PATHMARKS


is more {GA 9: 347} "logical" than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless?

Because we say that the being of the human being consists in "being-in-the-world" people find that the human being is downgraded to a merely terrestrial being, whereupon philosophy sinks into positivism. For what is more "logical" than that whoever asserts the worldliness of human being holds only this life as valid, denies the beyond, and renounces all "Transcendence"?

Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the "death of God" people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more "logical" than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless?

Because in all the respects mentioned we everywhere speak against all that humanity deems high and holy our philosophy teaches an irresponsible and destructive "nihilism." For what is more "logical" than that whoever roundly denies what is truly in being puts himself on the side of non being and thus professes the pure nothing as the meaning of reality?

What is going on here? People hear talk about "humanism," "logic," "values," "world," and "God." They hear something about opposition to these. They recognize and accept these things [178] as positive. But with hearsay — in a way that is not strictly deliberate — they immediately assume that what speaks against something is automatically its negation and that this is "negative" in the sense of destructive. And somewhere in Being and Time there is explicit talk of "the phenomenological destruction." With the assistance of logic and ratio often invoked, people come to believe that whatever is not positive is negative and thus that it seeks to degrade reason and therefore deserves to be branded as depravity. We are so filled with "logic" that anything that disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically registered as a despicable contradiction. We pitch everything that does not stay close to the familiar and beloved {GA 9: 348} positive into the previously excavated pit of pure negation, which negates everything, ends in nothing, and so consummates nihilism. Following this logical course we let everything expire in a nihilism we invented for ourselves with the aid of logic.

But does the "against" which a thinking advances against ordinary opinion necessarily point toward pure negation and the negative? This happens — and then, to be sure, happens inevitably and conclusively, that is, without a clear prospect of anything else — only when one posits in advance what is meant as the "positive" and on this basis makes an absolute and simultaneously negative decision about the range of possible opposition to it. Concealed in such a procedure is the refusal to subject to reflection this


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Martin Heidegger (GA 9) Letter on Humanism