Heidegger’s view is that History is popularly conceived of as motion, events, and processes which happen and through which something comes to pass. This is a linear causal view that at best produces a history that is defined as the totality of facts about the past. Heidegger adopts a teleological view reminiscent of the teleological “cause” or “explanation” we encounter in Aristotle’s Metaphysical theory of change when he insists that History is more concerned with destiny and the transmission of essence or potential in an actualizing process. Man, for Heidegger, is the being for whom his very being is an issue and that issue involves unconcealment or the revelation of the Being of beings. This unveiling is the essence of the Parmenidean and Aristotelian concepts of Aletheia. Heidegger points to how, in the absence of this understanding, even great Historians such as Jacob Burckhardt resort to what he calls “the balancing of the books”: facts are given positive and negative weights and conclusions such as Spengler’s the decline of Western Civilisation are produced from this method. Here too Biological assumptions lie behind the “calculations”. Spengler balanced the books of the facts and arrived at the telos of decline where the more cautious philosophical position would be that the end is uncertain for the West.

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