Is There a Heideggerian System of History?
The History of being possesses a systematic coherence in its development. It possesses unity and totality: "The unity of the One shows itself throughout the History of being in configurations that are sometimes different, configurations whose difference proceeds from the mutation of the essence of aletheia, of the concealing disclosedness."20 It possesses its own necessity21 and, in the irresistible and irreversible character of its unfolding through to an end, it has a strong teleological structure. Indeed, just as in Hegel the progression is governed by the realization of Absolute Spirit, in Heidegger it is governed by the telos which is constituted by the completion of Metaphysics. Just as in Hegel's Phenomenology consciousness is defined at every moment by the "not yet" of the moments to come and of the final stage, so it is the itinerary to the perfection of being as Will, the maturation of the "will to will," that orders, gathers, and calls, so to speak, the previous moments back to itself. Thus Heidegger writes regarding the difference between Hegelian metaphysics and the metaphysics of the Will to Power (still to come): "This possibility was not yet possible. . . . The will has not yet appeared as the will to will in the reality which it has itself prepared. This is why metaphysics has not yet been completed in the metaphysics of spirit."22 The "motor" of History is therefore not this final totalization itself. It is true that Metaphysics tends toward the constellation that forms the essence of Technology —a constellation inasmuch as it gathers and sets to work all the past metaphysical principles (like the principle of reason which transforms itself into cybernetics) that are preserved and actualized in the present.
But what propels History, what permits taking into account the mutations of the essence of truth, is the increasing oblivion of the commencement, of the inaugural essence of truth as aletheia. It is in this sense that one can again speak of an inversion of Hegelianism: the Hegelian becoming of truth becomes the progressive establishment of the reign of errancy, the development of nihilism. The withdrawal of being hides to the point of leaving nothing; even that of oblivion effaces itself. History is not the progress of consciousness toward self-transparency, or the absolute movement, but is the gradual loss of the sense of presence as clearing and withdrawal. The "evil telos" that orients History is the complete obscuring of the meaning of being. "The History of Being is the history of the increasing oblivion of Being."23
Although the History of Being may be divided into epochs as can Weltgeschichte, there is no possible comparison between the Hegelian sense of an epoch as a moment in an evolutionary process —conceived on the model of a biological increase (thus the Greeks are the adolescents of the Spirit) — and the Heideggerian sense of an epoch as epochè, which means the abeyance.