{31} The Western Tradition of Philosophy continued.

Heidegger accuses Hegel of thinking of the being of things in terms of the speculatively historical. Thus does history become a dialectical process. Heidegger insists, however, that Dasein always remains free in his essential possibilities. As he notes in his Einführung, philosophers are creators who bring about historical change. However, this cannot be predicted in advance.

Heidegger, then, far from having previous stages of thought superseded by more profound and adequate ideas, sees the process of history as exactly the reverse. There is not some sort of progressive, fuller understanding of being, but rather a progressive, or better a regressive, understanding of being. One might say that Hegel's view is filled with the optimism of the nineteenth century; Heidegger's with the pessimism of the twentieth. Hegel's is an all-comprehensive system in which all systems are contained and mediated in a dialectical process. And for Hegel the final stage of absolute knowledge (which is embodied in his own thought) is the greatest. For Heidegger, on the other hand, mankind has not gained but lost. Greatness is not here and now at the end, as the end product of a long process, the dialectical evolution of progress. Greatness was in the beginning, and is still contained there for us to search it out; that is; if we will but abandon the metaphysics which has degenerated into a destructive nihilism, and re-turn to the greatness of an authentic re-beginning, a re-building which can then be projected forward in an authentic manner for the future possibilities of Dasein.

Here concludes this series. It started with this post.  ¶ 12:28 PM