Weltnacht and the Dervish

In the midst of a still powerful critique of Heidegger, published in 1958, F. H. Heinemann observed:

Weltnacht designates an age, in which the old gods are dead and the new gods not yet born. God is absent; He withholds Himself; there is no god who visibly and univocally could unite men, fill the world with splendour and give meaning to it. The time is barren, for it does not even notice God's absence. Nothingness has replaced God. "God is dead," Hegel's and Nietzsche's dictum remains dominant and is subjected [by Heidegger] to a profound analysis. An extreme nihilism emerges: "everything in History as well as in Nature is nothing in every respect"; Hegel's Absolute, his absolute mind, which replaced God and revealed itself at every stage of history, and therewith all its realizations, are now nothing, although every one of them claims to represent true reality. Thus, in the shadow of Hegel, a kind of inverted Hegelianism arises, transformed into an ontological mysticism. Nothingness and, based on it, nihilism now appear as the driving power and even as the law of European history. They pervade, moreover, the whole realm of Being, for this Being is Nothing. "Being conceals itself in its truth," it does not reveal itself. This represents a profoundly pessimistic interpretation of man and universe. Whereas Hegel affirmed every step in the history of thought as a one-sided contribution to truth, Heidegger interprets them as albeit inevitable failures in the revelation of truth."

For Heidegger, dark as our Weltnacht may appear, it makes possible faint glimmerings of light on the horizon.

"Yet this extreme nihilism is counterbalanced by positive tendencies. The 'deputy of Nothingness' (Platzhalter des Nichts) is simultaneously the 'shepherd of Being' (Hirte des Seins). He knows that only the Christian God, but not God Himself, is dead. Like Nietzsche [Heidegger] remains in search of God, and it is in this search that he turns to poets such as Holderlin and Rilke, because he holds that the poets name gods and that it is they who discover their traces."

The Dervish bears witness to Heidegger's Herculean struggle, nods, and smiles.

[Quotations from Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, 107].