ In other words, the problem of being is properly conceived only when time is made to disappear.) The Hegelian philosophy expresses this disappearance of time by conceiving philosophy as the science or as absolute knowledge.

      Now, in claiming that philosophy is not science, I am saying that, considering the actual content of philosophy, its guiding question cannot be left in the form that it had for the ancients, nor, consequently, can it be left to stand on the foundation provided by Hegel’s problematic. Thus, I am suggesting parenthetically that philosophy can find its way back into its fundamental problems less than ever as long as it is primarily conceived on the model of the idea of a rigorous scientificality and in terms of the founding of knowledge and of the sciences.

      By seeing the task of philosophy as lying in the thesis that “philosophy is not a science” (a thesis which sounds negative but whose positive character comes clearly to the fore in the title of my book Being and Time), I am not suggesting that philosophy should be delivered over to fanaticism and to the proclamation of any opinions about the world whatsoever (in other words, what currently carries the eminent title of “existential philosophy”). In this view, all strict conceptuality and every genuine problem are reduced to the level of mere technique and schematic. It was never my idea to preach an “existential philosophy.” Rather, I have been concerned with renewing the question of ontology—the most central problem of Western philosophy—the question of being, which relates to λόγος not only in terms of method [Mittel] but also in terms of content. One cannot decide whether or not philosophy is the science by considering some epistemological criterion or other. This decision can be made only from out of the actual content and the inner necessities of the first and last problem of philosophy—the question of being. If we suggest that philosophy cannot and should not be the science, then we are also not saying that philosophy should be made a matter of whim. Instead we are saying that philosophy is to be freed for the task which always confronts it whenever philosophy decides to turn into work and become actuality: It has become free to be what it is: philosophy.

      Philosophy should strike an alliance neither with the scientific nor with the unscientific, but rather simply with the matter itself, which remains one and the same from Parmenides to Hegel. And what about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? We should not say offhand that they are not philosophers; much less should we hurriedly say that they are philosophers and thus are part of the genuine history of philosophy. Perhaps in both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—and we cannot take them seriously enough—something has been realized which in fact is not philosophy, something for which we as yet have no concept. Therefore, in order to understand them and their influence, it is crucial that we search for that concept instead of pitting them against philosophy. We must keep the possibility open that the time to come, as well as our own time, remains with no real philosophy. Such a lack would not be at all bad.

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