Coinciding with Heidegger’s tenure as rector, these lectures demonstrate just how readily Heidegger aligns the fundamental question of his philosophy with the “national socialist revolution.” Seriously asking philosophy’s fundamental question coincides with “coming to know the spiritual–political mission of the German people” (4ff). “We stand and fall with the will to know and spirit” (263). Philosophers are the guardians of the state, with the “task of watching that those ruling [Herrschaft] and the state’s ruling order are thoroughly under the sway of philosophy, not some sort of system but . . . the deepest and widest knowledge of the human being” (194; see, too, 208–13). While short on details, such remarks reveal that he considers his philosophy to be in the service of National Socialism but precisely as the source of knowledge and leadership indispensable to it.
In the first part of these lectures, as a means of finding the way into the fundamental question, Heidegger proposes a confrontation with Hegel’s philosophy (14). The confrontation is rather spare, perhaps due to his duties as rector. Following a gloss of the modern transformation of metaphysics (jointly determined by Descartes’ mathematical method, Christianity, and Baumgarten), the lectures conclude with expository notes and the question of the extent to which Hegel’s metaphysics is the culmination of Western metaphysics (elsewhere Heidegger tells us that it is the beginning of the culmination).
The winter semester lectures set the stage for the final battle between the originary and later conceptions of truth (ἀλήθεια) in Plato by reviewing the Heraclitean πόλεμος as the essence of beings and glossing the essence of language. The remainder of the lectures reprises Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus from two years earlier (GA 34).