Heidegger On Romanticism

Romanticism has not yet come to its end. Romanticism attempts once again a transfiguration of beings, which as re-acting against the thorough explaining and calculating strives only to evolve beyond or next to this explaining or calculating. This transfiguration "calls upon" the historical renewal of "culture," urges its rootedness in the "people," and strives for communication to everyone. GA 65, 496; 1999, 349.

In other words, for Heidegger, the Romantic "re-action" to our modern Weltnacht did not go far enough. Even so, as Pol Vandevelde argues in his Heidegger and the Romantics (Routledge, 2012), Heidegger's desire to "do something more radical than romanticism" does not exclude the possibility that he "[built] upon the romantic project and [attempted] to offer the ontological foundation, the [Stiftung] of this romanticization" (15).

Vandevelde's use of the German term "Stiftung" (misprinted in the text as "Sitftung") translates in English as "foundation," but it connotes the kind of foundation that involves an endowment or donation (as in the English phrase "charitable foundation"). Understood in this fashion, we have to do with a more consistently Heideggerian notion than "foundation" in the sense of a base or basis. The Stiftung is an act of generosity, not an immovable rock upon which to build a church.