It is not clear whether Heidegger provided the deeper answer to the question of criticism (“unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke”) such as he describes it in this striking moment of “What is Metaphysics?” What he does provide is a name and a structure for these and related “possibilities of nihilative comportment.” For in all of them, Heidegger says, in all criticism, that is, there is a “surpassing of beings as a whole.” This surpassing Heidegger calls “die Transzendenz.” To be sure, Heidegger insists that the kind of transcendence he is thinking about itself surpasses Christianity (as well as science, in fact, which “becomes laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously”). Transcendence – unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke directed at beings as a whole – may seem like a hyperbolic word for “critique” but it reveals, I think, a deep truth about critique as a structure, a transcendental structure.

¶ 7:33 AM