(17 September 1969)
Wisser: Professor Heidegger! In our time ever more voices are making themselves heard, and these voices are becoming ever louder, voices which proclaim that the decisive task of the present lies in a transformation of social conditions and which see therein the only promising point of departure for the future.
How do you regard such an orientation of the so-called “spirit of the age” (Zeitgeist), for example with respect to university reform?
Heidegger: I shall answer only the last question, for what you asked before reaches too far. And the answer I give you is the same one that I gave forty years ago in my inaugural lecture in Freiburg in 1929.
I shall quote to you the sentence from the lecture What is Metaphysics?: “The fields of the sciences lie far apart from one another. Their manner of treating their objects is fundamentally different. This fragmented multiplicity of disciplines is today held together only by the technical organization of universities and faculties, and maintained in a meaning through the practical orientation of the disciplines toward specific ends. But the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has withered away.”
I believe that answer should suffice.
Wisser: Now the motives that have led to modern attempts to achieve a reorientation of goals and a “restructuring” of factual conditions, whether within society or within the sphere of human relations, are highly diverse. Clearly a great deal of philosophy is at work here, for good as well as for ill.
Do you see a social mission for philosophy?
Heidegger: No! In this sense one cannot speak of a social mission.