1    

Heidegger, Enlightenment, and Metaphysics:

The Unmasking of Science and Primacy of Being.

There appears to be a substantial confusion among many Iranian intellectuals

concerning the influence of Heidegger in Iranian political philosophy. Here, I am referring to

a community of influential and rather elite intellectuals who have been advocating a

Heideggerian approach since 1950 (Fardid, Shayegan, and Ashouri earlier, and a much larger

group of Iranian intellectuals in post-revolutionary Iran). For them, this approach offers the

key to understanding the world, as well as Iranian history and culture.

It seems that the key issue for many of these intellectuals is the concept of

metaphysics. Many such intellectuals, who harshly criticize Ahmad Fardid, make a substantial

distinction between Fardid and Heidegger upon the basis of “metaphysics.” This specific

intellectual group, almost all of whom are influenced by Marxism, argue that Heidegger’s

philosophical project was a radical critique of metaphysics. They contrast this with Fardid’s

2    

philosophy as deeply influenced by religious/Sufi ideas, and therefore embedded in

metaphysics. Upon this basis, they conclude that Fardid never really understood Heidegger.

My argument that that these intellectuals do not fully understand what Heidegger

means by metaphysics. Moreover, they confuse Marx’s and modernism’s critique of

metaphysics –which, to a large extent, represents a critique of idealism and theological

thinking - with that of Heidegger. But the Marxist/modernist and Heideggerian critiques of

metaphysics are distinctively different, and indeed they are fundamentally and mutually

opposed. Marx’s critique was a defense of materialism, affirming knowledge as embedded

within empirical and practical matters. For Marx, the making of “ideas” as a methodological

priority represented a false way of knowing, echoing Platonism, the Bible and other cosmic

meaning narratives which inherently lose sight of the everyday worker (of course, Marx

himself sometimes failed to follow this scheme). For others, Weber, Durkheim, etc., they

advocated a social analysis of all ideas, including religious and metaphysical thinking.

However, Heidegger - and in the case of Iran, almost all Heideggerians (Corbin, Fardid, etc.) -

are very hostile to sociology and modern history. This is precisely because it demystifies

their obsession with privileging “mysterious subjectivity” over the scientific method and

worldview (including the social sciences). For them, knowledge is not the product of

analytical explorations, empirical studies, or experimentation, but rather the revelation of a

hidden truth (imaginal for Corbin).

I would like to clarify that, in contrast to this Heideggerian philosophical tendency,

religious people can also be critical of metaphysics. There is nothing inherent to being

religious that predisposes one to this specifically Heideggerian point of view. Religious

individuals, too, can use the social sciences to come up with analysis of certain forms of

religious thinking and practice. What makes Heidegger or Fardid unique is their profound

3    

hostility to modern knowledge, because of which they rejected rationalism and all scientific

ways of knowing the world.

In order to clarify this point, a differentiation is required between the historical

meanings of the metaphysical and post-metaphysical worldviews.

-Historically, the metaphysical worldview, often in the form of religious thinking,

considers ideas such as myth, or the transcendental and hidden meanings of things, as real and

overarching forces, which should be seen as the fundamental basis of our reality.

-Post-metaphysical thinking, started by the enlightenment, scientific experiments, and

varieties of materialism in philosophy and the social sciences, tries to find “the real” in what

is empirically or practically in this world. Therefore, their critique of metaphysics is central

to the enlightenment’s understanding of the world. There are, of course, those in the modern

period who have challenged the presentation of modern knowledge as post-metaphysical and

are critical of this tradition. Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, and more recently,

post-modernism, exemplify this tendency. They argue that the ideas central to the

enlightenment, i.e. progress, materialism, objectivity, democracy, justice, etc., are abstract and

mythological representations which are merely imagined as real and of this world.

Here, precisely, is where there is much confusion. Some are critical of the

enlightenment because, they argue, it remains influenced by metaphysical thinking. These

individuals include Michel Foucault and John Dewey, and others who attack the

enlightenment because for them “science”, “objectivity” and the elite modern project is a

lower level myth making. At its core, this is a Nietzschean insight.

Nietzschean genealogy unmasked the lower everyday realities hidden behind lofty

eternal ideals. For example, the monotheist idea of hell, he explained in terms of “those who

are denied the real reaction, that of the deed, and who compensate with an imaginary

4    

revenge”.1 This is comparable to Marx’s dialectical unmasking of false consciousness, i.e.

eternal religion, to reveal its embeddedness in local material self-interest (the ‘new’ caliphate

in Iraq). This methodology of suspicion was inherited by Foucault. His genealogy meant a

tendency to historicize large terms (humanity, justice, freedom, truth, goodness) down to their

more banal everyday contexts, and to view human reality in terms of an unceasing play of

power. Knowledge, being part of a pervasive web of power, is modelled metaphorically on

the battlefield. To know inherently constitutes a mode of domination, and to speak to partake

of a wider order of power (i.e. for a man to call a woman a slut is not an isolated insult, but

fits within an organized gender hierarchy giving the term its powerful meaning). This entire

movement of suspicion is grounded in a modern materialist worldview. Nietzsche targeted

the ancient threat of “hell” as a fiction of the mind, and Marx targeted “religion” along similar

lines. Foucault followed their example in problematizing our most cherished values (i.e.

justice) as possibly only mental constructions. Their critiques suggested the banalization of

time, because the origins of ‘great ideas’ were mundane rather than metaphysical or divine.

But Foucault, unlike his 19th century predecessors, had an additional influence in

Heidegger. It is hence here above all that we see where Heidegger’s intervention differs

fundamentally from the Marxist or modernist critique of metaphysics. Heideggerian

influence, contrary to the Marxist tradition, sought to reinvest mental phenomena (‘great

ideas’) – and hence time - with the religious enchantment that the philosophers of suspicion

had stripped it of. This is a metaphysical stance – despite the rejection of traditional

metaphysics – and the polar opposite of the modernist or materialist tradition of critiquing

metaphysics.

This was the meaning of Heidegger’s “question of truth of being,” the “deepest of the

deep questions” and the “most originary”. He explicitly stated its religious significance for

                                                                                                                         1  Friedrich  Nietzsche,  The  Portable  Nietzsche  (New  York:  Penguin,  1982),  451.  

5    

mankind, as “the first question not chronologically, but in (ontological) rank”, which is “to

seek the ground; this means to get to the bottom.” It is the ultimate question of importance for

mankind, the “fundamental question of metaphysics” encompassing everything. It is,

moreover, a question transcending ordinary empirical perception, with a “concealed power”

and coming in moments of “great despair when all weight dwindles away from things and

things grow dark the question looms”. It comes potentially in moments of joy, angst and

boredom, essentially whenever the conscious mind is displaced. It “perhaps strikes only

once” in a lifetime, a rare opportunity given by being, and a mental state of readiness is

required for the life changing conversion not to be missed. It is therefore clearly within the

tradition of metaphysics, as a hidden and larger meaning encompassing the ordinary details of

life in its varied everyday contexts.

Moreover, it seeks in the traditional metaphysical manner to transcend these mundane

spaces, by investing them with an ultimate and unified significance. Encompassing the

mythically-hued alternatives between “originary ground” and the “abyss”, i.e. home and exile,

it transcends empirical considerations of “causality” (“mere skimming of the surface”) to

“press into the ultimate”. Clearly, Heidegger asks us to dismiss the evidence-based findings

of modern science (for instance, that we have our biological ancestors in primates) in favor of

discovering origins upon a deeper metaphysical level of being. What could be more

metaphysical than the claim that we are ‘more’ than we appear to be in the empirical world?

Is the man’s love for his daughter or his wife, as an ordinary human experience, not a wonder

enough in itself as Shakespeare suggested? In Heidegger’s sense of the word ‘being’, we are

clearly very far from the everyday empirical world that Marxism, the sociological tradition,

and modernism had in mind.

Heidegger’s view is also very far indeed from the materialist genealogy employed by

Nietzsche, to which Heidegger makes mealy mouthed allusion in the early part of Being and

6    

Time. Yet Heidegger’s vision of the “originator” claims to be precisely about the world,

encompassing the “elephants in Indian jungles” and the “chemicals on Mars”. It is only that

these elephants and chemicals must be understood by other than modern scientific means.

Here we glimpse Heidegger’s fundamental opposition to the modern scientific method (that

Nietzsche found practically fascinating and theoretically naïve, and Marx saw in near

messianic terms). Scientific knowledge, in Heidegger’s vision, is used to discredit itself.

“Stupefied” and “supposedly intelligent animals” upon a “grain of sand” in “empty space”

have “invented knowledge”. Heidegger uses modern man’s own modest post-metaphysical

self-image to ridicule him, for the purpose of displacing the secular worldview with

something we are asked to believe is spiritually superior. This claim is predicated upon praise

of man as the supposedly unique asker of the question, the “opener of being”, with a wink at

Adam and Eve’s originary naming in Eden.

Upon the at best flimsy basis of this quasi-theological image, the “question of being”

transcends the “arbitrary” and challenges “the whole of the universe”. Heidegger embraces

an infinite regress by declaring “why the why?” the most important question in existence

(notice ‘discourse’ replaces ‘being’, i.e. after “why being rather than nothing”). For those

who may experience reasonable doubt at this point, Heidegger is ready with a good old

fashioned theological knock-down argument. Heidegger urges us: “do not fall victim to the

cheap look of things”; instead, “experience a happening”. This argument has been used on

Hamas-controlled Palestinian television, with colourful puppets, to encourage children to “not

be seduced by this lower world” but to “look upward to God”. Heidegger stresses that the

question is dependent upon “force of spirit” and an “originary leap”. What is this explicit

rejection of sensory evidence and call for a leap of faith, if not the old monotheist religious

line in favour of conversion rearticulated in a new language? It is the traditional Christian

proselytizing line forced into tortured new philosophical language, in which our failure to

7    

agree with the arguments reflects the inadequacy of our “spirit”.2 Are we to be heckled and

pressured into agreeing, so that when under collective duress we concede, the entire crowd of

believers can cry, “hallelujah!”, and thereafter we feel renewed and better about ourselves? In

a nutshell, Heidegger uses the well-established pattern of a very old theological mind game.

Forgive us for thinking: the other sociological question that Heidegger never

answered, concerning his implication in the World War 2 Nazi regime, is far more important

than this to all appearances vacuous and mystical ontological question concerning being.

This difference of opinion from Heidegger implies two competing evaluative frameworks: the

metaphysical and the sociological. And perhaps more than metaphysical, theological, because

you must be a kind of ‘transcendental believer’ based on ‘suspension of ordinary belief’ to

accept Heidegger’s argument in this work (but the promises are so wondrous, it is almost

worth it! And what if it were true!) Whatever its existential strengths (after all millions of

Born Again Christians yield joyfully to it), such an argument is entirely unacceptable from the

sociological view founded by Marx, Durkheim and Weber. As for Nietzsche, with his own

notion of materialism, he would almost certainly have found this argument a laughable and

clumsy form of seduction – rather as he lampooned Hegel for his poorly disguised religious

moorings in promising us all the ‘end of history’.

Heidegger’s views are decidedly metaphysical. How, then, can we say he overturned

metaphysics? The clues are in his legacy among more sociologically grounded thinkers. In

Foucault’s Order of Things, we find a sociological and Heideggerian framework combined.

His strong interest in the relation between the sciences and human life (sociological) is second

to a stronger interest in a Heideggerian framework of historical ontology (metaphysical).

Foucault suggests his role as the prophet in the closing of one epistemic age and the onset of a

new one, in concluding the Order of Things by heralding the “death of man”. Here, Foucault

                                                                                                                         2  Martin  Heidegger,  Introduction  to  Metaphysics.    Chapter  1,  the  Fundamental  Question  of  Metaphysics.      

8    

spiced up the closing pages of his arcane treatise with the messianic power borrowed from

Heidegger’s re-enchanted notion of time. It is not Marx’s anticipation of the dreary material

banality of a classless society, where we have to work, but a transformed sense of spiritual

consciousness linked to a hitherto unknown world. How exciting: what will I become after

having been a mere man? These alluring but vapid promises are the oldest game in the

proverbial book, but they seem to work equally well among jaded modern university students

as among peasants in a medieval hamlet.

There is a second way in which Foucault borrowed a cardinal feature of Heidegger’s

metaphysics, i.e., “fundamental ontology”. Superficially, it follows Nietzschean iconoclasm.

Foucault employed the genealogical method with a view to undermining all orders of power

in anarchist fashion. The consequence is that it becomes impossible to discuss issues like

“justice”, or “freedom”, because he has no ideas about them at any general level. We must

not talk on any general level about either ideas or reality, only deconstruct, deconstruct and

deconstruct (i.e. or we are “complicit” in “power”). By thus doing so interminably, the

existing structures of power shall crumble (presumably they will drown spiritually in their

own contradictions). Here is the Heideggerian rub, adopted similarly by Derrida, Baudrillard

and other post-structuralists. This is largely predicated upon the notion of the world as

somehow, in Heideggerian fashion, a text. Here we have Heidegger’s cardinal departure from

traditional metaphysics, in a hermeneutics. The fundamental hermeneutical idea is that due to

the unavoidability of one’s presuppositions, objectivity is not possible. The traditional

metaphysics of western scholastic philosophy had guaranteed the truth of knowledge, and the

new Heideggerian phenomenological metaphysics proposed instead the meaning of being to

read as a text.

To quote Heidegger:

9    

“Interpreting human life is like interpreting a text overlaid by centuries of distorting

exegesis. We must make sure that our 'fore-having [Vorhabe]', our preliminary approach to it,

is 'original and genuine', not taken over from tradition or the They.”3

It is precisely where Heidegger claims to break with traditional metaphysics that his

philosophical idealism becomes the most pronounced: “Metaphysics focuses on beings; it

does not explore the full abundance of being, or reduce it to a single aspect of itself, extruding

everything else from it. So being can unfold its essence through the ages, revealing hidden

aspects. Being is like a rich text”. Consider the implications of these citations for the oft-

claim of Heidegger’s post-metaphysical groundedness and immanence in lived life. Heidegger

is admittedly unwilling to detach being from context, coining such terms as Mitsein, 'being-

with'; Beisein 'being-at, presence'; In-sein, and so on, to suggest multiple modes of being.

And yet these supposed sources of the diversity of being are grounded in being as a text.

Heidegger shifts the metaphysical criteria from truth to authenticity. The fundamental

framework of Heidegger’s notion of the world as text is the authenticity/inauthenticity

dichotomy. Upon the basis of this ontological dichotomy, it is very clear upon a careful

reading that what Heidegger meant by being was something radically far from our real

everyday lives, in a quasi-religious realm of revelation and epiphany. It is kind of discursive

universe of his own imagining, where our quality as human beings is determined by

cosmically fundamental determinations in the dual dimensions of authentic/inauthentic.

These imply the central notion of salvation in Heidegger’s thought (i.e. “only a god can save

us”). It is far from the post-metaphysical sociological meaning of the everyday world, where

such quasi-theological terms as authenticity/inauthenticity can hardly apply as a fundamental

ontology (i.e. that is more like in the ISIS claim of all Shi’ite Muslims being heretics

deserving physical death and damnation in the here-after).

                                                                                                                         3  Quoted  in  Inwood,  Heidegger  Dictionary,  88.  

10    

In Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), the Marxist-Nietzschean genealogical and

deconstructionist traditions were reconstructed for what can only be called a bizarre spiritual

revival. The genealogical and deconstructive methods tend to view the world, following

Heidegger’s “being”, as if it were a text rather than the maze of unfathomable material details

(Nietzsche) or the material mode of production (Marx). Is it due to Heidegger’s canny (or is

that “uncanny”) influence that our social science departments have become like seminaries or

the retreats of holy hermits, puzzling interminably over discursive universes in the hope that it

will bring deliverance to the ‘fallen’ world?

Heidegger invested Nietzschean genealogy with a romantic and nostalgic notion of

returning to a lost essence. This went against the very grain of Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical

materialism - where nothing but competing tensions produced identity in the first place.

Heidegger, with a comparative poverty of psychological insight (but with a vivid theological

imagining), depicted the Western decline resulting from a need to retrieve the original Greek

experience of “being.” Concerning deconstruction, he envisioned it as forming a bridge home

to “being” through a deconstruction of the dominant metaphysical tradition. His basic thesis

is that Western society lives in “forgetfulness” of “being” (in its scientific-rationalist fixation

upon “beings” as objects of manipulation), and is hence riven with “inauthenticity”.

Heidegger’s fixation on “being” showed a radical departure from the new sociological and

post-metaphysical achievements of Durkheim (as well as Max Weber). If he was trying to

overcome metaphysics, it was very much the pot calling the kettle black. It is more true to

say that Heidegger sought to replace the traditional metaphysics with his own wildly imagined

metaphysical vision to explain “everything” in one sweeping philosophical canvas.

Finally, what is “being”? Consider the poetic passages on death in Being and Time. A

nurse in a hospital experiences real death every day. From sickness, work accidents, violence,

old age, road accidents etc. But for Heidegger this is not real death. The nurse is also living

11    

in forgetfulness of being, and cannot perceive the basic ontological structures of real death

revealed by his “fundamental ontology” (a heroic calling, an unveiling of one’s unique

existence). However, the experience of that nurse is exactly what Marx, Durkheim or Weber,

or the post-metaphysical sociological tradition in general, means by “being in the world”

(though they posited forms of material false consciousness). From a sociological perspective

on death, child rearing, work, technology, etc., Heidegger’s being is pure metaphysics. Yet

for Heidegger, metaphysics is an impersonal force, controlling individual thinkers, in sum an

“episteme”. Heidegger therefore believes that by transcending metaphysics in favour of a

hermeneutical “question of the truth of being”, one can transform the essence of man. It is a

utopianism grounded in a kind of philosophical idealism. The thinker of “fundamental

ontology” will open up being for rootless modern humanity, and permit them (as in his oft-

used metaphor) to see the “light’’.

How do we explain this discrepancy between Heideggerian ontology and Durkheim’s

sociological vista? For Heidegger, the world of our experience is not real, for we are not

“awakened”, i.e. authentic. Being, more fundamentally than the everyday world, is like a rich

text (i.e. hermeneutics). This is an idealist and mystic view. The world of our experience is

not a text, except in the monotheist tradition (word made flesh) where a holy book of

Revelation is given priority. We are sitting bored in a bus station waiting room, but really,

perhaps unbeknownst to us, we are waiting for a meeting of eternal significance with God.

For Heidegger, the word is before the flesh. Hence, he argues, that animals do not

exist in the early part of Being and Time. This shows the special and highly idealistic

meaning he gives to existence and being. It is upon similarly discursive grounds that

Heidegger can argue that metaphysics is the ground of Western history, and that the world-

controlling evil of technology stems from metaphysics. In sociological reality, for good or ill,

technology stems from our lives in the material world, not metaphysics. A sociological

12    

perspective would recognize that its real social consequences are manifold by analyzing

empirical phenomena. For Heidegger, it is simply the product of a certain rootless mode of

thinking, and upon this basis can only be bad. We might compare this to bin Laden’s

comment upon music as “the devil’s flute” at the Khartoum racetrack in Sudan. There are

none of the nuances of the real everyday world, only a categorically imposed metaphysical or

theological horizon that forbids us to consider our real experiences because of a divine

injunction.

Finally, we arrive at Heidegger’s hatred of subjectivity and the modern era, with

Cartesian metaphysics as its “cause.” While sociology sought to establish the scientific

endeavour upon new foundations, taking into account social experience (including religion) as

well as the modern physical sciences, Heidegger aimed to denigrate science to a subordinate

level to ontology (the quasi-theological question of the meaning of being). Moreover, while

sociology used phenomenology to clarify really existing social relations and experiences,

Heideggerian ontology converted phenomenology into the means to a spiritual awakening to a

superior but forgotten state of consciousness from the remote past. Everyday experience in

the modern world, because of speed and so on, was denigrated as inauthentic.

In Being and Time Heidegger transfers the essentialist separation of traditional

metaphysics to that of “authentic” and “inauthentic” existence. In contrast with the post-

metaphysical vista of sociology, he preserves the metaphysical claim of a totalizing “Truth”:

“primordial and authentic truth must guarantee the understanding … of being in general.” The

ontological priority of this “hidden reality” is made explicit: “phenomena” is defined as

“something that does not show itself initially and for the most part, something that is

concealed, in contrast to what initially and for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way

13    

that it constitutes its meaning and ground.”4 For sociology, the unthought is evidenced in

material or mental structures which influence us outside of our consciousness; for Heidegger,

the unthought is transformed into a hidden source of collective salvation. It is something that

withdraws from us, and then returns to us, and to whom we must appeal while preserving its

inherent mystery. No prizes, then, for guessing what this notion of ‘being’ really amounts to.

The very idea of Heidegger single handedly resurrecting it for all of humanity is nothing short

of the height of arrogance. Did he envision himself as a prophet? If so, and it appears that he

did, then let us at least concede it honestly.

Regarding everyday life, then, Heidegger had something quite different in mind to

sociology. Everyday life, for Heidegger, was “inauthentic”, a state of forgetfulness of what is

most important in existence. It was precisely modernity, he maintained, with its technological

speed, scientific control and mass society, which rendered man a homeless being in a rootless

world. Most fantastically of all, he envisioned the overcoming of metaphysics as one with the

defeat of the modern world. It is hard to imagine a more idealist position. Yet he did have

hopes and wishes for the world. His preoccupation was with a form of holy revival based on

his own notion of a lost religious heritage. These were the obsessions of a lapsed Catholic

who had experienced the extinction of his faith during the horrors of the First World War. In

his naiveté and fanaticism, he did make a disastrous foray into German national politics with

untold damage to the lives of others. In his struggle against what he saw as the evils of a

modern secular society, he ultimately embraced Nazism as a viable ‘spiritual’ alternative.

This event, above all, demonstrates the greater explanatory power of the sociological material

unthought. Heidegger’s own life story, while denying it in his verbose words, affirms it in the

confusion of his deeds and their abysmal consequences. Meanwhile, despite his claims of

spiritual deliverance during the rise of the Third Reich, the event did not give a shred of

                                                                                                                         4  Martin  Heidegger,  Being  and  Time  (Albany:  State  University  of  New  York  Press,  1996),  292,  31.  

14    

support to his claims about a mystical unthought in being waiting to intervene and save

Western humanity. Is it really lurking there in the invisible recesses, awaiting the right

moment, and Heidegger simply got the moment wrong?

To separate this loathsome man’s life conduct and beliefs from his supposedly ethical

and sound philosophical thought is a grave error. The Iranian Islamist revolution, deeply

inspired by this modern ontology of authenticity and salvation, points yet again to the terrible

error of trying to follow this path. Above all, let us be rid of the illusion that Heidegger

somehow championed the plurality of everyday life in rejecting Universalist Western

metaphysics. Whatever the serious problems of Western metaphysics – and they have been

analyzed lucidly by thinkers from Dewey to Weber and Durkheim – it is certainly not in

Heidegger’s alternative metaphysics that we shall find a solution. On the contrary,

Heidegger’s avowedly exclusionary and totalizing metaphysics are far viler than any tacitly

exclusionary universalism that we might wish to replace.