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sometimes phenomenology (still regarded by its founder as an exact
science) is supposed to help. To the "knowledge of power and
achievement" of scientific research, presumably born of the human
will to power, Max Scheler opposes the knowledge of culture and
salvation. Others, again, would regard
all
proven scientific procedure
as distortion and violation of the given and explain it as arbitrary
convention, as if anything could
be
achieved thereby for the security
of values. The "breaking of the power of the intellect"
in
favor of
a "more authentic asking"5 becomes the slog.an in a struggle in which
the means are not always scrupulously chosen.
It
is in this spiritual atmosphere that the basic anti-objectivistic
attitude of modem existential philosophy has its origin, while Kierke–
gaard's battle against Hegel's objective idealism-as he understood
it--sprang from other motives. The objective world of "what is,"
the world of human knowledge and action, appears in Heidegger as
the realm of homelessness and hopelessness. It is fashioned by the
aggressive will and by calculating arrangement and reaches its peak
in technology in gadgets that can be brought out, on order, as thought
out. Man's "Fall" into a world of objects takes place for the first
time, however, not in the modem positivistic world, but in objectiviz–
ing metaphysics ever since Plato and Aristotle: from these two comes
the "technical" interpretation of thought as "the process of reflection
in the service of doing and making." Even the language of science,
yes, even the language of everyday, is corrupted. It entrusts itself to
"our mere willing and contriving as an instrument of mastery over
the real"; it "falls into devising arteries of traffic from object to
object in contempt of every boundary." In "gossip"
it
becomes the
means by which the self is lost in the impersonal "they," in the con–
ventions of mass society, the inauthenticity of which suffocates and
levels off everything essential. Although Heidegger frequently insists
that he does not mean to "evaluate," these conceptions of his must
clearly be felt to be evaluations-as F.
J.
v. Rintelen has seen them
in his subtle and scholarly book.
6
Out of this world of night and this death of meaning, man must
be redeemed. In the early Heidegger the pathos of the awakener still
prevails: who, through dread, would frighten the forgetters of Being
out of their false securities, who would prepare them for the
unum
necessarium
of being themselves, and of authenticity-while, later,
