Abstract

No one, including Heidegger himself, disputes that he has completed a turn in the development of his thinking. Roughly put, this leads from human existence as something to be analyzed in phenomenological and transcendental philosophy to the “Being” which is to be proclaimed directly in its concealment and disclosure. Above all others, Löwith and Schulz have proposed the thesis that this turn involves at least a reinterpretation of the original tendency, if not an inversion or an erosion. Löwith’s book on Heidegger gives a hint of the judgment presently widespread, that the latter has fallen back from his significant beginning in Being and Time and has stopped being a philosopher in order to give himself over to the mysticism of Being. According to Schulz, however, the turn has world-historical significance: Heidegger’s essay “What is Metaphysics?” is not merely the end of his first period of work, but is even “the metaphysical finale of traditional metaphysics.”