If there is any "cover door" in Heidegger's thought, it is "death" at the touch, that is, "Heidegger has no ethics". Heidegger does not talk about ethics under the discipline system, which is quite proud of him because he wants to talk about "original ethical experience" related to existence. No ethics does not mean no ethics, but those who oppose Heidegger can ignore these. They always want to interpret Heidegger's Nazi connection as the defect of Heidegger's thought itself. In 20 14, Heidegger's three-volume Black Notebook deepened people's anti-Semitic prejudice against him and caused a sensation in German academic circles. Liu Xiaofeng's Heidegger and China focuses on Heidegger's criticism. But this criticism is different from the above. People who criticize Heidegger through his Nazi connection usually come from Britain, America and France. They think that Heidegger's thought is anti-enlightenment and divorced from modernity, and Liu Xiaofeng's critical resources directly come from his spiritual mentor Leo? Strauss, his main point of criticism of Heidegger is that Heidegger is too modern.

This book begins with a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of Heidegger and Ethical Issues, a doctoral thesis written by Han Dynasty more than ten years ago. The first third of the book is a foreshadowing retelling of Han Dynasty's papers, just as the students in the discussion class make a combing report for the reading materials. This is bound to be a much-told story in the future academic circles, because it is a model for academic predecessors to learn from their younger generations. The writing of the Han Dynasty was undoubtedly influenced by the "Strauss whirlwind". He tortured Heidegger with Holdrin's poems: "Is there a ruler on the earth?" The implication is obvious. Rulers come from God, and there are no rulers on the earth. Heidegger's philosophy is just an ontology of "this is", which focuses on the earth and the "this" world. Through layers of pursuit, the Han Dynasty finally made Heidegger's thoughts "desperate". He revealed that Heidegger's practical thought focused on being immersed in time-sensitive and technical technology, and even Nomus was "the formation of historical existence". This conclusion provides Liu Xiaofeng with the long-awaited evidence to criticize Heidegger's thought: Heidegger understands "nature" in "history" and "existence" in "temporality", and Heidegger is an out-and-out philosopher of temporality.

If Strauss's political philosophy has a source, it is Plato's philosophy of ideas. This philosophy opposes temporality, or in the words of the time, regards philosophy as the pursuit of extrasensory things. Emotional things in time, erratic, never true. Only super-perceptual things, that is, mathematical knowledge and ideas, are eternal things and irrefutable truths. Strauss once praised Heidegger's class. But he didn't accept Heidegger from the beginning and opposed Heidegger's interpretation of ancient philosophy, especially Plato. Heidegger advocates reinterpreting Plato from Aristotle's perspective, while Strauss shows us that Plato and Aristotle are integrated metaphysics. They both pay attention to eternal things, and both advocate that a contemplative life is the highest form of life. This sharp opposition has been persistent in Strauss's works and thoughts. In a letter he wrote to his best friend Kefu in 1950, he once made a judgment on Heidegger: "Many places are outstanding, but on the whole they are bad: the most extreme historicism". "Historicism" is an ideological tendency that Heidegger himself explicitly opposes. Strauss applied it to Heidegger, showing how strange he was to Heidegger, or how contemptuous he was, and did not admit that Heidegger's thought had the ability of self-clarification.

Liu Xiaofeng is the initiator of the "Strauss whirlwind" in China's research field. Of course, the Strauss factor in Korean and Korean works is very gratifying and welcome. Heidegger was once a favorite thinker, and the title of "poetic philosophy" by German and French thinkers such as Heidegger was due to Liu's contribution. Liu Xiaofeng later turned to Strauss's "political philosophy", which always contained an ideological "case", that is, the dispute between Strauss and Heidegger. At first, this ideological debate was not a personal disagreement, but an ideological event. According to Strauss's own idea, this is the "dispute between ancient and modern", Strauss represents the "classical mind" and Heidegger represents the "modern mind" of modern philosophers. The wave of modernity, from Machiavelli to Nietzsche and then to Rousseau, was finally laid in Heidegger's philosophy of existence. In Liu Xiaofeng's Strauss works, this kind of case-solving is put forward as a hidden idea, but it has never been really faced as a positive topic like Heidegger and China.

In order to clarify this case, we must first carefully examine Strauss's political philosophy. Strauss starts with the necessity of finding a personality for moral "should", in other words, finding a stable "virtue" or "temperament", thus providing a support point for moral network. The virtue of an actor who restores moral judgment is not a unique secret. In the 20th century, it generally refers to the representatives of Neo-Aristotelian School, including Max Gentile, Anscombe, nussbaum, Williams and Arendt, all of whom have such a "turn of virtue ethics". The characteristic of Strauss's theory of virtue is that he believes that virtue depends on insight into truth, and truth is an eternal idea under the sun. Only a philosopher can have this kind of truth. The ability he needs is to get out of the "cave" of secular things and see the truth from the "cave". Therefore, Plato's "Cave Metaphor" became the ideological beginning of Strauss's political philosophy. Anyone who doesn't understand this metaphor can't enter Strauss's philosophy. Anyone who doesn't regard this metaphor as more important than others is not qualified to talk about Strauss's philosophy.

"Cave metaphor" appears at the beginning of the seventh chapter of Plato's Republic. Here, Plato tells a story: in a cave, some people are leaning against a low wall, their hands, feet, heads and faces are fixed, and they can only see various projections on the curtain wall in front of them, but they are actually made by another group of people behind the low wall by fire. But finally someone broke free, went outside the cave and saw something in the sun. People who see the projection are equivalent to the perceptual things that people in our secular world see; And people who walk into the sun are equivalent to seeing conceptual things. For Plato, perceptual things are just images of super-perceptual ideas, and perceptual things have different ideas. The political philosophy implication of this story lies in that the prototype of ideal life is to walk out of the cave and enter the world of ideas, that is, to be satisfied in the contemplative life of super-sensibility. Its other political and philosophical meaning is that people who walked out of the cave actually returned to the cave in order to wake up those who were still in the cave. This meaning directly leads to an extremely strict distinction: the distinction between philosophers and the public. Philosophers belong to the truth, and the masses are addicted to opinions. When philosophers want to summon the masses with their own views, the humble masses are wary and alert. The death of Socrates is a symbolic case of the conflict between philosophers and the public. It means that the public can't be awakened normally in caves. Philosophers need to win the trust of the public through "lies"-lies at this time are "noble lies"-so as to guide them to get the brilliance of the sun even in caves. This is how the "philosopher king" was established.

However, at present, the conceptual ontology on which this philosopher-king model is based has been passively shaken on the basis of the ontology of modern philosophy. Its connotation lies in that modern philosophy regards perceptual things as the source of truth, not images; That static nature is guided in the history of temporality. The eternity, naturalness and immovability of nature as the origin are denied to pieces in modern philosophy, and naturally become a limited, moving and acquired comprehensive object. In this sense, Strauss realized that his political philosophy was in the cruel confrontation of "the dispute between ancient and modern". Only by revisiting the "dispute between ancient and modern times" and attracting a group of Taoists with the elegance and nobility of virtue can this reversed situation be reversed again.

Generally speaking, the teaching of Strauss's political philosophy can be summarized as follows: ideas exclude time, philosophers are above the public, and nature precedes history. It is worthy of sympathy and understanding, because it reveals that modern people are trapped in their own vision, and Strauss' classical perspective can just tear the mystery for them. However, as a modern man, Strauss wants to break away from modernity itself, which is a "false" task. We can clearly say that modernity is the characteristic of the times of all modern people's lives. We can't be divorced from the times; It must belong to this era only if it is divorced from the characteristics of the era itself. This is the fate of the times. Trying to reverse the concept of an era through simple concept inversion is like trying to leave the earth with your hair. However, we can also think about an interesting phenomenon: from the perspective of East Asians, people at the other end of the United States are upside down. Similarly, Americans can also say that people in East Asia are upside down. The earth is round, or the concept is round, depending on how people look at it. When the supporters of modernity claim that anti-modernists are reversing the times, it is modernity itself that is reversed in the self-knowledge of anti-modernists.

Furthermore, if we realize that judging each other's "head-to-foot handstand" depends entirely on our own vision or horizon, then we can also be gratified to understand that the so-called modernity and anti-modernity have certain horizons. According to Giddens and others, today's modernity itself is a kind of "reflexive modernity", so in fact, we can also say that Strauss-style anti-modernity itself belongs to modernity. They are deviant because they want to revive the canon, which is different from the deviant who seeks novelty and novelty for fashion. "It's better to make mistakes with Plato than to be right with him." This proverb from Cicero was repeatedly recited by Liu Xiaofeng, which has both the heroic feeling of "although ten thousand people have gone" and the feeling of being forced to do evil because of longing for the ancient sages. He thinks he is a classical avant-garde, not a modern avant-garde. This "avant-garde classicism" is not a loss of a keen perception of the temporality of "modernity", but a reaction after going deep into the most fundamental metaphysics of modernity-the understanding of temporality. He wants to oppose temporality and historicism, and Heidegger is the most thorough defender of temporality ontology, so he wants to oppose Heidegger.

The theme of time and eternity can be transformed into the existence of good disputes. What Han and Chao expressed in his doctoral thesis is actually whether goodness should be dominated by existence or whether goodness should dominate existence. The priority of existence means that facts precede value and what is higher than what should be; The priority of goodness means that the value is higher than the fact and what should be decided. The division of disciplines in classical philosophy seems to have separated them from each other for a long time, but the problems will always reappear in a brand-new way. Plato realized that there must be a "good idea" above all ideas, so he tended to be "good above existence"; Heidegger understood the primary problem of philosophy as "existential problem", so he tended to "existence is higher than goodness". How can "being" find a way to distinguish itself from the "should" of goodness? The exploration of the Han Dynasty has progressed to such a point that Heidegger's existential philosophy attributed the basis of "norms" to existence and placed existence in the generation of temporality, which inevitably made norms no longer have unchangeable majesty, or that norms were no longer "natural proofs". This is considered by Liu Xiaofeng as the basic feature of "historical determinism".

Now, we come to the crux of the dispute between Strauss and Heidegger. For Liu Xiaofeng, goodness is not valued, because existence is mixed with temporality. In Plato's view, existence is eternal, eternal, eternal; The purity of the idea lies in that the idea lives high and is divorced from the perceptual things of timeliness. However, modern philosophy has undergone a fundamental reversal, and movement, timeliness, subject and experience have become the basic vocabulary of modern ontology. Immortality, eternity, objectivity and wholeness are all discarded as mistakes in traditional metaphysics. According to the ancient people's distinction between truth and opinion, then modern people are completely in the field of opinions that depend on the subjective perspectives of different subjects, and are not interested in the whole shining truth field. Modern people are cave creatures. After this comparison, of course, we can see that Heidegger is the most thorough and clear person who has excavated the modernity characteristics of this philosophy. Being and Time is the product of this vision, and the meaning of existence is clearly placed in the vision of time. Heidegger's truth no longer means the correctness of proposition and the consistency of perception, but only revolves around the "no cover" of the distinction between truth and opinion. Truth is a kind of movement, which keeps some cover while removing it. So shielding has a antecedent and innate meaning. The "preconceptions/prejudices" of hermeneutics become the premise of understanding, not the obstacle to understanding. How much Strauss loves Plato, how much he hates Heidegger. Due to the "historical consciousness" brought by timeliness and subjectivity, Heidegger's "historicism" has been marked. This is the most accurate judgment that Strauss can think of.

However, this judgment is not accurate. Because Heidegger opposes historicism, to be precise, the phenomenological thinking method represented by Heidegger fundamentally and thoroughly opposes historicism. Because strictly speaking, historicism means that all historical phenomena can only be measured by their own values and scales, not by norms that transcend time. Phenomenology is not historical precisely because it reveals that phenomenon is the manifestation of things, which will always be for people, but it does not depend on the subject of experience. Phenomenology reaches the essence in an intuitive way, and "category intuition" reveals the nature of phenomena that are both comfortable and self-sustaining. This way of exploration clearly points out to us that in the experience of temporality, our world is inseparable from temporality, and what people usually call eternity, infinity and reliability just needs the help of temporality to reach it. In Heidegger's view, the structure of this existence-"existence-world-existence"-laid the foundation for the transcendence of this existence. The so-called transcendence is not from separating the isolated subject from the object, but as "surpassing itself".

Phenomenology recognizes that all essential universals come from our time experience, which can avoid subjectivism. Phenomenology is the salvation of subjectivity since modern philosophy. The transcendence of things occurs in time, and only with the help of this temporality can it be understood. In contrast, Strauss's idea of returning to Plato's idealism is too simple, even a layman in today's philosophy. Strauss can't even tell Socrates from Plato, nor can he tell Plato from Aristotle. Ancient philosophy was advertised as "Excellence in virtue". Even in Plato's philosophy, Strauss's "new theory" only considered Plato's "theory of ideas" in its heyday, without considering Plato's hesitation about the non-existence of temporality in The Wise Man and parmenides's detailed analysis of "one" and "many". Not to mention Aristotle, because Heidegger's "philosophy of temporality" depends on Aristotle's pioneering pace of the concept of "movement" in physics.

Of course, we can't say here that Platonism can be completely refuted with the help of this modern philosophy's explanation of temporality. The opposition and support of ideas are actually mutual, and time and eternity are two indispensable dimensions of human existence. The question is whether we are honest with our starting point and give an explanation. If modern philosophy supports generativeness and temporality, it means the degeneration of human nature, which is absolutely a reckless assertion. Besides, to our surprise, Liu Xiaofeng seems to indiscriminately use two completely different concepts of historical philosophy, namely "historical rationality" and "historical determinism". "Historical rationality" is actually "historical determinism", which is the way that history becomes "science" in rationalism, that is, history is described as a process of evolution according to certain laws, and historical rationality is Hegelian "objective spirit" or "world rationality". Historical determinism, however, is trivial, fragmented, proud of diversity, and never serves it with any unity, represented by Dilthey's philosophy of life. I don't know whether the misuse of "historical rationality" and "historicism" is the knowledge of China people's predecessors or the myth of Liu Xiaofeng alone. If the Strauss tradition represented by Liu Xiaofeng wants to criticize all historical views with "historical consciousness", then they can be confused. However, what kind of experience is it to cancel the historical view of "historical consciousness"? This may in turn point the finger at Strauss's philosophy. Is Strauss enlightening us with a historical philosophy without history?

Liu Xiaofeng tried to force the conclusion of "contempt" under Heidegger's philosophy of time with Strauss's judge's pen. For Liu Xiaofeng, virtue is noble and precious because it is eternal, while Heidegger supports temporality, which naturally cancels virtue. However, this kind of criticism stands outside the door of philosophy and does not cut into the thought itself at all. We can't call a person timid just because he is measuring the width of the waves. Wisdom is not the acquired "essence" at all, but the one you want to understand. "Philosophy" literally means "love wisdom" in ancient Greece. Socrates always said "I know I don't know", and that's the meaning. Western traditional philosophy itself contains a timely grasp of wisdom. Strauss can emphasize this "desire for love" in some texts, which also clearly shows that although he wants to show his firm grasp of absolute truth, he still has to take this grasp process into account. Grasping the truth requires a process, which shows that people do not always grasp the truth. Truth is waiting for us to "love" on the road.

Moreover, is it true that philosophers who support temporality are morally degraded? Confucius was revered by Mencius as a "timely sage", and Su Shi expressed his typical time emotion and sentiment in the poem Before and After Chibi. Generally speaking, "working all day, walking with the times" and "studying the relationship between man and nature, learning from the changes of ancient and modern times" are the background colors of China's thought. At this point, Liu Xiaofeng may have given another jaw-dropping judgment. Regarding the "no historical consciousness" of China's thought, he wrote: "This makes us think that no one has Machiavelli-Heidegger's historical consciousness, whether it is Laozi, Confucius or almost all ancient philosophers in China." (Page 2 19) What he is actually defending here is that there is also a history without historical consciousness, a history in the sense of Socrates-Plato-Xenophon. Given that he has generally dismissed timeliness as the opposite, he can only make this blunt distinction. Because history can't be denied in fact, just as time can't be denied. Plato's "eternal time", according to the research of philosophers, actually excludes the "present" of the past and the future; So what is Plato's "history"? Rule out the history of historical events?

No matter what the Strauss-style view of history is, one thing is certain, and Liu Xiaofeng's judgment that the ancient philosophers in China have no sense of history is doubtful. In his book, Liu Xiaofeng rashly asserted with the help of Liao Ping's words: "There is absolutely no problem with China's metaphysical path." This statement reflects the enthusiasm of the national cultural standard, but from the rigorous academic attitude, China's metaphysical way is not so much a "problem" as it is a "problem", and this conclusion is more appropriate. We should at least regard China's thought as "Stellen in fracture", and then we can start to consider it (in Frage kommen) and study it. And "no problem" is where the mind is blocked.

As we said before, when Strauss realized that the time consciousness of modernity was destroying the eternal virtue of conceptual truth, his reaction was to try to defend Canon's unshakable position with a blunt subversive attitude. When Heidegger, as a phenomenological tradition, realized that the modern technology produced under the framework of traditional metaphysics had completely enveloped mankind under the "shelf", he kept a philosopher's calm, and his last exhortation to people was: take it easy. This is not a kind of laissez-faire, but allows subjects in different niches to move forward on their own in the time and space of natural game. The self-adaptation of survival history is actually the self-evolution of social order and civilization. This solution does not relax the tension between ancient and modern times, but keeps this tension in the gaze of existing history. Keep your thoughts as thoughts, not simply solidified into "no problem" things.

Finally, we want to mention Heidegger's "furnace metaphor", which can be said to be just the opposite of Plato's "hole metaphor" and also give a timely expression scheme of virtue. This is a story about the ancient unknown philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus was naturally good at thinking, which aroused the curiosity of some ordinary people, who all wanted to get close to this philosopher. After arriving at Heraclitus' residence, people often feel disappointed, because they thought they would see a stranger, but they didn't expect to see Heraclitus warming himself by the fire like ordinary people. But Heraclitus encouraged those who were about to leave not to go, specially invited them in and said, "Even here, God is here." Where God is "here", there is "divinity". This is Heidegger's explanation of the "place" of ethics. Ethics itself is a place, or ethics takes place in a place.

In Heidegger's interpretation of antigone, we can further see the significance of this interpretation to ethical norms. Heidegger explained the origin of antigone's unwritten law with the "stove" mentioned in the chorus. Stove is a must-have thing in the home, representing the home nature of life here. Written laws are at home, unwritten laws are not at home, and unwritten laws are not at home, which is exactly what written laws require and expel. "Leaving home can happen in a simple measurement of existence, thus driving out a way out and a place. But this measure only comes from forgetting the stove, that is, forgetting to exist. However, in a foreign land, you can also break this forgetting by thinking about existence and belonging to the stove. " (The Complete Works of Heidegger, Volume 53, page 144) The reason why natural law is natural law is because it is unwritten law. On the surface, it is not the supreme law that issues orders, but the "innate" that people understand in their daily lives. Heidegger gathered the normative "divinity" into the secular daily life, which is not the reduction of divinity, but the promotion of human nature, or it runs through the gap between human nature and divinity. This interpretation also unveiled the mystery of "sacredness" in one fell swoop. Sacredness is not unattainable, only because it is within reach, divinity is sacred. Just as antigone acted intuitively according to natural law, those doubts about whether antigone, as an "individual", could understand natural law were unreasonable.