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ly steeped in the romantic mood of Schopenhauer and Wagner, he was
also a great anti-romantic thinker. His personal break with Wagner
was also a turning away from the apotheosis of romanticism in Wagner's
music dramas and a turning back to the intellectual heritage of the
Enlightenment. "This Enlightenment we must now advance further–
unconcerned with the fact that there has been a 'great revolution'
against it." Thus existentialism is not merely the counter-Enlightenment;
it
is
also a form of counter-romanticism. And it commands a respectful
hearing, I believe, precisely because it has tried to render intelligible
in a critical, philosophical discourse what was previously expressed or
hidden in the romantic discourse of religion and poetry.
Now how do we make things intelligible except by throwing the
light of intelligence upon them; i.e., by thinking as clearly, lucidly, and
self-critically as possible? This ideal is not a characteristic of irrational
man.
If
we approximate it anywhere, making due allowance for the
finite and limited powers of man, it is in the dimension of human in–
telligence, or in the
lumen naturale,
the natural light of reason in the
old-fashioned language of the Enlightenment. Heidegger himself ap–
pealed to this
lumen naturale
in order to define "truth" as "unhidden–
ness"-a state of being in which the original, true qualities and mean–
ings in the human world
(Dasein)
emerge from hiding into openness,
from darkness into light. And surely
Sein und Zeit,
a cornerstone in
contemporary existentialism, is the product of a powerful intelligence
as is Sartre's
Being and Nothingness.
Both works represent a highly
concentrated effort of hard thinking ; both mobilize and exercise the
resources of human intelligence, not the dark powers and the blindspots
of irrational man; both belong to a "rational" discourse even though
the kind of thinking they employ and exhibit differs from that in
science and traditional philosophy.
When, in his later works, Heidegger began to practice phil–
osophical "poetry" instead of painstaking intellectual and existential
analysis, the rational discourse of
Sein und Zeit
dissolved into ob–
scurantism, word-magic, and verbal necromancy. I know that to some
people these esoteric mysteries discovered by the late Heidegger are
bewitching and profound truths; I find them most unintelligible. They
make no sense because they no longer serve to enlighten, but to ob–
scure. And when, in 1933, he discovered the
Fuehrer,
or the Nazi move–
ment, at the "Ground of Being"-those who believed in the "chthonic
unconscious" fell into the same trap--the nonsense was disgusting.
It is to the credit of Karl Jaspers that he saw, during those years,
that the task of existential philosophy was not
to
sell irrational man
