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IS HEIDEGGER A NIHILIST? T HE shift in accent which occurs in the works posterior to 1930 marks Heidegger's concentration on developing the positive side of the doctrine of finite Being. Viewed thus positively, the Being revealed by the Dasein's existence is historical. Consequently, the sum-total of the historical destiny of mankind composes the immeasurably rich treasury of concrete human possibility, which, in the form of the progressive illumination of the things that are, can be called their Being. But because the Dasein is finite, the negative element, so strongly emphasized by Heidegger in Was ist Metaphysik? cannot be ignored, but joins with the positive to weave a chiaroscuro picture of a revelation of the things that are that is at the same time always a dissimulation. In the Postscript to Was ist Metaphysik?, written in 19M3, some 13 years after the Inaugural Lecture itself, Heidegger seeks to equilibriate the black and the white of what was said in the original discussion of the Nothing. After having admitted that Was ist Metaphysik? is thought" in transition" which has not borne its full positive fruit and which remains too much in reaction against the traditional ontology, Heidegger seeks to show that what was written there is nevertheless basically sound. To put the earlier doctrine into clear perspective , Heidegger proposes to allay three" misgivings" that have arisen concerning the work, with the intention of showing that the lecture may, and indeed should, in each case be interpreted in a way that leads past the forbidding negative assertions to a positive doctrine of Being. These misgivings are of particular interest, for they not only show the points about which the later Heidegger has become sensitive, but in the answers furnished to each problem we are provided with a· vivid demonstration of the advances which the later Heidegger has made in coming into full, positive possession of the ontology he would found in breaking with the past. 302 IS HEIDEGGER A NIHILIST? 303 The three misgivings are these: (1) Having made "nothing " (das Nichts) the subject of metaphysics, the lecture becomes the last word in Nihilism; (2) A philosophy of "Angst " paralyzes the will to act; (3) The anti-logicism of the lecture leads to a philosophy of pure feeling.1 Let us examine the author's answer to each misgiving separately. 1. After reviewing the analysis in Was ist Metaphysik? that led to the affirmation of the Nothing, Heidegger seeks to forestall any possible nihilistic interpretation of his intentions. It would be immature ... to adopt the facile explanation that Nothing is merely the nugatory, equating it with the non-existent (das Wesenlose). We should rather equip ourselves and make ready for one thing only: to experience in Nothing the vastness of that which gives every being the warrant to be. That is Being itself. Without Being, whose unfathomable and unmanifest essence is vouchsafed us by the Nothing in essential dread, everything that "is" would remain in Beinglessness (Sein losigkeit). But this is not a nugatory nothing, assuming that it is the truth of Being that Being never essentializes itself without Seienden, and Seienden cannot be without Being.2 The opening of a transcendental horizon is not, indeed, a nugatory nothing, just as it is not either the work of a " something," -a Seiende in its Seiendheit. But when the philosopher wishes to introduce into history the proper presence of the Presence that opens an horizon, and he wishes to distinguish his conception of " Being " from the traditional metaphysical conception which always begins with things as things, then clearly the first effort at expression is bound to be negative.... Being is NOT Seiendheit. Even when Heidegger affirms that it is Anguish which reveals that the Nothing is at the heart of the transcendence of Being, this is not nihilistic in the visual sense. Indeed, anguish is the grasp of the radical freedom of our finitude, but it is that freedom in and through its finitude which makes possible that presence of the things-that-are which we call "Being." The accent then is positive when Heidegger 1 Was ist Metaphysik? p. 45. ~ Was ist Metaphyaik? p. 46. 804 THOMAS D. LANGAN...

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