Heidegger’s main interest was
ontology or the study of being. In his fundamental treatise, Being and Time, he
attempted to access being (Sein) by means of phenomenological analysis of human
existence (Dasein) in respect to its temporal and historical character. After
the change of his thinking (“the turn”), Heidegger placed an emphasis on
language as the vehicle through which the question of being can be unfolded. He
turned to the exegesis of historical texts, especially of the Presocratics, but
also of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and to poetry, architecture,
technology, and other subjects. Instead of looking for a full clarification of
the meaning of being, he tried to pursue a kind of thinking which was no longer
“metaphysical.” He criticized the tradition of Western philosophy, which he
regarded as nihilistic, for, as he claimed, the question of being as such was
obliterated in it. He also stressed the nihilism of modern technological
culture. By going to the Presocratic beginning of Western thought, he wanted to
repeat the early Greek experience of being, so that the West could turn away
from the dead end of nihilism and begin anew. His writings are notoriously
difficult. Being and Time remains his most influential work.
1.
Life and Works
Heidegger was born on
September 26, 1889 in Messkirch in south-west Germany to a Catholic family. His
father worked as sexton in the local church. In his early youth, Heidegger was
being prepared for the priesthood. In 1903 he went to the high school in
Konstanz, where the church supported him with a scholarship, and then, in 1906,
he moved to Freiburg. His interest in philosophy first arose during his high
school studies in Freiburg when, at the age of seventeen, he read Franz
Brentano’s book entitled On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to
Aristotle. By his own account, it was this work that inspired his life-long
quest for the meaning of being. In 1909, after completing the high school, he
became a Jesuit novice, but was discharged within a month for reasons of
health. He then entered Freiburg University, where he studied theology.
However, because of health problems and perhaps because of a lack of a strong
spiritual vocation, Heidegger left the seminary in 1911 and broke off his
training for the priesthood. He took up studies in philosophy, mathematics, and
natural sciences. It was also at that time that he first became influenced by
Edmund Husserl. He studied Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In 1913 he
completed a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on The Doctrine of
Judgement in Psychologism under the direction of the neo-Kantian philosopher
Heinrich Rickert.
The outbreak of the First
World War interrupted Heidegger’s academic career only briefly. He was
conscripted into the army, but was discharged after two months because of
health reasons. Hoping to take over the chair of Catholic philosophy at
Freiburg, Heidegger now began to work on a habilitation thesis, the required
qualification for teaching at the university. His thesis, Duns Scotus’s
Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, was completed in 1915, and in the same year
he was appointed a Privatdozent, or lecturer. He taught mostly courses in
Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy, and regarded himself as standing in the
service of the Catholic world-view. Nevertheless, his turn from theology to
philosophy was soon to be followed by another turn.
In 1916, Heidegger became a
junior colleague of Edmund Husserl when the latter joined the Freiburg faculty.
The following year, he married Thea Elfride Petri, a Protestant student who had
attended his courses since the fall of 1915. His career was again interrupted
by military service in 1918. He served for the last ten months of the war, the
last three of those in a meteorological unit on the western front. Within a few
weeks of his return to Freiburg, he announced his break with the “system of
Catholicism” (January 9, 1919), got appointed as Husserl’s assistant (January
21, 1919), and began lecturing in a new, insightful way (February 7, 1919). His
lectures on phenomenology and his creative interpretations of Aristotle would
now earn him a wide acclaim. And yet, Heidegger did not simply become Husserl’s
faithful follower. In particular, he was not captivated by the later
developments of Husserl’s thought—by his neo-Kantian turn towards
transcendental subjectivity and even less by his Cartesianism—but continued to
value his earlier work, Logical Investigations. Laboring over the question of
things themselves, Heidegger soon began a radical reinterpretation of Husserl’s
phenomenology.
In 1923, with the support of
Paul Natorp, Heidegger was appointed associate professor at Marburg University.
Between 1923 and 1928, he enjoyed there the most fruitful years of his entire
teaching career. His students testified to the originality of his insight and
the intensity of his philosophical questioning. Heidegger extended the scope of
his lectures, and taught courses on the history of philosophy, time, logic,
phenomenology, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Leibniz. However, he had
published nothing since 1916, a factor that threatened his future academic
career. Finally, in February 1927, partly because of administrative pressure,
his fundamental but also unfinished treatise, Being and Time, appeared. Within
a few years, this book was recognized as a truly epoch-making work of 20th
century philosophy. It earned Heidegger, in the fall of 1927, full
professorship at Marburg, and one year later, after Husserl’s retirement from
teaching, the chair of philosophy at Freiburg University. Although Being and
Time is dedicated to Husserl, upon its publication Heidegger’s departure from
Husserl’s phenomenology and the differences between two philosophers became
apparent. In 1929, his next published works—“What is Metaphysics?,” “On the
Essence of Ground,” and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics—further revealed
how far Heidegger had moved from neo-Kantianism and phenomenology of
consciousness to his own phenomenological ontology.
Heidegger’s life entered a
problematic and controversial stage with Hitler’s rise to power. In September
1930, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) became
the second largest party in Germany, and on January 30, 1933 Hitler was
appointed chancellor of Germany. Up to then virtually apolitical, Heidegger now
became politically involved. On April 21, 1933, he was elected rector of the
University of Freiburg by the faculty. He was apparently urged by his
colleagues to become a candidate for this politically sensitive post, as he
later claimed in an interview with Der Spiegel, to avoid the danger of a party
functionary being appointed. But he also seemed to believe that he could steer
the Nazi movement in the right direction. On May 3, 1933, he joined the NSDAP,
or Nazi, party. On May 27, 1933, he delivered his inaugural rectoral address on
“The Self-Assertion of the German University.” The ambiguous text of this
speech has often been interpreted as an expression of his support for Hitler’s
regime. During his tenure as rector he produced a number of speeches in the
Nazi cause, such as, for example, “Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and
the National Socialist State” delivered in November 1933. There is little doubt
that during that time, Heidegger placed the great prestige of his scholarly
reputation at the service of National Socialism, and thus, willingly or not,
contributed to its legitimization among his fellow Germans. And yet, just one
year later, on April 23, 1934, Heidegger resigned from his office and took no
further part in politics. His rectoral address was found incompatible with the
party line, and its text was eventually banned by the Nazis. Because he was no
longer involved in the party’s activities, Heidegger’s membership in the NSDAP
became a mere formality. Certain restrictions were put on his freedom to
publish and attend conferences. In his lecture courses of the late 1930s and
early 1940s, and especially in the course entitled Hölderlin’s Hymnen
“Germanien” und “Der Rein” (Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine”)
originally presented at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester
of 1934/35, he expressed covert criticism of Nazi ideology. He came under
attack of Ernst Krieck, semi-official Nazi philosopher. For some time he was under
the surveillance of the Gestapo. His final humiliation came in 1944, when he
was declared the most “expendable” member of the faculty and sent to the Rhine
to dig trenches. Following Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, Heidegger
was accused of Nazi sympathies. He was forbidden to teach and in 1946 was
dismissed from his chair of philosophy. The ban was lifted in 1949.
The 1930s are not only marked
by Heidegger’s controversial involvement in politics, but also by a change in
his thinking which is known as “the turn” (die Kehre). In his lectures and
writings that followed “the turn,” he became less systematic and often more
obscure than in his fundamental work, Being and Time. He turned to the exegesis
of philosophical and literary texts, especially of the Presocratics, but also
of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and makes this his way of
philosophizing. A recurring theme of that time was “the essence of truth.”
During the decade between 1931 and 1940, Heidegger offered five courses under
this title. His preoccupation with the question of language and his fascination
with poetry were expressed in lectures on Hörderlin which he gave between 1934
and 1936. Towards the end of 1930s and the beginning of 1940s, he taught five
courses on Nietzsche, in which he submitted to criticism the tradition of
western metaphysics, described by him as nihilistic, and made allusions to the
absurdity of war and the bestiality of his contemporaries. Finally, his
reflection upon the western philosophical tradition and an endeavor to open a
space for philosophizing outside it, brought him to an examination of
Presocratic thought. In the course of lectures entitled An Introduction to
Metaphysics, which was originally offered as a course of lectures in 1935, and
can be seen as a bridge between earlier and later Heidegger, the Presocratics
were no longer a subject of mere passing remarks as in Heidegger’s earlier
works. The course was not about early Greek thought, yet the Presocratics
became there the pivotal center of discussion. It is clear that with the
evolution of Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s, they gained in importance in
his work. During the 1940s, in addition to giving courses on Aristotle, Kant
and Hegel, Heidegger lectured extensively on Anaximander, Parmenides, and
Heraclitus.
During the last three decades
of his life, from the mid 1940s to the mid 1970s, Heidegger wrote and published
much, but in comparison to earlier decades, there was no significant change in
his philosophy. In his insightful essays and lectures, such as “What are Poets
for?” (1946), “Letter on Humanism” (1947), “The Question Concerning Technology”
(1953), “The Way to Language” (1959), “Time and Being” (1962), and “The End of
Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), he addressed different issues
concerning modernity, labored on his original philosophy of history—the history
of being—and attempted to clarify his way of thinking after “the turn”. Most of
his time was divided between his home in Freiburg, his second study in
Messkirch, and his mountain hut in the Black Forest. But he escaped
provincialism by being frequently visited by his friends (including, among the
others, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the physicist Werner
Heisenberg, the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, the psychologist Ludwig Binswanger)
and by traveling more widely than ever before. He lectured on “What is
Philosophy?” at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1955, and on “Hegel and the Greeks” at
Aix-en-Provence in 1957, and also visited Greece in 1962 and 1967. In 1966,
Heidegger attempted to justify his political involvement during the Nazi regime
in an interview with Der Spiegel entitled “Only God Can Save Us”. One of his
last teaching stints was a seminar on Parmenides that he gave in Zähringen in
1973. Heiddegger died on May 26, 1976, and was buried in the churchyard in
Messkirch. He remained intellectually active up until the very end, working on
a number of projects, including the massive Gesamtausgabe, the complete edition
of his works.
2.
Philosophy as Phenomenological Ontology
In order to understand
Heidegger’s philosophy before “the turn”, let us first briefly consider his
indebtedness to Edmund Husserl. As it has been mentioned, Heidegger was
interested in Husserl from his early student years at the University of
Freiburg when he read Logical Investigations. Later, when Husserl accepted a
chair at Freiburg, Heidegger became his assistant. His debt to Husserl cannot
be overlooked. Not only is Being and Time dedicated to Husserl, but also
Heidegger acknowledges in it that without Husserl’s phenomenology his own
investigation would not have been possible. How then is Heidegger’s philosophy
related to the Husserlian program of phenomenology?
By “phenomenology” Husserl
himself had always meant the science of consciousness and its objects; this
core of sense pervades the development of this concept as eidetic,
transcendental or constructive throughout his works. Following the Cartesian
tradition, he saw the ground and the absolute starting point of philosophy in
the subject. The procedure of bracketing is essential to Husserl’s
“phenomenological reduction”—the methodological procedure by which we are led
from “the natural attitude,” in which we are involved in the actual world and
its affairs, to “the phenomenological attitude,” in which the analysis and
detached description of the content of consciousness is possible. The
phenomenological reduction helps us to free ourselves from prejudices and
secure the purity of our detachment as observers, so that we can encounter
“things as they are in themselves” independently of any presuppositions. The
goal of phenomenology for Husserl is then a descriptive, detached analysis of
consciousness, in which objects, as its correlates, are constituted.
What right does Husserl have
to insist that the original mode of encounter with beings, in which they appear
to us as they are as things in themselves, is the encounter of consciousness
purified by phenomenological reduction and its objects? “Whence and how is it
determined what must be experienced as the ‘things themselves’ in accordance
with the principle of phenomenology?” These are pressing questions which
Heidegger might well have asked. Perhaps because of his reverence for Husserl,
he does not subject him to direct criticism in his fundamental work.
Nevertheless, Being and Time is itself a powerful critique of the Husserlian
phenomenology. Heidegger there gives attention to many different modes in which
we exist and encounter things. He analyses the structures constitutive of
things not only as they are encountered in the detached, theoretical attitude
of consciousness, but also in daily life as “utensils” (Zuhandene) or in
special moods, especially in anxiety (Angst). What is more, he exhibits there
the structures that are constitutive of the particular kind of being which is
the human being and which he calls “Dasein.” For Heidegger, it is not pure
consciousness in which beings are originally constituted. The starting point of
philosophy for him is not consciousness, but Dasein in its being.
The central problem for
Husserl is the problem of constitution: How is the world as phenomenon
constituted in our consciousness? Heidegger takes the Husserlian problem one
step further. Instead of asking how something must be given in consciousness in
order to be constituted, he asks: “What is the mode of being of that being in
which the world constitutes itself?” In a letter to Husserl dated October 27,
1927, he states that the question of Dasein’s being cannot be evaded, as far as
the problem of constitution is concerned. Dasein is that being in which any
being is constituted. Further, the question of Dasein’s being directs him to
the problem of being in general. The “universal problem of being,” he says in
the same letter, “refers to that which constitutes and to that which is
constituted.” While far from being dependent upon Husserl, Heidegger finds in
his thought an inspiration leading him to the theme which has continued to draw
his attention since his early years: the question of the meaning of being.
Phenomenology thus receives in
Heidegger a new meaning. He conceives it more broadly, and more etymologically,
than Husserl, as “letting what shows itself to be seen from itself, just as it
shows from itself.” Husserl applies the term “phenomenology” to a whole
philosophy. Heidegger takes it rather to designate a method. Since in Being and
Time philosophy is described as “ontology” and has being as its theme, it
cannot adopt its method from any of the actual sciences. For Heidegger the
method of ontology is phenomenology. “Phenomenology,” he says, “is the way of
access to what is to become the theme of ontology.” Being is to be grasped by
means of the phenomenological method. However, being is always the being of a
being, and accordingly, it becomes accessible only indirectly through some
existing entity. Therefore, “phenomenological reduction” is necessary. One must
direct oneself toward an entity, but in such a way that its being is thereby
brought out. It is Dasein which Heidegger chooses as the particular entity to
access being. Hence, as the basic component of his phenomenology, Heidegger
adopts the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, but gives it a completely
different meaning.
To sum up, Heidegger does not
base his philosophy on consciousness as Husserl did. For him the
phenomenological or theoretical attitude of consciousness, which Husserl makes
the core of his doctrine, is only one possible mode of that which is more
fundamental, namely, Dasein’s being. Although he agrees with Husserl that the transcendental
constitution of the world cannot be unveiled by naturalistic or physical
explanations, in his view it is not a descriptive analysis of consciousness
that leads to this end, but the analysis of Dasein. Phenomenology for him is
not a descriptive, detached analysis of consciousness. It is a method of access
to being. For the Heidegger of Being and Time, philosophy is phenomenological
ontology which takes its departure from the analysis of Dasein.
3.
Dasein and Temporality
In everyday German language
the word “Dasein” means life or existence. The noun is used by other German
philosophers to denote the existence of any entity. However, Heidegger breaks
the word down to its components “Da” and “Sein,” and gives to it a special
meaning which is related to his answer to the question of who the human being
is. He relates this question to the question of being. Dasein, that being which
we ourselves are, is distinguished from all other beings by the fact that it
makes issue of its own being. It stands out to being. As Da-sein, it is the
site, “Da”, for the disclosure of being, “Sein.”
Heidegger’s fundamental
analysis of Dasein from Being and Time points to temporality as the primordial
meaning of Dasein’s being. Dasein is essentially temporal. Its temporal
character is derived from the tripartite ontological structure: existence,
thrownness, and fallenness by which Dasein’s being is described. Existence
means that Dasein is potentiality-for-being (Seinkönnen); it projects its being
upon various possibilities. Existence represents thus the phenomenon of the
future. Then, as thrownness, Dasein always finds itself already in a certain
spiritual and material, historically conditioned environment; in short, in the
world, in which the space of possibilities is always somehow limited. This
represents the phenomenon of the past as having-been. Finally, as fallenness,
Dasein exists in the midst of beings which are both Dasein and not Dasein. The
encounter with those beings, “being-alongside” or “being-with” them, is made
possible for Dasein by the presence of those beings within-the-world. This
represents the primordial phenomenon of the present. Accordingly, Dasein is not
temporal for the mere reason that it exists “in time,” but because its very
being is rooted in temporality: the original unity of the future, the past and
the present. Temporality cannot be identified with ordinary clock time – with
simply being at one point in time, at one “Now” after another—which for
Heidegger is a derivative phenomenon. Neither does Dasein’s temporality have
the merely quantitative, homogeneous character of the concept of time found in
natural science. It is the phenomenon of original time, of the time which
“temporalizes” itself in the course of Dasein’s existence. It is a movement
through a world as a space of possibilities. The “going back” to the
possibilities that have been (the past) in the moment of thrownness, and their
projection in the resolute movement “coming towards” (the future) in the moment
of existence, which both take place in “being with” others (the present) in the
moment of fallenness, provide for the original unity of the future, the past,
and the present which constitutes authentic temporality.
As authentically temporal,
Dasein as potentiality-for-being comes towards itself in its possibilities of
being by going back to what has been; it always comes towards itself from out
of a possibility of itself. Hence, it comports itself towards the future by
always coming back to its past; the past which is not merely past but still
around as having-been. But in this “going back” to what it has been which is
constitutive together with “coming towards” and “being with” for the unity of
Dasein’s temporality, Dasein hands down to itself its own historical
“heritage,” namely, the possibilities of being that have come down to it. As
authentically temporal, Dasein is thus authentically historical. The repetition
of the possibilities of existence, of that which has been, is for Heidegger
constitutive for the phenomenon of original history which is rooted in
temporality.
4.
The Quest for the Meaning of Being
Throughout his long academic
career, Heidegger was preoccupied with the question of the meaning of being.
His first formulation of this question goes as far back as his high school
studies, during which he read Franz Brentano’s book On the Manifold Meaning of
Being in Aristotle. In 1907, the seventeen-year-old Heidegger asked: “If
what-is is predicated in manifold meanings, then what is its leading
fundamental meaning? What does being mean?” The question of being, unanswered
at that time, becomes the leading question of Being and Time twenty years
later. Surveying the long history of the meaning attributed to “being,”
Heidegger notes that in the philosophical tradition it has generally been
presupposed that being is at once the most universal concept, the concept
indefinable in terms of other concepts, and the self-evident concept. In short,
it is a concept that is mostly taken for granted. However, Heidegger claims
that even though we seem to understand being, its meaning is still veiled in
darkness. Therefore, we need to restate the question of the meaning of being.
In accordance with the method
of philosophy which he employs in his fundamental treatise, before attempting
to provide an answer to the question of being in general, Heidegger sets out to
answer the question of the being of the particular kind of entity that is the
human being, which he calls Dasein. The vivid phenomenological descriptions of
Dasein’s being-in-the-world, especially Dasein’s everydayness and resoluteness
toward death, have attracted many readers with interests related to existential
philosophy, theology, and literature. The basic concepts such as temporality,
understanding, historicity, repetition, and authentic or inauthentic existence
were carried over into and further explored in his later works. Still, from the point of view of the quest
for the meaning of being, Being and Time was a failure and remained unfinished.
As Heidegger himself admitted in his later essay, “Letter on Humanism” (1946),
the third division of its first part, entitled “Time and Being,” was held back
“because thinking failed in adequate saying of the turning and did not succeed
with the help of the language of metaphysics.” The second part also remained
unwritten.
“The turn” (Kehre) that occurs
in the 1930’s is the change in Heidegger’s thinking mentioned above. The consequence of “the turn” is not the
abandoning of the leading question of Being and Time. Heidegger stresses the continuity of his
thought over the course of the change. Nevertheless, as “everything is
reversed,” even the question concerning the meaning of Being is reformulated in
Heidegger’s later work. It becomes a question of the openness, that is, of the
truth, of being. Furthermore, since the openness of being refers to a situation
within history, the most important concept in the later Heidegger becomes the
history of being.
For a reader unacquainted with
Heidegger’s thought, both the “question of the meaning of being” and the
expression “history of being” sound strange. In the first place, such a reader
may argue that when something is said to be, there is nothing expressed which
the world “Being” could properly denote. Therefore, the word “being” is a meaningless
term and the Heideggerian quest for the meaning of being is in general a
misunderstanding. Secondly, the reader may also think that the being of
Heidegger is no more likely to have a history than the being of Aristotle, so
the “history of being” is a misunderstanding as well. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s
task is precisely to show that there is a meaningful concept of being. “We
understand the ‘is’ we use in speaking,” he claims, “although we do not
comprehend it conceptually.” Therefore, Heidegger asks: Can being then be
thought? We can think of beings: a table, my desk, the pencil with which I am
writing, the school building, a heavy storm in the mountains . . . but being?
If the being whose meaning Heidegger seeks seems so elusive, almost like
no-thing, it is because it is not an entity. It is not something; it is not a
being. “Being is essentially different from a being, from beings.” The
“ontological difference,” the distinction between being (das Sein) and beings
(das Seiende), is fundamental for Heidegger. The forgetfulness of being that,
according to him, occurs in the course of Western philosophy amounts to the
oblivion of this distinction.
The conception of the history
of being is of central importance in Heidegger’s thought. Already in Being and Time
its idea is foreshadowed as “the destruction of the history of ontology.” In
Heidegger’s later writings the story is considerably recast and called the
“history of being” (Seinsgeschichte). The beginning of this story, as told by
Heidegger especially in the Nietzsche lectures, is the end, the completion of
philosophy by its dissolution into particular sciences and
nihilism—questionlessness of being, a dead end into which the West has run.
Heidegger argues that the question of being would still provide a stimulus to
the research of Plato and Aristotle, but it was precisely with them that the
original experience of being of the early Greeks was covered over. The fateful
event was followed by the gradual slipping away of the distinction between
being and beings. Described variously by different philosophers, being was
reduced to a being: to idea in Plato, substantia and actualitas in Medieval
philosophy, objectivity in modern philosophy, and will to power in Nietzsche
and contemporary thought. The task which the later Heidegger sets before
himself is then to make a way back into the primordial beginning, so that the
“dead end” can be replaced by a new beginning. And since the primordial
beginning of western thought lies in ancient Greece, in order to solve the
problems of contemporary philosophy and reverse the course of modern history,
Heidegger ultimately turns for help to the Presocratics, the first western
thinkers.
5.
Overcoming Metaphysics
For the later Heidegger,
“western philosophy,” in which there occurs forgetfulness of being, is
synonymous with “the tradition of metaphysics.” Metaphysics inquires about the
being of beings, but in such a way that the question of being as such is
disregarded, and being itself is obliterated. The Heideggerian “history of
being” can thus be seen as the history of metaphysics, which is the history of
being’s oblivion. However, looked at from another angle, metaphysics is also
the way of thinking that looks beyond beings toward their ground or basis. Each
metaphysics aims at the fundamentum absolutum, the ground of such a metaphysics
which presents itself indubitably. In Descartes, for example, the fundamentum
absolutum is attained through the “Cogito” argument. Cartesian metaphysics is
characterized by subjectivity because it has its ground in the self-certain
subject.
Furthermore, metaphysics is not merely the philosophy which asks the
question of the being of beings. At the end of philosophy—i.e., in our present
age where there occurs the dissolution of philosophy into particular
sciences—the sciences still speak of the being of what-is as a whole. In the
wider sense of this term, metaphysics is thus, for Heidegger, any discipline
which, whether explicitly or not, provides an answer to the question of the
being of beings and of their ground. In medieval times such a discipline was
scholastic philosophy, which defined beings as entia creatum (created things)
and provided them with their ground in ens perfectissimum (the perfect being),
God. Today the discipline is modern technology, through which the contemporary
human being establishes himself in the world by working on it in the various
modes of making and shaping. Technology forms and controls the human position
in today’s world. It masters and dominates beings in various ways.
“In distinction from mastering
beings, the thinking of thinkers is the thinking of being.” Heidegger believes
that early Greek thinking is not yet metaphysics. Presocratic thinkers ask the
question concerning the being of beings, but in such a way that being itself is
laid open. They experience the being of beings as the presencing (Anwesen) of
what is present (Anwesende). Being as presencing means enduring in
unconcealment, disclosing. Throughout his later works Heidegger uses several
words in order rightly to convey this Greek experience. What-is, what is
present, the unconcealed, is “what appears from out of itself, in appearing
shows itself , and in this self-showing manifests.” It is the “emerging
arising, the unfolding that lingers.” He describes this experience with the
Greek words phusis (emerging dominance) and alêtheia (unconcealment). He
attempts to show that the early Greeks did not “objectify” beings (they did not
try to reduce them to an object for the thinking subject), but they let them be
as they were, as self-showing rising into unconcealment. They experienced the
phenomenality of what is present, its radiant self-showing. The departure of
Western philosophical tradition from concern with what is present in
presencing, from this unique experience that astonished the Greeks, has had
profound theoretical and practical consequences.
According to Heidegger, the
experience of what is present in presencing signifies the true, unmediated
experience of “the things themselves” (die Sache selbst). We may recall that
the call to “the things themselves” was included in the Husserlian program of
phenomenology. By means of phenomenological description Husserl attempted to
arrive at pure phenomena and to describe beings just as they were given
independently of any presuppositions. For Heidegger, this attempt has, however,
a serious drawback. Like the tradition of modern philosophy preceding him,
Husserl stood at the ground of subjectivity. The transcendental subjectivity or
consciousness was for him “the sole absolute being.” It was the presupposition
that had not been accounted for in his program which aimed to be
presuppositionless. Consequently, in Heidegger’s view, the Husserlian attempt
to arrive at pure, unmediated phenomena fails. Husserl’s phenomenology departs
from the original phenomenality of beings and represents them in terms of the thinking
subject as their presupposed ground. By contrast, Heidegger argues, for the
Presocratics, beings are grounded in being as presencing. Being, however, is
not a ground. To the early Greeks, being, unlimited in its dis-closure, appears
as an abyss, the source of thought and wonder. Being calls everything into
question, casts the human being out of any habitual ground, and opens before
him the mystery of existence.
The departure of western
philosophical tradition from what is present in presencing results in
metaphysics. Heidegger believes that today’s metaphysics, in the form of
technology and the calculative thinking related to it, has become so pervasive
that there is no realm of life that is not subject to its dominance. It imposes
its technological-scientific-industrial character on human beings, making it
the sole criterion of the human sojourn on earth. As it ultimately degenerates
into ideologies and worldviews, metaphysics provides an answer to the question
of the being of beings for contemporary men and women, but skillfully removes
from their lives the problem of their own existence. Moreover, because its sway
over contemporary human beings is so powerful, metaphysics cannot be simply
cast aside or rejected. Any direct attempt to do so will only strengthen its
hold. Metaphysics cannot be rejected, canceled or denied, but it can be
overcome by demonstrating its nihilism. In Heidegger’s use of the term,
“nihilism” has a very specific meaning. It refers to the forgetfulness of
being. What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is Being; hence,
it is nihilistic.
According to Heidegger,
Western humankind in all its relations with beings is sustained by metaphysics.
Every age, every human epoch, no matter however different they may be—
Greece after the Presocratics,
Rome, the Middle Ages, modernity—has asserted a metaphysics and, therefore, is
placed in a specific relationship to what-is as a whole. Metaphysics inquires
about the being of beings, but it reduces being to a being; it does not think
of being as being. Insofar as being itself is obliterated in it, metaphysics is
nihilism. The metaphysics of Plato is no less nihilistic than that of
Nietzsche. Consequently, Heidegger tries to demonstrate the nihilism of
metaphysics in his account of the history of being, which he considers as the
history of being’s oblivion. His attempt to overcome metaphysics is not based
on a common-sense positing of a different set of values or the setting out of
an alternative worldview, but rather is related to his concept of history, the
central theme of which is the repetition of the possibilities for existence.
This repetition consists in thinking being back to the primordial beginning of
the West—to the early Greek experience of being as presencing—and repeating
this beginning, so that the Western world can begin anew.
6.
From the First Beginning to the New Beginning
Many scholars perceive
something unique in the Greek beginning of philosophy. It is commonly
acknowledged that Thales and his successors asked generalized questions
concerning what is as a whole, and proposed general, rational answers which
were no longer based on a theological ground. However, Heidegger does not
associate the unique beginning with the alleged discovery of rationality and
science. In fact, he claims that both rationality and science are later
developments, so that they cannot apply to Presocratic thought. In his view,
the Presocratics ask: “What are beings as such as a whole?” and they answer:
aletheia—unconcealment. They experience beings in their phenomenality: as what
is present in presencing. But the later thought which begins with Plato and
Aristotle is unable to keep up with the beginning. With Plato and Aristotle
metaphysics begins and the history of being’s oblivion originates.
The aim which the later
Heidegger sets before himself is precisely to return to the original experience
of beings in being that stands at the beginning of Western thought. This
unmediated experience of beings in their phenomenality can be variously described:
what is present in presencing, the unconcealment of what is present, the
original disclosure of beings. To repeat the primordial beginning more
originally in its originality means to bring us back to the Presocratic
experiences, to dis-close them, and to let them be as they originally are. But
the repetition is not for the sake of the Presocratics themselves. Heidegger’s
work is not a mere antiquarian, scholarly study of early Greek thinking, nor is
it an affirmation of the long lost Greek way of life. It occurs within the
perspective of nihilism and being’s forgetfulness, both unknown to the Greeks,
and has as a goal the future possibilities for existence. It happens as the
listening that opens itself out to the words of the Presocratics from our contemporary
age, from the age of the world picture and representation, the world which is
marked by the domination of technology and the oblivion of being. In the first
beginning, the task of the Greeks was to ask the question “What are beings?,”
and hence to bring beings as such as a whole to the first recognition and the
most simple interpretation. In the end, the task is to make questionable what
at the end of a long tradition of philosophy-metaphysics has been forgotten.
The new beginning begins thus with the question of being.
From Being and Time (1927)
where the question of the meaning of being is first developed, but still
expressed in the language of metaphysics, to “Time and Being” (1962) where an
attempt to think being without regard to metaphysics is made, Heidegger goes
full circle. Heidegger begins by asking about the multiple meanings of being
and ends up conceding its multiplicity and acknowledging that there are
multiple determinations or meanings of being in which being discloses itself in
history. Nevertheless, in neither of these meanings does being give itself
fully. “As it discloses itself in beings, being withdraws.” There is an
essential withdrawal of being. Therefore, the truth of being is none of its
particular historical determinations—idea, substantia, actualitas, objectivity
or the will to power. The truth of being can be defined as the openness, the
free region which always out of sight provides the space of play for the
different determinations of being and human epochs established in them. It is
that which is before actual things and grants them a possibility of
manifestation as what is present, ens creatum, and objects.
The truth of being, its
openness, is for Heidegger not something which we can merely consider or think
of. It is not our own production. It is where we always come to stand. We find
ourselves thrown in a historically conditioned environment, in an epoch in
which the decision concerning the prevailing interpretation of the being of
being is already made for us. Yet, by asking the question of being, we can at
least attempt to free ourselves from our historical conditioning. Heidegger’s
program expressed in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964)
consists solely in the character of thinking which does not attempt to
dominate, but engages in disclosing and opening up what shows itself, emerges,
and is manifest. When Heidegger urges us to stand in being, he does not merely
ask us to acknowledge our own place in being’s history, but to be
future-oriented and see the future in a unity with the past as having-been and
the present. It means turning oneself into being in its disclosing withdrawal.
7.
From Philosophy to Political Theory
Heidegger never claimed that
his philosophy was concerned with politics. Nevertheless, there are certainly
some political implications of his thought. He perceives the metaphysical
culture of the West as a continuity. It begins with Plato and ends with
modernity, and the dominance of science and technology. He thus implies in the
post-modernist fashion that Nazism and the atom bomb, Auschwitz and Hiroshima,
have been something like the “fulfillment” of the tradition of Western
metaphysics and tries to distance himself from that tradition. He turns to the
Presocratics in order to retrieve a pre-metaphysical mode of thought that would
serve as a starting point for a new beginning. However, his grand vision of the
essential history of the West and of western nihilism can be questioned.
Modernity, whose development involves not only a technological but also a
social revolution, which sets individuals loose from religious and ethnic
communities, from parishes and family bonds, and which affirms materialistic
values, can be regarded as a radical departure from earlier classical and Christian
traditions. Contrary to Heidegger’s argument, rather than being a mere
continuity, the “essential” history of the West can then be seen as a history
of radical transformations. Christianity challenges the classical world, while
assimilating some aspects of it, and is in turn challenged by modernity.
Modernity overturns the ideas and values of the traditional (Christian and
classical) culture of the West, and, once it becomes global, leads to the
erosion of nonwestern traditional cultures.
Under the cover of immense
speculative depth and rich ontological vocabulary full of intricate wordplay
(both which make his writings extremely hard to follow) Heidegger expresses a
simple political vision. He is a revolutionary thinker who denies the
traditional philosophical division between theory and practice, and this is
especially clear when he boldly declares in his Introduction to Metaphysics
that “we have undertaken the great and lengthy task of demolishing a world that
has grown old and of building it truly anew”. He wants to overturn the
traditional culture of the West and build it anew on the basis of earlier
traditions in the name of being. Like other thinkers of modernity, he adopts a
Eurocentric perspective and sees the revival of German society as a condition
for the revival of Europe (or the West), and that of Europe as a condition for
the revival of for the whole world; like them, while rejecting God as an end,
he attempts to set up fabricated ends for human beings. Ultimately, in the
famous interview with Der Spiegel, he expresses his disillusionment with his
project and says: “Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change
of the present state of the world . . . The greatness of what is to be thought
is too great.” Like being, which he describes as “disclosing self-concealing,”
after making a disclosure he withdraws; after stirring up a revolution, he
leaves all its problems to others. He says: “only a God can still save us,” but
the God for whom, in the absence of philosophical thought, he now looks is
clearly not that of the Christians or of any contemporary religion.
In the Spiegel interview
Heidegger tells us that in order to begin anew, we need to go to the “age-old”
(i.e., pre-classical and pre-metaphysical) traditions of thought. He invokes
the concept of the ancient polis. Yet, since he does not want to concern
himself with the question of ethics (beyond saying in the “Letter of Humanism”
that the word “ethics appeared for the first time in the school of Plato” and
thus implying that ethics does not think the truth of being and is nihilistic),
he does not consider the fact that even in pre-Platonic and pre-Socratic times
a Greek polis was an ethical community, in which moral questions were raised
and discussed. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the poems of Hesiod, and the
tragedies of Sophocles, as well as the other ancient Greek texts, including the
monumental political work of Thucydides, the History of the Peloponnesian War,
express concerns with ethical behavior at both the individual and community
levels. Furthermore, the strength of Western civilization, insofar as its roots
can be traced to ancient Greece, is that from its beginning it was based on
rationality, understood as free debate, and the affirmation of fundamental
moral values. Whenever it turned to irrationality and moral relativism, as in
Nazism and Communism, that civilization was in decline. Therefore, Heidegger is
likely to be mistaken in his diagnosis of the ills of the contemporary society,
and his solution to those ills seems to be wrong. Asking the question of being
(and, drawing our attention to this question is certainly his significant
contribution) is an important addition to, but never a replacement for asking
moral questions in the spirit of rationality and freedom.
Heidegger claims that the
human being as Da-sein can be understood as the “there” (Da) which being (Sein)
requires in order to disclose itself. The human being is the unique being whose
being has the character of openness toward Being. But men and women can also
turn away from being, forget their true selves, and thus deprive themselves of
their humanity. This is, in Heidegger’s view, the situation of contemporary
humans, who have replaced authentic questioning concerning their existence with
ready-made answers served up by ideologies, the mass media, and overwhelming
technology. Consequently, Heidegger attempts to bring today’s men and women
back to the question of being. At the beginning of the tradition of Western
philosophy, the human being was defined as animal rationale, the animal endowed
with reason. Since then, reason has become an absolute value which through
education brings about a gradual transformation of all spheres of human life.
It is not more reason in the modern sense of calculative thinking, Heidegger
believes, that we need today, but more openness toward and more reflection on
that which is nearest to us—being.
8.
Heidegger’s Collected Works
Heidegger’s earlier
publications and transcripts of his lectures are being brought out in Gesamtausgabe,
the complete edition of his works. The Gesamtausgabe, which is not yet complete
and projected to fill about one hundred volumes, is published by Vittorio
Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main. The series consists of four divisions: (I)
Published Writings 1910-1976; (II) Lectures from Marburg and Freiburg,
1919-1944; (III) Private Monographs and Lectures, 1919-1967; (IV) Notes and
Fragments. Below there is a list of the collected works of Martin Heidegger.
English translations and publishers are cited with each work translated into
English.
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