INTRODUCTION TOMETAPHYSICS 1125
divided up into regions. The spiritual world becomes culture, and in the creation and
conservation of culture the individual seeks to fulfill himself. These regions become
fields of a free endeavor that sets its own standards for itself, according to the meaning
of “standards” that it can still attain. These standards of validity for production and use
are called values. Cultural values secure meaning for themselves in the whole of a cul-
ture only by restricting themselves to their self-validity: poetry for poetry’s sake, art for
art’s sake, science for sciences sake.
In respect to science, which concerns us especially here in the university, the sit-
uation of the last few decades, a situation which remains unchanged today despite some
cleansing, is easy to see. Although two seemingly different conceptions of science are
now seemingly struggling against each other—science as technical and practical pro-
fessional knowledge and science as a cultural value in itself—nevertheless bothare
moving along the samedecadent path of a misinterpretation and disempowering of the
spirit. They are distinct only in that the technical and practical conception of science as
specialized science may still lay claim to the merit of open and clear consistency within
today’s situation, whereas the reactionary interpretation of science as a cultural value,
which is now again appearing, tries to hide the powerlessness of the spirit through an
unconscious mendacity. The confusion of spiritlessness can even go so far that the
practical, technical explanation of science confesses itself at the same time to be
science as cultural value, so that both understand each other very well in the same
dearth of spirit. One may wish to call the arrangement of the amalgam of the special-
ized sciences for purposes of teaching and research a university, but this is now just a
name and no longer an originally unifying spiritual power that imposes duties. What I
said here in my inaugural address in 1929 about the German university still applies
today: “The regions of science he far asunder. Their ways of handling their subject mat-
ters are fundamentally different. This disintegrated multiplicity of disciplines is still
meaningfully maintained today only through the technical organization of universities
and faculties and through the practical aims of the disciplines. Yet the rootedness of the
sciences in their essential ground has atrophied” (What Is Metaphysics,1929, p. 8). In
all its areas, science today is a technical, practical matter of gaining information and
communicating it. No awakening of the spirit at all can proceed from it as science.
Science itself needs such an awakening.
- The last misinterpretation of the spirit rests on the formerly mentioned falsifi-
cations that represent the spirit as intelligence, this intelligence as a tool serviceable for
goals, and this tool, together with what can be produced, as the realm of culture. The
spirit as intelligence in the service of goals and the spirit as culture finally become
showpieces and spectacles that one takes into account along with many others, that one
publicly trots out and exhibits as proof that one does notwant to deny culture in favor of
barbarism. Russian Communism, after an initially purely negative attitude, went
directly over to such propagandistic tactics.
Against these multiple misinterpretations of the spirit, we determine the
essence of the spirit briefly in this way (I choose the formulation from my Rectoral
Address,because there everything is succinctly brought together in accordance with
the occasion): “Spirit is neither empty acuity, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor
the understanding’s boundless pursuit of analysis, nor even world reason, but rather
spirit is originally attuned, knowing resolution to the essence of Being” (Rectoral
Address,p. 13). Spirit is the empowering of the powers of beings as such and as a
whole. Where spirit rules, beings as such always and in each case come more into
being <wird...seinder>. Asking about beings as such and as a whole, asking the