In “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” and in the original we read that modern science “produces . . . men of another stamp [einen anderen Schlag von Menschen].” “The scholar” (der Gelehrte), Heidegger indicates, now disappears and he is replaced by “the researcher” (Forscher), engaged in “research projects.” “These . . . give his work its cutting atmosphere [scharfe Luft].” A sequence of antitheses demonstrates the replacement: “scientists” versus “scholars,” “conferences” and “congresses” versus the “library,” the “cutting atmosphere” versus “an increasingly thinner and emptier romanticism of scholarship and the university.” In this manner, Heidegger describes the arrival of a new type of man: the researcher “of his own accord [von sich aus]” presses “necessarily into the sphere of the essential figure of the worker and of the soldier, in the essential sense.” But here is the alteration: the worker and the soldier are absent in the Holzwege, where we now read that “of his own accord, the researcher necessarily presses into the sphere of the essential figure of the technologist [Techniker] in the essential sense.”

Silvio Vietta, who knew the original manuscript, argued that the original formulation and its divergence from the postwar text can be understood in terms of Heidegger’s critique of “Fascism’s tendency toward forced conformity [Gleichschaltung],” as manifest in “continuous uniformization and militarization, and the definition, implemented in fascism, of man as a ‘worker’.” But then again, why should Heidegger have eliminated the worker and the soldier after the war? Everybody knew that he had extolled them as the pillars of the regime and its mythical mission, and in the 1938 lecture he endorsed emphatically the message of the rectorate address, the message that labor service, military service, and “knowledge service” (Wissensdienst) constitute “one formative force.” According to Heidegger, the unity of these three Volksdienste, i.e. national services, results from the definition of the “essence of science” in a presumed ancient Greek sense—first and foremost as an acceptance of fate. Heidegger knew what he was doing when, after the war, he replaced his former heroes by the villain of the modern age, the technologist. It was a roundabout reversal of the facts.

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