"The Twisted Handiwork of Egypt" and Heidegger's Question Concerning Culture

In the first paragraph of his essay "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger says something of utmost importance for and about our times. In this paper, I want to say why this is the case. The paragraph reads:

In metaphysics reflection [die Besinnung] is accomplished concerning the essence [das Wesen] of what is [des Seienden] and a decision [eine Entscheidung] takes place regarding the essence of truth [das Wesen der Wahrheit]. Metaphysics grounds an age [ein Zeitalter], in that through a specific interpretation of what is [eine bestimmte Auslegung des Seienden] and through a specific comprehension of truth [eine bestimmte Auffassung der Wahrheit] it gives to that age the basis [Grund] upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena [Erscheinungen] that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended in them. Reflection is the courage [der Mut] to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.¹

Before we get to this critical paragraph itself, we need to think about the title "The Age of the World Picture" and its several terms, as well as about the expression "our times." First, the title: the days of the fashionability of the term "world picture" are, as I write at the start of the 21st century, long gone. That term seems to us, today, to mark an historicism that is already an item for investigation by the history of ideas. It may have begun with Spengler, but it had its heyday among such writers as Karl Mannheim ("On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung"), E. M. W. Tillyard (The Elizabethan World Picture), Lucien Goldmann (The Hidden God and its "vision du monde") and Michel Foucault (The Order of Things and its "epistémé"), not to mention the whole detour through "ideology."² And no doubt the great forebear of the "world picture" is Herder's Volksgeist.³ But cultural historicights e leve first paragraph of a paper about the age of the world picture. Still less, by employing the word "age" or "time" (die Zeit), is he trying to out-historicise this historicism by, as it were, simply confining it to its own age or time. This is, then, far from a kind of meta-historicism.

The age or time that Heidegger does bring before us in this essay is no less than the whole of modernity (Neuzeit), the new age, the new time. And its inception is marked, as in so many instances for Heidegger, by the Cartesian cogito. The time or age, then, is the time from Descartes' Meditations (1641)—perhaps even before—to Heidegger's present (1938)—perhaps even beyond. And what marks this age of modernity is its world picture. But, if this is not the world picture of the historicists, then what?

This age of modernity, for Heidegger, is a time in which there simply is a world picture; or, rather, in which the world becomes a picture: "The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture" [Der Grundvorgang der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt als Bild] (AWP 134; 94). So, "world picture" is to be read as "world as picture." And, perhaps echoing Schopenhauer via Nietzsche, the world as picture is equivalent to the world as representation. The difference, however, is that while Schopenhauer makes an explicit philosophy on the grounding idea that "The world is my representation"⁴—that everything that is is an object for a subject and nothing more (such that things can never be, strictly, "in themselves")—Heidegger gives this "picturing" an entirely different status. With Heidegger, the picturing relation to the world, the "philosophy of representation," is always already implicit in all the thinking of modernity from Descartes to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's explicitation of it—which he calls "this thought . . . which has been sought for a very long time under the name of philosophy, and...