NOTES

Introduction

1. “Je sens la mort qui me pince continuellement la gorge ou les reins. . . .” Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Lecture de Montaigne,” in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 254.

2. Otto Pöggeler, “Neue Wege mit Heidegger?” in Philosophische Rundschau, XXIX, 1/2 (1982), 42. See also Werner Marx, “Die Sterblichen,” in Ute Guzzoni, ed., Nachdenken über Heidegger: Eine Bestandsaufnahme (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1980), pp. 160–75; and especially Gibt es auf Erden ein Mass? (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1983), soon to appear in an English translation published by the University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 1

1. Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 6th ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1971). Apart from a few minor changes in the second edition (1922), the exclusion of the Foreword to the third edition (1925), and the inclusion of the Foreword to the fourth edition (1954), the sixth edition reproduces the first—even to its pagination. I have cited this most recent edition because of its availability to the present-day reader. Citations appear in the text as: (J, with page number).

2. Martin Heidegger, “Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers’ Psychologie der Weltanschauungen,” in Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion, ed. Hans Saner (Munich: R. Piper, 1973), pp. 70–100. Cited in the text by page number (in parentheses). Apart from information supplied by Professor Saner, to the effect that Heidegger’s essay was “originally thought of as a review” (see Saner’s note, p. 100), the exact history of the text remains unknown. My own enquiries have established that Heidegger dropped plans to publish the piece shortly after sending the typescript to Jaspers in June, 1921. Communications surrounding this unpublished review sparked a cordial relationship between the two thinkers during the 1920s; their friendship did not, however, survive Heidegger’s involvement in the NSDAP in 1933–34. To the best of my knowledge, neither man ever commented publicly or expressed anything in writing on Heidegger’s Jaspers article. See my discussion of the Heidegger-Jaspers relationship in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, XII, 2 (May 1978), pp. 126–29.

3. We know very little about the origins of Being and Time. Hans-Georg Gadamer notes that its “original form” was a lecture delivered to the Marburg theologians during 1924; see his “Martin Heidegger und die marburger Theologie,” in Heidegger, ed. Otto Pöggeler (Cologne: Kiepenheuer &Witsch, 1969), p. 169. But the original form of some of the most fundamental ideas of Being and Time precede this lecture by three to five years. Two of the years 1916–21 Heidegger spent on the Western Front. Hence the years 1919–21, during which Heidegger worked on his review of Jaspers’ book, become even more important in the chronology leading to Being and Time. None of this, however, is meant to cast doubt on the importance of the Marburg lectures (1923–28) in the genesis of Being and Time, which the published volumes of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe have already demonstrated.

4. Jaspers entered a handwritten note in his copy of the second edition, saying that he could not revise the book “without writing it all over again” (100). See note 19, below.

5. In his Appendix (note one), Heidegger is highly critical of Jaspers’ “Introduction” (especially its third section, “Systematic Basic Thoughts,” which a new edition “might well drop”) for failing to perform this preliminary work.

6. It would be quite another task—but an important one—to see how Heidegger’s later essay, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (1938), now appearing in Holzwege, pp. 69–104, recoils directly on Jaspers’ work: “That the world becomes an image results from the very same process by which man becomes the Subject among beings.” Cf. H, 85, and note 9, 98–103.

7. According to Heidegger, neither the “understanding” of verstehende Psychologie nor the problem of the “historical,” which is to say, neither of the problems that derive from the work of Dilthey, are adequately treated in Jaspers’ work. Cf. the Appendix to Heidegger’s review (99–100, note three).

8. The “limit situations” are not discussed until the third chapter of the book (J, 229ff.). Heidegger suggests in his Appendix (note two) that this chapter be brought forward to the beginning of the book, in order that the second and first chapters might “emanate” from this material.

9. For Heidegger’s later criticisms of Nietzsche in this regard, see his Nietzsche, I, 573–74.

10. On the “how,” see SZ, section 71. (I am indebted to Thomas Sheehan for this reference.)

11. On Vorhandenheit see SZ, sections 21 and 64.

12. Cf. the existential structure of the sich vorweg, in SZ, section 41.

13. In section 42 of Being and Time, Bekümmernis appears as an ontic mode of Sorgen, related to Besorgen (cf. p. 197). The two root words are closely related in meaning: see Hermann Paul, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1966) pp. 374a and 611a. The Jaspers review points forward only in the vaguest way to those structures of Sorge so painstakingly analyzed in the preparatory analysis of Dasein’s everyday existence in the First Division of Being and Time. In this early essay (93) Heidegger speaks of the self as having “self-worldly” relations (selbstweltlich) (cf. SZ, section 5), “with-worldly” relations (mitweltlich) (cf. SZ, section 26), and “environmental” relations (umweltlich) (cf. SZ, section 15). No further details appear.

14. Heidegger speaks of the historisch unfolding of my having-my-self, preferring this word to geschichtlich. Later, in Being and Time and in subsequent writings, he reserves historisch for things relating to the discipline of history and prefers geschichtlich as a more original kind of “historizing.” Although he names past, present, and future in the Jaspers review, he does not yet call them ecstases of time, nor does he mention Zeitlichkeit or Zeitigung at all. See chapter three for further discussion of “temporality.”

15. Cf. Verfallen in SZ, section 38.

16. For the following I am indebted to Otto Pöggeler, “Neue Wege,” esp. pp. 57–58, and to Otto Pöggeler and Friedrich Hogemann, “Martin Heidegger: Zeit und Sein,” in Josef Speck, ed., Grundprobleme der grossen Philosophen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), V, pp. 48–86. An essential sourcebook is Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, second edition (Pfullingen: G. Neske, 1983), soon to be published in English translation by Humanities Press and Macmillan. I am grateful to have had Pöggeler’s writings—and his letters—before me as I write.

17. See Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,’ 1920–21,” in The Personalist, LX, 3 (1979), 312–24.

18. Cf. Being and Time, sections 39–40, 45, 50, 61 and, above all, 63, “The hermeneutical situation gained for an interpretation of the meaning of the Being of care, and the methodological character of the existential analysis in general.” See also chapter two, below.

19. These remarks (from 1954) are reproduced in the current edition (the sixth, 1971). Both these and those appearing in Jaspers’ Foreword to the third edition (1925) may be taken as a direct response to Heidegger’s critique of the first edition. Because the third edition is all but unobtainable today I shall offer a translation of its Foreword here:

The new edition reproduces the second without changes. I would like to make a few purely personal remarks as to why a reworking of the text would have been out of place.
        One possible result of such a reworking would have been an entirely new book. At the time I wrote, having become aware of worldviews as moments or dimensions in the one true worldview which embraces the whole in an indefinite manner and never explicitly, I tried to formulate my thoughts on the basis of intuition and to communicate them without a great deal of deliberation. The particular matters that came to be presented this way still seem to me to be true; I could not present them any better, but only differently. Since I have long been engaged methodologically in risking the second step—a logically defined clarification of the modern consciousness of existence—it seems all the more natural to me to leave my youthful undertaking in its initial form. At that time there was a secret ideal expressed in the general stance of the book, in the very manner of its analyses, without my knowing or willing it. I acknowledge this secret ideal without reservation as present to me now. Yet the limits that are fixed in the very nature of such a presentation demand that the identical content appear in sundry forms. I am laboring at a new configuration, and it would be false for me to achieve it merely by reworking a text already at hand. As a result of my work I have become another person so far as knowledge and logical form are concerned, although not in my basic attitudes. I prefer to leave my earlier effort untouched, in the hope that after its attempt at a psychological clarification and undergirding of philosophical existence I can produce a logical, systematic one.
        The other possible result of such a reworking would have been that the book suffer damage. Because it has flaws—in structure, in methodological observations, in historical digressions, thus in the kinds of things that must be regarded as inessential in the light of the book’s goal—I would have wanted to correct them on the basis of my present perspective. Weak lines or pages might have been struck, many formulations might have been altered, and, above all, the things that are missing might have been adduced and the systematic character of the whole entirely redone without touching particulars. But that would have resulted in a two-headed monstrosity. The book would have suffered—and for the sake of merely extrinsic and tangential correctness.

The impact of Heidegger’s criticisms and of the publication in 1927 of Heidegger’s Being and Time may be seen in Jaspers’ three-volume Philosophie (Berlin: Springer, 1932). In this work Jaspers comments on the centrality of the question of Being for contemporary philosophy (I, ix); he refers to Being and to Dasein in his more detailed account of death (II, 220ff.), which is itself brought forward and made the primary “limit situation” (II, 201ff.); and he introduces an account of “anxiety,” Angst (II, 225ff.).

20. Heidegger’s analysis of guilt (Schuld) owes much less to Jaspers than does the analysis of death. It seems probable—although no explicit evidence emerges from the review—that Jaspers’ preoccupation with “genuineness” and “authenticity” (Echtheit, Eigentlichkeit) (cf. J, 35–39) exerts an influence on Heidegger’s use of both notions—perhaps the most problematic notions in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit, structurally related to Jemeinigkeit and nonethical at least in its intention, cannot be identified with Jaspers’ Echtheit. Yet Heidegger also imports (from Jaspers?) the concept of Echtheit into his analysis (cf. SZ, 146 and 148).

Chapter 2

1. I am thinking for example of the final pages of the “Letter on Humanism,” of “On The Essence of Truth,” section 3, of “Time and Being” (ZSdD, 12ff.), and of “The Thing” and “Building Dwelling Thinking” (both in VA) in their entirety.

2. A detailed comparison of Basic Problems, section 19, and Jacques Derrida’s “Ousia et Grammé” seems to me to be absolutely essential, since section 19 constitutes Heidegger’s own note to a footnote in Being and Time. A translation of Derrida’s article by E. S. Casey appears in Phenomenology in Perspective, ed. F. J. Smith (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1970), pp. 54–93.

3. My readers may be astonished that such doubts come so soon. But when I asked Heidegger during my last conversation with him, on January 31, 1976, precisely when he began to have serious doubts about being able to complete Division Three of Being and Time Part One, he replied, “1925 or 1926.” But those are the years when Divisions One and Two were still underway. Heidegger-II put in an appearance before Heidegger-I could write his magnum opus! Perhaps he had already put in an appearance in 1919, as I have suggested in chapter one, in order to expose Jaspers’ lack of clarity concerning the “founding act.” (My conversation with Heidegger is recounted in greater detail in chapter six, below.)

4. I have already recorded something of the doubts that assail Heidegger during his lectures of 1927 and 1928, doubts concerning his “temporal interpretation” of Being as such. In Basic Problems he complains about the lack of a “perfect mastery of the phenomenological method,” about an inability to unravel the complex structures his own temporal interpretation has uncovered (24, 439). To be sure, when he refers to the “phenomenological method” he is thinking of section 7 in Being and Time and of his own interpretation of phenomenological reduction, construction, and destruction (cf. 29–32). And in the 1928 Logic, after a fascinating comparison of Leibnizian microcosmic Monads and Heideggerian world-situated Dasein, he expresses an unwillingness to pursue the question of the extent to which “the interpretation of Dasein as temporality can be grasped universal-ontologisch” (26, 271). For it is a question he “cannot decide,” a question “still altogether obscure” to him (ibid.).

5. That Heidegger never abandons the question of the finitude of Time is evinced by the final paragraph of the Todtnauberg Seminar protocol, which records—all too elliptically—the concluding discussion on the finitude of Ereignis and of the “Fourfold.” The discussion employs the terms “end, boundary, the own—to be safeguarded in the own,” and defines das Eigene as “what is one’s own,” Eigentum (ZSdD, 58).

6. See “Being and Truth, Being and Time,” in Research in Phenomenology, VI (1976), 151–66, especially 165.

7. These words point toward the central hermeneutical admonition of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, to wit, Heidegger’s insistence that “precisely the elaboration of the intrinsic essence of finitude, an elaboration required by, and conducted with a view to, the grounding of metaphysics, must as a matter of principle itself remain finite and can never become absolute” (KPM, 229). But the words also point back to the 1925–26 logic course, where Heidegger speaks of the nature of “presuppositions” in philosophy. He writes: “Every philosophical problematic has something behind its back which, in spite of the supreme transparency which that problematic might possess, it cannot attain. For it possesses its transparency precisely from the fact that it doesn’t know about the presupposition” (21, 280).

8. That the “capacity for transformation” cannot be satisfied with one grand pirouette toward Being (i.e., the Kehre as usually interpreted, the conversion to Being) is suggested by the following passage: “Meta-ontology is possible only on the grounds and in the perspective of the radical ontological problem, and is at one with it. The very radicalization of fundamental ontology compels the designated transition of ontology to emerge from ontology itself [aus dieser selbst hervor]” (200).

9. 26, 201. Cf. Heidegger’s remarks on what he calls der existenzielle Einsatz (177).

10. Heidegger continues to probe the enigma of the withdrawal of beings as a whole in his 1929–30 lectures at Freiburg University. (These lectures, published in 1983 as volume 29/30 of the Gesamtausgabe under the title Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, reached me only when the present book was at proof stage: hence this regrettably brief note.) Here he analyzes the fundamental mode of attunement which we call “boredom,” die Langeweile, literally the protracted “whiling” away of time. He endeavors to trace this mood—so tantalizingly reminiscent in its effects to the fundamental disposition of anxiety in SZ—back to the “unified universal-horizon of Time” (218). Yet without success: “With this reference to the horizon of Time we gain nothing” (219). For such mere references do not penetrate the entire dimension of problems which Heidegger had been grappling with long before he published SZ. “What does it mean to say that Time is the horizon?” It is clear that such a horizon must encompass beings as a whole. Yet Heidegger’s analysis (see §32) can do no more than erect the paradox of Binden/Bannen: the horizon of Time both binds and bans Dasein to and from beings as a whole, both captivates and catapults it, both fascinates and banishes it. Heidegger is unable to elucidate this power of time to ban beings as a whole. His reference to the Augenblick, while crucial to the issue of the finitude of Dasein, does not serve to illuminate the temporal character of the “moment.” It is perhaps in this 1929–30 lecture course that we witness the ultimate failure—actually the default—of the analysis of ecstatic temporality. It may be a task for contemporary thinking to recover that analysis, to pursue it in the directions of both everydayness and finite existence. For the metabolism of time confronts Dasein in all its quotidian involvements, all the while it is under way to something insurmountable.

11. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, n.d., p. 80.

12. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXX, 1 (1969), 31–57. See especially Part IV, on Heidegger.

13. In Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays, etc., trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 145.

14. Ibid., pp. 138 and 145.

15. SI, 1011. See D. F. Krell, “Der Maulwurf: Die philosophische Wühlarbeit bei Kant, Hegel und Nietzsche,” in boundary 2, IX, 3 and X, 1 (1981), “Why Nietzsche Now?”, 155–84.

16. “Ousia and Grammé,” in Smith, p. 93. But there are other, very different, far more modest statements. Cf. Dominique Janicaud, “Presence and Appropriation,” in Research in Phenomenology, VII (1978), 69–71.

Chapter 3

1. For this second division of the course there is no manuscript in Heidegger’s hand; the text is based on the corrected (but undated) Simon Moser Nachschrift.

2. See 24, 334–35 and 358–59, the two places where Heidegger would have to have commented on it. On p. 334 Heidegger mentions the word “suddenly” in its relation to the “now,” but he completely ignores the matter of ekstasis. Heidegger does discuss the word “suddenly,” exaiphnās, fifteen years later in a lecture course on Parmenides (see Gesamtausgabe volume 54, Parmenides [Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1982], p. 223). Although the context here involves time (see esp. section 8b), it is no longer the ecstatic temporality of existence that draws Heidegger’s attention, no longer the Augenblick, but “incipient upsurgence,” das Anfängliche. (See also pp. 113–14 on the sense of time as “commencement,” Anfang.) Cf. Augustine, Confessions, X, 6 and 8; XI, 15.

3. The intriguing remarks on presence in “The Anaximander Fragment” (EGT, chapter 1), remarks which have captivated Derrida—cf. “Différance”—are as much as we have.

4. See the Hinweis to “Time and Being,” ZSdD, 91.

5. See C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879). The Oxford English Dictionary contains the following—misleading—remark in its entry on the verb “to exist”: “The late appearance of the word is remarkable: it is not in Cooper’s Latin-English Dictionary (1565), either under existo or exto.” Yet the noun “existence” appears much earlier than that, for example in Chaucer and in the Roman de la Rose.

6. We are fortunate in now having English translations—excellent ones—of these two courses: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, by Albert Hofstadter; and Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, by Michael Heim; both published by Indiana University Press (Bloomington, 1982 and 1984, respectively). Indiana also published Theodore Kisiel’s fine translation of the 1925 Zeitbegriff lectures in 1985.

7. The reference reminds us how indebted Heidegger’s analysis of “ecstatic term porality” is to Henri Bergson—infinitely more so than to the time-consciousness analyses of Husserl. In the projected central portion of his course on the “History of the Concept of Time” Heidegger proposes to explicate the three “principal stages” of that history: Aristotle, Newton and Kant, and Henri Bergson. See 20, 11.

8. See Otto Pöggeler and Friedrich Hogemann, p. 73, and elsewhere. Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie: “Vom Ereignis” is discussed further in chapter six below.

9. Derrida raises a troubling question when he wonders whether the distinction between “original” and “ordinary” Time is specious, whether it is itself the expression of a metaphysics of presence or proximity, indeed a metaphysics tainted with a moral-ethical prejudice which favors the “authentic” over the “inauthentic.” Yet Derrida fails to engage in (1) a careful analysis of ecstatic-horizonal Time, (2) an analysis of the Time of Ereignis, as Reichen, and (3) detailed consideration of the starting-point of Being and Time as finitude, to which he nevertheless does allude. It is with the question of finitude that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in terms of the question of the “meaning” of Being initiates an epochal—better, an eschatological—turn in the history of metaphysics. “Finitude of Time” remains the missing keystone, one that must be sought in Heidegger’s thinking of Ereignis. For Derrida’s questions, see “Ousia and Grammé,” esp. pp. 88–90.

10. See chapter eight for further discussion of transition and downgoing, Übergang and Untergang.

11. “Le sentiment d’éternité est hypocrite, l’étemité se nourrit du temps.” In M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 484.

12. See the entire discussion in section 19 of the Grundprobleme. See also the references to metabolē in “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis,” W, 319, 355 and 358. I am indebted to Walter Brogan for this second reference.

Chapter 4

1. For a list of these courses see W. J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, pp. 663–64.

2. Franz Brentano, Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1960, a photographic reproduction of the first edition, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1862), pp. 1–2 for this and the following. I will cite the text by page number in parentheses.

3. Perhaps this is too harsh: the lists from Theta 10 and Zeta 1, as well as that of Delta 7, to which Zeta 1 refers, are indeed variants of the list Brentano chooses. It is not so much a question of how the various lists may dovetail as of how the content of any given list is to be interrogated.

4. Brentano here is presumably following Adolf Trendelenburg, Geschichte der Kategorienlehre (Berlin: G. Bethge, 1846), p. 167. Cf. also pp. 187–89.

5. Brentano’s understanding of analogy differs significantly from that of Trendelenburg, which stresses the mathematical origins of analogy as proportionality. See Trendelenburg, pp. 149 ff. Cf. Brentano, pp. 95 ff.

6. Cf. Aristotle, Met. Beta 3, 998b 22 and Eta 6, 1045a 36; and Nic. Eth. I, 4, 1096a 23.

7. Met. Epsilon 4, 1027b 20 and Theta 10, 1051b 3ff. Brentano also refers to Cat. 5, 4a 37 and De interp. 9, qu. v.

8. See his Kategorienlehre, pp. ix-xi. However, Trendelenburg is not so much anti-Hegel as he is polemical against Karl Rosenkranz and Karl Ludwig Michelet, the “Friends of the Immortalized.” Himself committed to a philological-textual approach—his book is dedicated to Immanuel Bekker and Christian August Brandis of the Berlin Academy—Trendelenburg inveighs against the absolutization of three-stage dialectic which, he says, “quite often has its sole ground in the need for psychological comfort, because it promises the easiest path to a panoramic view of the whole.”

9. These remarks are based on Brentano’s reading of Met. Epsilon 4, which follows the analysis in Trendelenburg’s Kategorienlehre, pp. 167 and 187–89. Much later in his career Brentano reduces “being in the sense of the true” to an “improper sense” of being, which by now merely means thing. See Brentano’s own Kategorienlehre, edited from the Nachlass, by A. Kastil (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1933), p. 13.

10. See FS, 57ff. esp. 62 and 65–66, from which the following material derives.

11. F. Brentano, On the Origin of Ethical Knowledge (1889), p. 76, cited by Heidegger, FS, 62.

12. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1921) II/2, 123–24. In a sense, the ideal of totale Deckung corresponds to Brentano’s 1889 position: in sections 38–39 Husserl speaks of an identity of Sein and Wahrheit, in which Being expresses both the being true of “acts” and the true being of their “objective correlates.” “Evidence” expresses the unity of Being and truth. But all that is merely to introduce the problem of sensuous and categorial intuitions and of “the possibility of complete adequation” (p. 147).

13. Jean Beaufret has done this in his Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. I, Philosophie grecque (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973) pp. 117ff.

14. The quoted phrase is from Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Marburger Erinnerungen,” in Alma Mater Philippina (Marburg am Lahn: Universitätsbund e.V., Winter Semester 1973–74), p. 24. Gadamer corroborates what Pöggeler and Hogemann have already told us concerning the importance of factical, historical life-experiences in process. “No matter what he was teaching,” writes Gadamer of Heidegger, “whether Descartes or Aristotle, Plato or Kant, the central issue was always his analysis of the most original experiences undergone by Dasein, experiences he liberated from the concealments of traditional concepts.” Gadamer’s principal example (in “Martin Heidegger und die Marburger Theologie,” reprinted in Pöggeler, ed., Heidegger, pp. 170–71) is the course on Aristotle’s Ethics which I have just mentioned. Phronēsis was a mode of knowing that did not fall back on objectification for support; it involved knowledge not of a scientific character but of “the concrete existential situation.” Thus Aristotle himself offered a means for overcoming the predominant Greek interpretation of the truth of beings as Vorhandenheit. Nevertheless, Gadamer does not record the precise meaning of alētheia for Heidegger in the context of phronēsis, and alētheia is the crucial issue.

15. At SZ, 215, line 6, Heidegger refers to Brentano as having drawn attention to Kant’s acceptance of the traditional notion of truth as correspondence. As far as I know, there are no further references to Brentano in Being and Time.

16. On this “double leitmotif” see the excellent account of Walter Biemel, Heidegger (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973), p. 35. English translation by J. L. Mehta (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), p. 25.

17. See Heidegger, “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis,” in Wegmarken, pp. 317, 329–30, 340, 353, and 370–71. Cf. “Aletheia,” in EGT, 111–15. Jean Beaufret (Dialogue, p. 121) follows Heidegger by calling Aristotle’s task peri tas archas alētheuein (Nic. Eth. VI, 3, 1141a 17), which Beaufret translates as “. . . to enter into the open until we finally can see the place from which all the rest takes its departure and which rules ceaselessly over everything.”

18. I am indebted to Kenneth Maly for the following insight.

Chapter 5

1. See John Sallis, “Into the Clearing,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), pp. 107–15.

2. Recall however that Heidegger had already separated the word [Da sein] in the Jaspers review of 1919–21. See p. 15, above.

3. See Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, VIII, 214–21.

Chapter 6

1. Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger, second, expanded edition (Zürich and Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Atlantis, 1956), p. 72n.

2. “Martin Heidegger: Zeit und Sein,” in Speck, p. 76.

3. “Martin Heidegger: Zeit und Sein,” in Speck, p. 76.

4. “Neue Wege,” p. 47.

5. Pöggeler relates that Heidegger himself favored such a “three-tiered” interpretation of his career over the I-II dualism. My account of the three tiers expands upon Pöggeler’s, yet I believe he would accept my additions and even my reservations. For all that follows see Pöggeler and Hogemann, p. 77.

6. See Parvis Emad, “The Conception of Logic as the Metaphysics of Truth in Heidegger’s Last Marburg-Lectures,” in Research in Phenomenology, IX (1979), 233–46.

7. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977–78), II, 172ff., and J. L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1976), chap. 8; cf. Mehta, The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (New York: Harper &Row, 1971), chap. 2, which reprints chap. 8 of The Way. I have discussed Arendt and Mehta in greater detail in my “Analysis” to Volume IV of Heidegger’s Nietzsche (“Nihilism”), Ni 4, 272–76.

8. Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger und die hermeneutische Theologie,” in E. Jüngel, J. Wallmann, and W. Werbeck, eds., Verifikationen: Festschrift für Gerhard Ebeling zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1982), 475–98. Section II of Pöggeler’s paper provides a detailed account of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie. Numbers in parentheses in my text refer to this section of Pöggeler’s essay.

9. “Die hermeneutische Theologie,” p. 482. The German text reads: “Was gesagt wird, ist gefragt und gedacht im ‘Zuspiel’ des ersten und des anderen Anfangs zueinander aus dem ‘Anklang’ des Seyns in der Not der Seinsverlassenheit für den ‘Sprung’ in das Seyn zur ‘Gründung’ seiner Wahrheit als Vorbereitung der ‘Zukünftigen’ ‘des letzten Gottes.’”

10. See Pöggeler and Hogemann, in Speck, p. 49.

11. Otto Pöggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1972), p. 25.

12. W. J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, pp. 630–32.

Chapter 7

1. In Heidegger’s view letztes Faktum is the term that betrays the metaphysical character of Nietzsche’s philosophy of will to power. See Nl, 417 (Ni 2, 156); NII, 114 (Ni 4, 73); and all of chapter eight, below.

2. See Löwith, “Heideggers Vorlesungen über Nietzsche,” in Merkur, XVI (Stuttgart, 1962), pp. 72—83, esp. pp. 74 and 83.

3. Compare Heidegger’s critique of Husserl in ZSdD, 69ff. and in LR, xiv-xv.

4. Michel Haar, “Structures hégéliennes dans la pensée heideggérienne de l’Histoire,” in Revue de la Métaphysique et de Morale, 85, 1 (January-March 1980), 48–59. The page references in parentheses in the following paragraphs refer to this issue of the Revue. See also Dominique Janicaud, “Savoir philosophique et pensée méditante: Penser à partir de Hegel et de Heidegger aujourd’hui,” in Revue de l’enseignement philosophique (February-March 1977), pp. 1–14. Janicaud anticipates Haar’s question (see esp. pp. 6 and 8) by emphasizing the essentially positive “contiguity” of the Hegelian task (“Conceptualize that which is”) and the Heideggerian (“Think that which holds itself in reserve”). Janicaud’s essay should be kept in mind during our discussion of “Results” in chapter nine, below, inasmuch as its focus is “the destiny of rationality” in the era of science and technology. See now also his La puissance du rationnel (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). Finally, for an excellent account of Hegel/Heidegger, see Robert Bemasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1985), chapter one.

5. I will consider the most important source of Heidegger’s eschatology, “The Anaximander Fragment,” in chapter nine, below. We have already seen something of the possible origins of that thought—reflected in Heidegger’s 1920–21 lecture course, “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion”—in the first chapter of this book. Something of its attractive power we have perhaps experienced toward the close of chapter six on the Kehre. The very danger of this thought is thought-provoking in the extreme.

6. “Descensional reflection” appears in relation to the Platonic philosophy in D. F. Krell, “Socrates’ Body,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, X, 4 (Winter, 1972), p. 451; the formulation first appears in connection with Heidegger and Nietzsche in Krell, Nietzsche and the Task of Thinking (Doctoral Dissertation, Duquesne University, 1971), ch. IV, from which the present chapter in part derives. See also D. F. Krell, “Descensional Reflection,” in John Sallis, ed., Philosophy and Archaic Experience: Essays in Honor of Edward G. Ballard (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), pp. 3–12; and “Hegel Heidegger Heraclitus,” in John Sallis and Kenneth Maly, eds., Heraclitean Fragments: A Companion Volume to the Heidegger/Fink Seminar on Heraclitus (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980), esp. sections 3 and 4.

7. See EM, 15; NI, 448ff.; NII, 36ff.; and “Nietzsche’s Proclamation: ‘God is dead,’” in H, 218–19.

8. I cannot develop this fundamental matter here. But see SZ, 221–22, on the equiprimordial relation of Dasein to truth and untruth, and “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” W, 93: “The hiding away of what is concealed, as well as errance, belong to the primordial essence of truth.”

9. See Jean Granier, Le problème de la Vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1966), III, 2, esp. pp. 532ff.

10. See Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), pp. 179ff.

11. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, no. 56, in SII, 617; and Heidegger, NI, 320–21.

12. W, 146. Cf. Nietzsche, who asserts that “thanks to the unobtrusive dominance and direction of similar grammatic functions,” philosophy belongs in the province of grammar (JGB, SII, 584). Nietzsche ironically exalts grammar as “The People’s Metaphysics” (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, SII, 222) and designates grammar the most stubborn of idols: “I fear we will not be rid of God, because we still believe in grammar.” (GD, SII 960.) He demands, finally, “Should not philosophers rise above belief in grammar?” (JGB, SII, 600.)

13. LR, xxiii. Heidegger repeated his words in a 1969 television interview: cf. Richard Wisser, ed., Martin Heidegger im Gespräch (Freiburg im Breisgau: K. Alber, 1970), p. 77.

Chapter 8

1. Éperons: les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 60. Derrida’s discussion of Heidegger/Nietzsche on pp. 59–102 of Éperons is more subtle and suggestive than his earlier remarks in, for example, De la grammatologie (Éd. de Minuit, 1967), pp. 31—33, “La structure, le signe et le jeu,” in L’écriture et la différence (Éd. du Seuil, 1967), pp. 412–13, or “Les fins de l’homme,” in Marges de la philosophie (Ed. de Minuit, 1972), pp. 161–64.

2. For the following see my “Analysis” to Ni 1, 245–47.

3. See SZ, 264, lines 15–16; 272 n. 1; and, the key reference, to Nietzsche’s “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” 396, lines 16ff.

4. Her attempt to explain the change in terms of some sort of personal remorse is highly dubious, however. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, 172–78, and chapter six, above.

5. The word Übergang, we recall, united the metabolic “now” in Aristotle’s treatise on time and the metabolē of fundamental ontology itself. See chapter three, above, and my “Analysis” in Ni 2, 276–78.

6. The quoted phrases in this last sentence—indeed, the entire paragraph—are from Jean Granier, Problème de la Vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche, pp. 572–73.

7. Eckhard Heftrich, “Nietzsche im Denken Heideggers,” in Durchblicke, ed. Vittorio Klostermann (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1970), p. 349.

Chapter 9

1. See Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 239–58 (now appearing in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], pp. 37–59). (I shall cite the text as it appears in Murray, with page numbers in parentheses.) Heidegger plays a more positive role in the article than my presentation of it here suggests. Heidegger’s thought plays an even more positive role—however covert and non thematic it may be—in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). Not only in the third part of the book (on hermeneutics and philosophy as “edification”) but also in the two earlier “deconstructive” parts (on the mind-body problem and on traditional epistemology) Heidegger emerges as an essential impulse for Rorty’s entire project. See, for example, pp. 5–6, 12, 157n., 159n., 162–63, 393–94, and elsewhere.

2. William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography (New York: Macmillan-Collier Books, 1965), p. 43. Rorty comments (p. 251): “One of Heidegger’s strongest feelings . . . is that ages, cultures, nations, and peoples are supposed to live up to the demands of philosophers, rather than the other way round.”

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 304; see also pp. 298–303, which I regard as one of the most thoughtful statements of the predicament of twentieth-century politics.

4. See once again 26, 211 n., cited in chapter two, above. This note is one of the earliest references in Heidegger’s work to the holy. Yet even the later lectures and essays on Hölderlin have to do with the absence of the holy, which may by no means become the object of a “quest”; and the essays of the 1950s invoke divinities solely as an index of departure, a measure of humanity as mortal.

5. Rorty’s fears concerning Heidegger’s politics are not well articulated in his article. But see in the same volume (Murray, pp. 304–28) Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” the most dispassionate and balanced discussion I have seen, and one of the most insightful. Curiously, what Harries finds objectionable is not Heidegger’s “hope” but his despair, his “inward migration” after the Second World War. (Rorty might reply that such flight from political life seeks refuge in professional philosophy, so that Heidegger’s hope and despair are complementary: only the German professor, in a desperate act of compensation, could confuse philosophy with “present troubles.”) Harries defines Heidegger’s essential insight into history, namely, that “our destiny is governed by the history of metaphysics, which conceals a finally futile search for security,” (pp. 327–28), then argues: “Only this linear view of history leads Heidegger to his despairing analysis of the present age as so deeply fallen that all attempts to criticize and reform are already caught up in that fall” (p. 328). Harries sees in this “linear” view the “antipluralistic side of Heidegger’s thought,” his “implicit idealization of unity at the expense of plurality” (p. 327), such idealization transforming “authenticity” into either an authoritarianism or an unmitigated individualism. As desperate as such a linear view may be, and as pluralistic as I (an unstinting admirer of William James) would like to be, the rough beast of technology seems to mesmerize all political systems, East and West, North and South, and to paralyze or neutralize in advance all effective political action. The beast craves pools of energy, and the world is dragged on its leash.

6. Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena, p. 159.

7. Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), esp. pp. 32, 63, and 69–70.

8. Derrida, “Différance,” p. 160.

9. Derrida, “Différance,” p. 153.

10. This is argued in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, 188.

11. Land des Abends, Abend-land, the West or Occident, literally, the evening-land. Heidegger’s own remarks on evening, night, and dawn in the present passage may have been influenced by a passage at the conclusion of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part One (see SII, 614; NI, 336): “And that is the great midday when man stands at the midpoint of his path between beast and overman, when he celebrates his way to evening as his supreme hope: for it is the way to a new morning.”

12. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, 192.

13. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, 194.

14. However, I do not wish to imply that there is anything self-indulgent or inane about Derrida’s double-readings of Heidegger. See, for example, his recent “Envoi,” in Actes du XVIIIe Congrès des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française (Strasbourg, July 1980), published in Paris by J. Vrin, pp. 5–30. Translated as “Sending: On Representation,” by Peter and Mary Ann Caws, Social Research, 49, 2 (Summer 1982), 294–326. For more “results” in Derrida’s work, with regard to Hegel and Heidegger, see “Ousia et Grammé,” Marges de la philosophie, pp. 38–39 (Smith, p. 58), and “Hors Livre,” in La Dissémination (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1972), pp. 9–67.

Chapter 10

1. In Manfred Frings, ed., Heidegger and the Quest for Truth (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), p. 74.

2. See the complaint—and appreciation—of Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, p. 40.

3. Compare the use of the term Entschlossenheit, as “a distinctive mode of Dasein’s disclosedness” (SZ, section 60), and as an active power of decision, a will not to will, in Gelassenheit, pp. 58–59. Entschlossenheit is the thrown project of a Dasein that is silent, reticent, and determined to cultivate anxiety as disclosure; it is the effort to resist all interpretations that would “resolutely” handle anxiety, since in the case of anxiety all handling becomes the thoughtless violence of suppression and flight. Ent-schlossenheit is un-closure, hence “resolute openness.”

4. Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, SII, 943.

5. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, SII, 335.

6. VA, 196: “Poetizing is in the strict sense of the word a comprehensive taking-measure, through which man first receives the measure of the breadth of his essence. Man essentially is as mortal. . . . Only man dies: indeed he dies continuously as long as he endures on the earth, as long as he dwells. But his dwelling rests in the poetic.”

Chapter 11

1. Kurt Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung: Ein Dokument des Expressionismus, first published in 1920, reissued with new material in 1959 (Hamburg: Rowohlt), p. 25. Trakl’s poetry, cited in this chapter solely by page number within parentheses, is quoted from the following edition: Georg Trakl, Die Dichtungen, 13th printing (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1938).

2. US, 92: “During the period of Expressionism the realms of poetry and art were constantly present to me. Still more striking, even in my student days before the First World War, were the poems of Hölderlin and Trakl.”

3. The photograph (in the possession of the Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg) is reproduced in Otto Basil, Trakl (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965), p. 97.

4. R. M. Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1914 bis 1921 (Leipzig: Insel, 1938), pp. 36–37. See also the letter to L. v. Ficker immediately preceding and a later one dated 22 February 1917 to Erhard Buschbeck, pp. 126–27.

5. So argues Karsten Harries in “Language and Silence: Heidegger’s Dialogue with Georg Trakl,” in William V. Spanos, ed., Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 155–71, following W. H. Rey, “Heidegger-Trakl: Einstimmiges Zwiegespräch,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 30 (1956), 89–136. See also Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger, p. 201 n. 74, who defends Heidegger against Rey’s criticism and exposes Rey’s own naive appeal to what is “really there” in Trakl’s text.

6. It is perhaps a minor theme. Indeed, the major theme of Heidegger’s preoccupation with Trakl—poetic speech as such; speech that allows beings to scintillate in sheer presence; the incantatory es ist in Trakl’s “Psalm” and “De Profundis” (57–59; 63); the theme of Ereignis and the granting of Time and Being—arises only peripherally in his major article on Trakl, only in those three places (US, 38, 65, and 73) where he speaks of “the source of the advancing wave” of Trakl’s prosody. On the major theme, see Krell, “The Wave’s Source: Rhythm and the Languages of Poetry and Thought,” in David Wood, ed., Heidegger and Language (Warwick, England: Parousia Press, 1981), pp. 25–50.

7. Der Schlag appears at US, 40, 49–50, 66, 78–80; das Geschlecht at US, 49–50, 55, 65, 67, 74, 78–80.

8. Cf. Heidegger’s analysis of Hölderlin’s “Heimkunft” and “Andenken,” in EHD, 13–14, and 150. Cf. also “. . . Dichterisch Wohnet der Mensch . . .” in VA, 187–204.

9. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, no. 62 (SII, 623): “. . . in Hinsicht darauf, dass der Mensch das noch nicht festgestellte Tier ist.” Heidegger cites the phrase in his Trakl article (US, 45) and it is a salient feature of the contemporaneous lecture course Was heisst Denken? See pp. 24ff. of the latter.

10. “Womit ist dieses Geschlecht geschlagen, d.h. verflucht? Fluch heisst griechisch plēgē, unser Wort “Schlag.” Der Fluch des verwesenden Geschlechtes besteht darin, dass dieses alte Geschlecht in die Zwietracht der Geschlechter auseinandergeschlagen ist. Aus ihr trachtet jedes der Geschlechter in den losgelassenen Aufruhr der je vereinzelten und blossen Wildheit des Wildes. Nicht das Zwiefache als solches, sondern die Zwietracht ist der Fluch. Sie trägt aus dem Aufruhr der blinden Wildheit das Geschlecht in die Entzweiung und verschlägt es so in die losgelassene Vereinzelung. Also entzweit und zerschlagen vermag das “verfallene Geschlecht” von sich aus nicht mehr in den rechten Schlag zu finden. Den rechten Schlag aber hat es nur mit jenem Geschlecht, dessen Zwiefaches aus der Zwietracht weg in die Sanftmut einer einfältigen Zwiefalt vorauswandert, d.h. ein ‘Fremdes’ ist und dabei dem Fremdling folgt.”

11. Ernest Hemingway, “A Natural History of the Dead,” in The First Forty-Nine Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), pp. 367–68.

12. Note Heidegger’s remark on the relation of poetry and prosaic formulas at US, 81.

13. Plato, Symposium, 191a-d, translated by Michael Joyce. I am aware of the dangers involved in taking these passages out of their dramatic context. See Samuel Weber, Freud-Legende (Olten: Walter, 1979), pp. 171–96; and Krell, “Socrates’ Body,” as cited in chapter seven, note 6.

14. See, for example, Georges Bataille, L’érotisme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957), which abandons its one fertile idea, la discontinuité de l’être, and lapses into an admittedly “theological” explication of eroticism in terms of l’interdit et la transgression, decidedly on this side of good and evil. What at first seems the new gesture of Bataille’s work turns out to be the leaden gesticulations of the dead god.

15. See Metaphysische Anfangsgründe, 26, 171–75, esp. points 1, 2, 6, and 9.

16. The phrase Dasein lebt, indem es leibt appears often in Heidegger’s early lectures on Nietzsche and even in much later texts. See NI, 199 (Ni 1, 99); NI, 565; VA, 214 (EGT; 65); W, 326; and Hk, 234.

17. The most remarkable recent reflection on these matters I take to be Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique,” the first part of which—devoted to Heidegger’s 1928 remarks on Dasein and sexuality—is published in Heidegger, ed. Michel Haar (Paris: Cahiers de L’Herne, 1983), pp. 419–30. English translation in Research in Phenomenology, XIII (1983), pp. 65–83. The second part, presented at Loyola University of Chicago in March 1985 but not yet published, is devoted to Heidegger’s Trakl article.

18. Aristotle, On the Generation of Living Beings, II, 1 (731b 24–732a 12).