p We have already mentioned that Martin Heidegger interprets the question we are considering as decisive not only for philosophy but for civilisation itself. Whatever our attitude to this obviously insufficiently substantiated, abstract posing of the question, it is undoubtedly distinguished by an awareness of the question’s truly outstanding importance. Unlike other philosophers, Heidegger does not try to reduce the problem to a search for some more or less acceptable definition of philosophy. He is also well aware that the posing of this question by the philosophers themselves, their dissatisfaction with the existing answers and their constant returning to the original question shows that what we are discussing is not merely the difference between philosophy and non-philosophy, but the origin and essence of philosophical knowledge itself, the status of philosophy and perhaps even its very existence. Heidegger says, "If this question is not to remain merely a subject for casual conversation, philosophy as philosophy must become a problem 108 worthy of our serious attention. But is it? And if it is, to what extent?”  [108•1 

p Heidegger argues against the one-sided rationalistic interpretation of philosophy as the science of reason, founded on the fundamental juxtaposition of reason and intellect (German classical idealism). He sees the inadequacy of this understanding of philosophy in the fact that it presumes the meaning of reason. He also tries to differentiate his position from those who see philosophy as some kind of irrational knowledge; in order to single out the sphere of the irrational one must also define the limits of reason. But this is just where the problem lies. No one has yet decided what reason is. Perhaps it has merely usurped the title of "lord of philosophy"? What right has it to the title? Who gave it that right? It may be that what we call reason is merely a sideshoot of two thousand years’ development of philosophy, in which case reason is not the source of philosophy, but vice versa. And since the history of philosophy is the history of its gropings in quest of truth, is not reason in fact groping? The aberrations of human thought? Is not thought then something fundamentally different from reason? Is not reason a degraded form of thinking?

p Heidegger tries to straddle both rationalism and irrationalism, but he develops a fatal list in the direction of the latter. This can be seen not so much in his criticism of the rationalist cult of reason, in which there is a fair portion of truth, as in his obviously anti-intellectual conception of indefinable irrational existence. Heidegger tries to trace the sources of this conception in the 109 teaching of the early Greek philosophers, and suggests that we return to the original Greek definition of philosophy, from which it, in a certain sense, begins its existence. "The Greek word as a Greek word suggests a way.”  [109•1 

p Heidegger stresses that the definition of philosophy as love of wisdom has nothing to do with love. "Feelings, even the finest of them, have nothing in common with philosophy. Feelings, as people say, are something irrational.”  [109•2  Then what does this first of all definitions mean? Apparently not so much love as wisdom, as the unattainable object of this love? But Heidegger goes on to discuss “logos”, which is everything—word and fate and all-determining being. The Greeks’ use of the word “logos” indicates, according to Heidegger, that for the Greeks man and human consciousness were not yet juxtaposed to existence, being, but existed within it and were themselves existence. Thus, according to Heidegger, the Greek “logos” implies that there was as yet no polarisation of subject and object, of consciousness and being, that the rupture had not yet occurred which, according to the existentialist conception, has since determined the history of Western philosophy, science and civilisation as a whole. Hence the conclusion that philosophy—of this the first Greek philosophers were aware, but immediately aware, and therefore were not philosophers but something bigger—is the correspondence of human existence to existence or being as the hidden basis of all that exists both as appearance and object. "The answer to the question ’What is philosophy?’ lies in our coming into 110 accord with that to which philosophy is heading. And that is: the being of that which exists".  [110•1 

p Man, according to Heidegger, is essentially always and everywhere in accord with being, but he is not aware of this, because he is immediately in the power of that which exists—the objects that surround him, impersonal human relations— and therefore does not consider the demands of being. Philosophy is a return to one’s own self, to primeval being, the conscious realignment of one’s existence with it, realisation of the existential human essence.

p If in ancient Greek philosophy, according to Heidegger, the essence of language was immediately revealed as “logos”, subsequent philosophy lost this initial intuition of being, and modern man can recover it only by constantly returning to the ancient Greek source of philosophy. "The specially impropriated and unfolding accord, which answers (entspricht) the demand of the being of that which exists is philosophy. We learn to know what philosophy is when we discover how, in what way philosophy exists. It exists as a means of accord, accord that is in harmony with the voice of the being of that which exists. This accord (Ent-sprechen) is a statement (ein Sprechen). It is at the service of language."  [110•2 

p Thus philosophy is a constant questioning about the being of that which exists, man’s striving to find a path to his being, which at the same time is being in general, an attempt to coordinate his existence with it. This is never anything more than a questioning, than an attempt, because being is unknowable. Unknowable, too, is the being which is we ourselves; the most philosophy can achieve, and then only if it is filled with the true (existentialist) mood—is to be aware that being is, that it is the being of all that exists. Thought, language and other intellectual activity—none of these can break through to being; they get caught up in existence and, only by being aware that this is merely existence, can we listen to the "voice of being”, heed it and respond to its call.

p The fact is not hard to grasp that being in Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary is still the same Kantian unknowable “thing-in-itself”. But in contrast to Kant, Heidegger believes that philosophy only has meaning in so far as it turns away from the knowable that which exists and tries to understand (not to know, which is impossible) the presence of the unknowable being of that which exists, thus realising that that which exists, precisely because it exists, is not being.

p In this way Heidegger philosophically substantiates and gives his blessing to the alienation of philosophy from science—the basic trend of development (decline) of contemporary idealism. The sciences are interpreted as flourishing and complacent knowledge of that which exists, which 112 is not being and thus has no meaning. The sciences are therefore an escape from the being of that which exists, a timid denial of being and a self-deception. Philosophy is radically opposed to science if, of course, it follows Heidegger’s categorical imperative of "fundamental ontology”. It has no subject-matter in the sense that the sciences have a subject-matter because its subject-matter is being, which cannot be mastered since we ourselves belong to it. Being therefore is undefinable. So, too, is philosophy. It is not knowledge but consciousness, and what is more, entirely individual, since social consciousness is totally committed to that which is impersonal and estranged from being.

p Philosophy, Heidegger maintains, must repudiate all positive inquiry into any reality; philosophy is the denial of any vital meaning of any knowable reality and any theory (science) which studies it. Philosophising does not overcome the alienation of the human personality; its sole purpose is to overcome the illusory notion that this alienation can be overcome. This “solution” to the question of the essence of philosophy, as one can easily appreciate, turns out to be a brief exposition of the existentialist philosophy. However, if we ignore Heidegger’s characteristically irrationalist interpretation of being, the conclusions he reaches basically coincide with the beliefs of some bourgeois philosophers that human life cannot be essentially changed, that social progress is no more than an illusion, and that the awareness of this fact, which assumes that we have repudiated the scientific and technological “superstitions” of our time, is the highest achievement of philosophy. This means that the crisis of idealist philosophising is portrayed as the final 113 solution to the sought-after initial question of philosophy.

p We have considered at some length Heidegger’s pretentious attempt to interpret the question "What is philosophy?”. As we know, Heidegger regards his "fundamental ontology" as a radical departure from all previous philosophical tradition, or to be more exact, the tradition beginning from Socrates. And yet Heidegger’s consideration of the question "What is philosophy?" shows that he has remained entangled in the nets of the speculative-idealist approach to the problem. He gives no concrete examination of the development of philosophy, its place in social life, or its relation to the specialised sciences. The fact that philosophy arises as theoretical knowledge in its pre-scientific form, and then stands in opposition to the specialised sciences which have broken away (or taken shape independently) from it, is absolutised by Heidegger, who obviously fails to notice that the philosophical knowledge that is contrasted with the specialised sciences is by no means independent of them. In arguing the unknowability of the being of that which exists, and thus erecting an ontological foundation under his juxtaposition of philosophy to scientific knowledge, Heidegger actually ignores social being, which to a significant extent determines philosophy. The golden age of philosophy, he believes, lies in the past, and what it must do today is reach back to this ancient Greek source. The beginning of philosophy is regarded as the highest point of "existential understanding" because "existential understanding" is metaphysically juxtaposed to knowledge, to inquiry. Inquiry, research is concerned with objects; " existential understanding" is an entirely special 114 cognition of that which exists, stemming from " primeval understanding”, from the a priori, from that which precedes the perception of external objects, which, according to Heidegger, are something derivative, shaped by some specifically human means of cognition and existence. Repeating the mistakes of most of the pre-Marxist philosophers, Heidegger interprets the definitions characterising his philosophy as the universal definition of every true philosophy in general.

p Abstraction, anti-historicism, idealism, deepseated incomprehension of the role of materialism in the development of philosophy, illusions concerning the impartiality of philosophy, the romantic idealisation of its alienation—all these long since obsolete features of speculative philosophising we find in Heidegger in a form that has been rejuvenated with the help of phenomenology. The failure of Heidegger’s attempt at understanding is inseparable from the existentialist, idealist interpretation of history, nature, man and cognition.

Dialectical and historical materialism dispels the mystification that surrounds the problem of philosophy, and deals with it by investigating the actual philosophical problems that have been posed by philosophy and the sciences, by the history of mankind and contemporary historical experience.