Bret W. Davis
“Basic concepts” or Ground-Concepts“ [Grundbegriffe] means for us here: grasping [begreifen] the ground [Grund] of beings as a whole. … When we have grasped something we also say something has opened up to us. … Thus ”to grasp“ [Be-greifen] the ground means above all that the ”essence“ of the ground embraces us into itself [ein-begriffen], and that it speaks to us in our knowing about it.
(BC 18–19 = GA 51: 21, trans. mod.)
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is widely considered to be the most famous, influential and controversial philosopher of the twentieth century. His writings are also among the most formidable. The fundamental concepts of his thought are for many the source of both fascination and frustration. Yet any student of philosophy – or of contemporary thought in general – needs to become acquainted with Heidegger’s main ideas. This book is designed to facilitate this process. Each chapter introduces and explains a key concept – or a cluster of closely related concepts – in Heidegger’s thought. Together, the chapters cover the full range of his path of thought in its early, middle and later periods.
What are the key concepts of Heidegger’s thought? A selection of the most important of these appear in the chapter titles of this book: the thinking of being; the hermeneutics of facticity; phenomenology; Dasein as being-in-the-world; care and authenticity; being and time; the turn; the German People; truth as alētheia and the clearing of beyng; the work of art; Ereignis (the event of appropriation); the history of being; will and Gelassenheit (releasement); Ge-stell (enframing as the essence of technology); language and poetry; the fourfold; and ontotheology (along with Heidegger’s conceptions of divinity). I shall let the chapter authors, each an expert in the area of his or her chapter topic, explain these key concepts in depth.
In this introductory chapter, I wish to orient the reader by addressing the following questions: who is Heidegger and how is his personal life related to his thought? What is “the question of being”, Heidegger’s central issue of concern, and what are the distinguishing characteristics of Heidegger’s thinking of being? And, finally, what are “basic concepts” according to Heidegger? I shall conclude with some brief reflections on the legacies of Heidegger’s thought.
Is a philosopher’s biography philosophically significant? Or is it the case that, as Heidegger once claimed, “when a thinker’s work … [is] … available, the ‘life’ of a philosopher is unimportant for the public. We never get to know what is essential in a philosophical life through biographical descriptions anyhow” (ST 5 = SA 5)? In his opening remarks to a lecture course on Aristotle, Heidegger once stated: “The only thing of interest regarding the person of a philosopher is this: He was born on such and such a date, he worked, and he died” (GA 18: 5).1 Heidegger may well have wished the same to be said about himself. To be sure, few philosophers have devoted their lives so single-mindedly to the task of thinking. Nevertheless, there are several compelling Heideg gerian reasons why it would not be entirely appropriate to simply say of Heidegger that he was born, worked and then died.
The first reason why we should not isolate Heidegger’s thought from his life is that, from early on, his thought is specifically about returning to the concreteness – the “facticity” – of human existence, and this return has to be a hermeneutical as well as a phenomenological endeavour given the historical embeddedness of human beings. According to Heidegger, the philosopher must start with and return to the concrete situation of his or her own historical life. “The problem of the self-understanding of philosophy”, Heidegger says in an early lecture course from 1920, “has always been taken too lightly. If one grasps this problem more radically, one finds that philosophy arises from factical life experience. And within factical life experience philosophy returns back into factical life experience” (PRL 6–7 = GA 60: 8). As he argues in Being and Time (1927), the life projects of an individual are embedded in the historical and social context into which one is “thrown”. One can authentically choose to modify one’s existential “situation” only by first awakening to it. This not only means that we should attend to the situation in which we ourselves stand as we read Heidegger, but it also means that we should take into consideration the life context in which he wrote.
Hence it is not irrelevant for understanding Heidegger’s thought to know that he was born in 1889 and died in 1976; that he was raised in Messkirch, a small conservative Catholic town in southwest Germany; that he intended to become a priest and studied theology before devoting himself fully to philosophy and leaving the Church; that he lived through both world wars, and notably through the Nazi era (more on this below); that he was German and wrote in the German language; that he lived and taught for most of his career in Freiburg; that he rarely travelled, other than a few trips to other European countries (such as Austria, Italy, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Greece), and yet frequently conversed with visiting scholars from around the world, including seminal exchanges with visitors from China and Japan (see May 1996); that he spent much time at his beloved cabin in Todtnauberg, a mountain village in the Black Forest; and that he lived in an age of the rapid development and increasingly pervasive spread of modern technology.2
A major reason why we cannot ignore Heidegger’s personal (or “existentiell”) history is his infamous official involvement with National Socialism in the first years of Hitler’s regime. Indeed, this entanglement with Nazism was not merely personal, in so far as Heidegger was, at the time, convinced that it was his philosophical calling to take a leading role in the formation of the movement. While his political role as rector of Freiburg University lasted only from 1933 to 1934, while his own version of what the movement should be about – his failed attempt to philosophically orient the movement, which he later claims was dismissively referred to as his own “private National Socialism” (RFT 23 = R 30) – was essentially untainted by biological racism, and while he increasingly became sharply (albeit often cryptically) critical of Hitler and Nazism in his public lectures and private writings and correspondence, nevertheless his short-lived political involvement as well as the more lasting political implications of his thought remain a troubling and fiercely debated topic to this day.
Finally, it would be inappropriate to abstract Heidegger’s thought from his historical situatedness in so far as, in his later period, he comes to hold that the historical existence of the individual is located within an epoch of the “history of being” itself. Accordingly, in studying any philosopher we need to know when – in which epoch of the history of being – he or she wrote. It is not enough, therefore, to say that a thinker was born on such and such a date, in so far as his or her thought arises out of and helps determine a historical context of meaning. The great philosophers are thought to play crucial roles in the shifts between epochs, and Heidegger saw his own thought as pivotally situated at the end of the history of philosophy as metaphysics and at the beginning of what he called “the task of thinking” (see BW 431ff. =ZSD 61ff.).
For Heidegger, it would also be insufficient to simply say that a thinker “died”, at least in so far as this would imply that death is merely a biological event that happens at the end of one’s life. As Heidegger explains in Being and Time, human existence (which he calls “Dasein”) is essentially determined as “being-toward-death” from the moment of its birth (BTS 228 = SZ 245). Our being is always confronted with its impending non-being, even though we for the most part inauthentic-ally flee from this most certain truth. Authentically anticipating this inevitable non-being, however, is not simply a gloomy looking ahead to the annihilation of life and meaningful existence; rather, facing up to our mortality allows us to properly take on the responsibility of embracing this or that possibility of existence, which is in turn what makes life meaningful. Later, Heidegger will say that death is “the shrine of the nothing” (PLT 176 = VA 171), and that “the nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of being” (PM 238 = GA 9: 312), implying that authentically facing up to our mortality is also what opens us up to an attentive correspondence with being, which, in its “ontological difference” from beings, must be approached as itself no-thing (see PM 233 = GA 9: 306; PM 290 = GA 9: 382). Thus, far from being a philosophically irrelevant biographical or biological event, death, or the being-toward-death of mortal human existence, would be a fundamental experience that opens and sustains Heidegger’s philosophy as a thinking of being.
A final objection to summing up Heidegger’s life by saying that he “was born, worked, and then died” is that, strictly speaking, he did not understand his efforts at thinking in terms of “working” or his writings in terms of “works”. There are two reasons for this. One is that Heidegger considered his thought to be essentially “on the way”. His motto for his Collected Edition (Gesamtausgabe) was “ways, not works” (Wege, nicht Werke), and he tell us that his books, essays and lectures should be read as “pathmarks” (Wegmarken) rather than as completed works. Another reason is that Heidegger contrasted the “work” done in the sciences with the “thinking” done in philosophy. While the former aims at “progress”, the latter aims at “re-gress”, that is to say, at taking a radical “step back”. “Science does not think” (WCT 8 = WhD 4), Heidegger was fond of provocatively stating. What he meant by this “shocking statement” is that science for the most part does not radically question its presuppositions, but rather carries out the work of research within certain given parameters. Heidegger is interested in how those parameters are given in the first place. (In Thomas Kuhn’s terms, Heidegger would be more interested in “revolutionary science”, which brings about “paradigm shifts”, than in “normal science”, which works within established paradigms [see BTS 7–8 = SZ 9; BW271–305; Kuhn 1970].) Thinking, Heidegger says, is not a matter of “work and achievement” within given horizons of intelligibility, but rather a kind of “thanking and attentiveness” through which such horizons are first delimited within the open-region of being (see GA 77: 99–100). In contrast to the work of the sciences, with its measurable achievements and technological effectiveness, the meditative thinking of philosophy is “the immediately useless, though sovereign, knowledge of the essence of things” (BQP 5 = GA 45: 5).
Heidegger’s chief concern is not with how this particular thing X relates to that particular thing Y, but rather how it is that the meaning of Xs and Ys and their possible relations gets determined in the first place. What does it mean for such things to be; what does it mean to say that they are? This question of “ontology” (the study of being), rather than questions regarding the “ontic” relations between particular beings, is what primarily interests Heidegger. Moreover, his central concern is not just with “regional ontologies”, that is, with the meaning of the being of, for example, biological things, artificial things, mental things, social things or imaginary things. Rather, following Aristotle’s understanding of ontology as “first philosophy”, Heidegger wants to know first and foremost about “being as such”. What is the sense of being that all entities share? What is the being of all beings?
“For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘ being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” Heidegger opens his first great book, Being and Time (1927), with this quotation from Plato (Sophist 244a). He goes on to say that not only do we in our time not have an answer to this question of the meaning of being, but we are no longer even perplexed about this most fundamental of philosophical concerns. We have forgotten the question of being. After Plato, Aristotle wondered about the question of “being qua being” (on hēi on), that is, the question of what it means for anything to be, irrespective of whatever other qualities it may have. While an ontological enquiry might go on to ask, for example, what makes the being of an animal different from the being of an artefact, the foundational question of ontology asks: what does it mean for anything at all to be?
As Heidegger points out, later philosophers such as Leibniz and Schelling rephrase the fundamental question of ontology as: “Why are there beings at all, and not rather nothing?” (see IM 1 = EM 1; PM 290 = GA 9: 382). But this way of framing the question of being can be misleading, in so far as it would lead us to think of being (das Sein) as the highest being or entity (das höchste Seiende), and to think of the relation between being and beings in terms of causality (in the sense in which one entity gives rise to another). In this manner, theologians might answer the question of being by saying that God is the highest being who creates the world, and that is why there are beings rather than nothing. For Heidegger, such answers evade rather than address the question of being, in that they fail to see what he calls the “ontological difference” between being and beings. “The being of beings ‘is’ itself not a being”, and so the “first philosophical step in understanding the problem of being consists in … not determining beings as beings by tracing them back in their origins to another being – as if being had the character of a possible being” (BTS 5 = SZ 6).
Being is not one being among others; being is not this or that entity. It is not even the highest being from which lower levels of beings derive their privative measure of being, as is thought in the many versions of the “great chain of being” (see Lovejoy 1964). Nor is being to be derived from beings by way of generalization, for example in the following manner: dogs and cats are animals, animals and plants are animate entities, animate and inanimate bodies are material entities, material and mental entities are both substances, and they are all that is; thus substance is the being of all beings. For Heidegger, when being is thought either in terms of the highest being (as it often is in theology), or in terms of the most universal category of entities (as it often is in ontology), it is thought from or in terms of beings or entities, the ontological difference is missed, and the question of being as such is forgotten. This oblivion of the question of being is said to pervade the history of Western metaphysics, which is dominated by what Heidegger calls “ontotheology”.
Being (das Sein) is not itself a being or something that is (das Seiende), but rather what determines beings as beings, or what it means for a being or an entity to be (see BTS 4–5 = SZ 6). Ultimately, for Heidegger, being – or rather, as he sometimes writes, “beyng” (Seyn) -is the appropriating event (Ereignis) through which the meaning of the being of beings gets determined (see CP = GA 65: pt VIII). Although he does not always clearly mark this distinction in his terminology, Heidegger is increasingly concerned not just with the difference between being and beings, but also with the difference between the being of beings (what it means for beings to be, the horizon of their intelligibility) and beyng itself (the originary event through which the being of beings gets determined). While the question of being and the ontological difference between being and beings have fallen into oblivion over the course of the history of Western metaphysics, beyng itself was intimated yet remained largely “unthought” even in the Greek beginning of Occidental thinking.
For Aristotle, although “being is spoken of in many ways”, the primary meaning of being is “substance” (Categories 4–5; Metaphysics VII).3 Substance (ousia) is the enduring substratum (hupokeimenon) of something that underlies changes in its qualities, location and so on. The substance of something remains constantly present despite whatever else changes through time. Heidegger’s dismantling (Abbau or Destruktion) of the Western tradition of metaphysics proceeds by pointing out the temporal determination of being implied in this thinking of being in terms of “constant presence”. Thus, in Being and Time he writes that “time is that from which Da-sein tacitly understands and interprets something like being at all”, and so time must now “be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding of and interpretation of being” (BTS 15 = SZ 17).
The following quotation from a transcript of lectures Heidegger delivered in 1925 gives a particularly clear formulation of Heidegger’s decisive critique of “a certain interpretation of being [that] pervades the history of philosophy and determines its whole conceptuality”:
What is striking here is how the Greeks interpreted being in terms of time: ousia [being] means presence, the present. If this is what being signifies, then authentic being is that which is never not there, i.e., what is always there (aei on [perpetual being]). Within the tradition, this concept of being was employed to understand historical reality, a reality that, however, is not always there. It is clear that if the Greek doctrine of being is uncritically accepted as absolute, then it becomes impossible for research to understand a reality such as historical Dasein.
(SUP 175; see also BH 273)
Heidegger goes on to claim that Descartes and Husserl, for example, fail to ask about the being of the “I am” and, using unawares a temporally restricted conception of being as constant presence, fail to give an adequate account of human being. Such an account would have to take into consideration the temporal “ek-stasis” (literally “standing outside oneself”) of human being: human existence is not simply immersed in the present, but also lives out towards the future and back towards the past.
Yet Heidegger’s call for a rethinking of the temporal dimension of being is not restricted to questions of philosophical anthropology. From his early analysis of the temporality of Dasein (human existence) to his later “being-historical thinking” (seinsgeschichtliches Denken), one of Heidegger’s central and most decisive philosophical claims is that being itself essentially occurs temporally and historically. Indeed, Being and Time not only begins with the hypothesis that the “meaning of the being of that being we call Da-sein proves to be temporality” (BTS 15 = SZ 17), but also ends with the question of whether time can be considered the horizon of being as such (BTS 398 = SZ 437). In the final chapters of Being and Time, Dasein’s temporality is shown to be involved in a shared “historicity” (BTS = SZ §§72–7), and in later texts Heidegger begins to speak of the occidental “history of being”. Indeed, in places he goes so far as to say that “the history of being is being itself” (EP 82=NII489; see also N4 221=NII362).
Another crucial claim Heidegger makes is that – is the site of the occurrence of being. In his later thought Heidegger comes to say that humans are required (gebraucht) for the appropriating event (Ereignis) that opens up a meaningful world, and it is only in such a world that beings can be the beings that they are (see CP = GA 65: §§194–5; EGT53 = GA 5: 367–8; PM 308 = GA 9: 407). Hence, Heidegger often stresses that his question of being must be understood as a question of the relation between being and human being, a relation he characterizes as a “belonging together” (see WCT 79 = WhD 74; IDS 30–32 = ID 17–19). This relation was in one way or another at the centre of his thought-path from beginning to end, and all the “turns” in his thinking of being – both those of his thinking and those of being – must be understood in terms of his abiding concern with this pivotal relation between being and human being. The question of being is thus at once the question of the place and role of human being in the temporal-historical event that lets beings be the meaningful beings they appear to be. While an important shift does occur in the course of Heidegger’s path of thought with regard to his idea of the proper comportment of human being to being – a shift from an ambivalent tendency towards voluntarism in his early and middle periods to a fundamental attunement of “releasement” (Gelassenheit) and an explicit attempt to think non-willing(ly), which is not to say passively, in his later period (see DT = G; CPC = GA 77; Davis 2007) -the question of being for Heidegger remains throughout all the phases of his thought a question about the relation between being and human being.
A third crucial claim Heidegger makes is that being never reveals (or “de-conceals”, entbirgt) itself completely. As Heraclitus wrote, “physis [nature or being] loves to hide” (fr. 123). The epistemological demand for certainty and the omniscience of “unbounded unconcealment” belongs to the metaphysical misrepresentation of being as constant presence. Heidegger is not a sceptic, since he does not relinquish the quest for truth; nor is he a relativist (or even a pragmatist), in so far as that would mean that truth varies according to mere subjective opinion or instrumental usefulness. Truth for Heidegger is not arbitrary; it is not subject to our individual or collective whims. Events of truth do take place – events that open up a “clearing” (Lichtung) or a space of intelligibility wherein knowledge of beings first becomes possible – and we are called on to take part in these events, which appropriate us into the world as a place of significant relations wherein we belong. Meaningful configurations of the world do come about, but such events of “unconcealment” (Heidegger’s literal translation of the Greek word for “truth”, alētheia) always entail at the same time a withdrawal into concealment. Truth is always coupled with untruth, openness with seclusion, clarity with mystery. Being withdraws as it comes to presence; it expropriates as it appropriates; it holds back as it gives. This understanding of truth as a twofold event of the revealing/concealing of being is a central thread running through Heidegger’s path of thought (see esp. BTS = SZ §44; PM 136–54 = GA 9: 177–202).
Given these three basic characteristics of Heidegger’s thinking of being – namely being’s essential temporality/historicity, its requirement of human being, and its truth as an event of revealing/concealing – it is not surprising that Heidegger considered his own path of thought to be always on the way towards a more appropriate conception of, and relation to, being. When approaching the key concepts of his thinking, it is thus generally advisable to proceed chronologically; and so the chapter topics of this book are arranged roughly according to the order in which they appear as specific foci of his thinking. It should immediately be added, however, that the earlier concepts usually carry over into later periods, even as they get recontextualized and rethought along the way. While some readers may end up preferring (aspects of)
Heidegger’s earlier thought to his later thought, Heidegger himself, as one would expect, maintained that his journey brought him ever nearer to a proper thinking of being. But he also stressed the necessity of retracing all the steps along the way. The reader will find that key concepts first formulated in earlier way-stations can often be heard still resounding in the “clearings” in the forest of being to which the winding “wood paths” (Holzwege) of Heidegger’s thought later lead. Heidegger might have characterized his pathway of thinking in terms of a deepening spiral rather than a linear progression, a spiral that always circles around the central question of being and its proper relation with human being.
Before allowing the reader to study in greater depth the key concepts selected as chapter topics for this volume, there is one other central aspect of Heidegger’s thought that deserves special comment in this introduction. In all periods of his thought, language is vitally important for Heidegger. As he famously wrote in the “Letter on Humanism” (1947), “language is the house of being” (PM 239 = GA 9: 313); that is to say, language demarcates the parameters of a realm wherein humans can meaningfully dwell. Language domesticates being: it makes the world liveable for us. In Being and Time, Heidegger spoke of the “as structure” of experience, meaning that when I hear a sound I hear it as a “motorcycle” or as a “baby’s cry” (BTS = SZ §32). It is language that allows us to perceive and understand things as the things that they appear to us to be. In a later text, commenting on the poet Stefan George’s lines, “Where the word breaks off no thing may be”, Heidegger writes: “Only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it” (OWL 62 = GA 12: 154). In his later accounts of the history of being, Heidegger goes so far as to claim that the horizon of intelligibility of an entire epoch is founded on a single term or cluster of terms: such words as physis (nature as what emerges of itself), ousia (substance as what permanently endures), actualitas (actuality), subject and will to power determine the manner in which the being of beings is revealed (and concealed) in the various epochs of Western civilization (see EP = NII).
Heidegger’s accounts of the history of metaphysics, as well as his own attempts to think otherwise, often focus on certain basic or fundamental concepts (Grundbegriffe). A number of titles of his texts testify to the centrality of such concepts: for example, Fundamental Concepts of Ancient Philosophy (1926, FCAP = GA 22), Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929/30, FCM = GA 29/30) and Basic Concepts (1941, BC = GA 51). Although in his earlier texts, such as Being and Time, Heidegger often attempts to fashion a new philosophical vocabulary with such neologisms as “thrownness”, “readiness-to-hand” and “being-in-the-world”, in his later writings Heidegger more often attempts to draw on etymology and cognate connections to retrieve a more original sense from accustomed locutions, letting words speak anew from their origins. For example, Heidegger attempts to let the everyday word for event, Ereignis, name the “event of appropriation” in which humans rediscover their proper (eigentliche) relation of belonging to being, and through which beings are brought back into their proper interrelational place in the world. It is also the case, however, that even in his earliest writings Heidegger is concerned with uncovering profounder implications of everyday words (for example, see his emphatic use of this very same word, Ereignis, in TDP 63 = GA 56/57: 75). Indeed, it should be borne in mind that when in Being and Time he speaks of the “destruc-turing of the tradition”, his aim is to recover access to “those original ‘wellsprings’ out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely drawn” (BTS 19 = SZ 21). It is also the case that we often find him composing neologisms even in his later period, such as the “fourfold” (Geviert) of earth and sky, mortals and divinities.
In his later writings on language, Heidegger famously claims that “Language speaks” (Die Sprache spricht), while “humans speak in that they correspond [entspricht] to language” (PLT207 = GA 12: 30, trans. mod.). In the course of his thinking, Heidegger became increasingly concerned with letting language speak, with “undergoing an experience with language” (OWL 57 = GA 12: 149), in contrast to a voluntaristic “grasping” (begreifen) of concepts (Begriffe) (WCT 211 = WhD 128). Already in Being and Time, in fact, Heidegger had defined his method of hermeneutical phenomenology as an attempt to “let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself”, as opposed to a theoretical imposition of subjective categories on things (BTS 30 = SZ 34). Later, he sharply distinguishes his approach to language from logical positivism’s project of constructing a “metalanguage” in order to supposedly clear up the obscurities of everyday language and philosophy. In so far as “Analytical philosophy … is set on producing this super-l anguage”, it is, as “metalinguistics”, “the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information” (OWL 58 = GA 12: 150). Such attempts to “master language” are, Heidegger thinks, one of the greatest hubristic follies of modern humanity. “Humans act as though they were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of humans” (PLT 213 = VA 184, trans. mod.).
Nevertheless, and despite Heidegger’s penchant for rhetorical reversals, it is crucial to recognize that for him the task of thinking, as letting language speak, is not simply passive. Rather, it involves a non-willing corresponding – a listening and a responding – to the address of being. The fundamental words of our historical worlds arise in the conversation that takes place between the address (Zuspruch) of being (Sein) and the correspondence (Entsprechung) of human Dasein. With their basic concepts, according to Heidegger, great thinkers should aspire to nothing less than such historically determined and determining words of being. Thinkers can also aspire to nothing more, unless perhaps, as in the case of Heidegger’s own basic concepts, they attempt to articulate the abiding relations involved in this always finitely word- and world-bestowing event.
As this introductory chapter has begun to reveal, and as the remaining chapters in this volume will explicate in more detail and depth, in his attempt to rethink the most fundamental issue of ontology, the question of “being” as such, Heidegger radically rethought such basic philosophical concepts as time, space, the self (Dasein), interpersonal relations, things, the world, language, truth, art, technology and the divine. The originality of Heidegger’s ideas is matched only by the thoroughness of his engagement with the texts of the history of philosophy, and the radicality of his reinterpretations of their key concepts. As a result of its originality and radicality, the influence Heidegger’s thought has exerted – and continues to exert – on subsequent developments in philosophy and in related disciplines of intellectual enquiry is arguably on a par with such landmark figures in the history of philosophy as Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche.
While it would be an exaggeration to claim that, for the past three-quarters of a century, the history of philosophy has now become “a series of footnotes to Heidegger”, the legacies of his thought, especially in Europe and in “continental philosophy” around the globe, have been extensive and profound. As his reputation as a lecturer spread in a manner Hannah Arendt compared to “the rumor of the hidden king”, Heidegger’s name became well known in German universities years before the publication of Being and Time launched him on to the world stage in 1927. Since that time, and on account of his prolific writing and continual lecturing until nearly the end of his life in 1976, Heidegger’s thought has left a major impact on – and in many cases helped found or at least radically reform – a number of areas of philosophy, including phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, ontology, epistemology, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of technology, the philosophy of art, the philosophy of language, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of religion.
In the 1920s, Heidegger quickly rose from being Edmund Husserl’s assistant to being a collaborator and then rival shaper of the new field of phenomenology, and subsequent generations of phenomenologists (notably such French figures as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and, more recently, Jean-Luc Marion) were influenced as much by Heidegger as they were by Husserl. Although he never accepted Sartre’s label, Heidegger’s early thought clearly influenced the philosophical and literary movement of existentialism. With his attention to history and the problem of interpretation, Heidegger paved the way for the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Gianni Vattimo. Heidegger’s existential analyses of human being were decisive for critical theorists (such as Herbert Marcuse), psychologists and psychoanalysts (such as Medard Boss and Jacques Lacan), and Protestant as well as Catholic theologians (such as Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Rahner). Heidegger’s Destruktion of the tradition of Western ontology paved the way for Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruc-tion” of the “metaphysics of presence”, and his account of the epochs of the history of being decisively influenced Michel Foucault’s genealogies of “regimes of truth”. Heidegger’s critique of modern technological society, the questionable role of ethics in his thought, as well as his controversial political engagements and thought, have inspired great discussion and debate (among such figures as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Hans Jonas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Emmanuel Levi-nas, Karl Löwith and Jean-Luc Nancy) over the many provocative and thought-worthy issues they raise. Heidegger’s writings on poetry and art have become standard reading material, not only for literary and art critics, but also for many poets and artists themselves. In addition to leading Heidegger scholars and continental philosophers (such as Robert Bernasconi, John Caputo, Edward Casey, Frangoise Dastur, Richard Dreyfus, Michel Haar, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, David Farrell Krell, Luigi Pareyson, Otto Pöggeler, William Richardson, John Sallis, Dennis Schmidt, Reiner Schürmann, Franco Volpi and David Wood, to name just a few, and without mentioning those listed among the contributors to this volume), a wide variety of analytic (or post-analytic), pragmatist, and other North American philosophers (such as Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor) have been significantly influenced by Heidegger’s thought, as have many British, Australian, South American and other philosophers around the world. Scholars from India (such as J. L. Mehta) have taken a serious interest in Heidegger’s philosophy and, in the Far East, philosophers such as those associated with the Kyoto School in Japan (including Kuki Shūzö and Watsuji Tetsurö, as well as Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji) have been profoundly affected by their prolonged dialogue with Heidegger and his thought.
This sketch of Heidegger’s extraordinary philosophical legacies remains fragmentary (indeed another book would be required to properly introduce the influences of Heidegger’s thought), and these legacies continue to grow. As the remaining volumes of his Collected Edition (Gesamtausgabe) followed by their translations – steadily become available, more books and articles continue to be published on Heidegger each year than perhaps on any other philosopher. The variety of approaches this scholarship takes ranges from the aggressively polemical to the unquestioningly defensive. There are also, thankfully, many scholars who attempt to steer a course between the bashers and the idolizers to engage in a critical appropriation of and/or a dialogi-cal confrontation with Heidegger’s thought. Although it is certainly not my intention to prescribe how the reader should read Heidegger, it is my hope that the present volume will serve to facilitate a genuine understanding of, and thereby an authentic encounter with, his way of thinking.
1. Theodore Kisiel warns against the abuse of this often cited remark (in which Heidegger apparently rejects the relevance of biography in understanding a philosopher), especially by those who would rather simply ignore the inconvenient aspects and episodes in Heidegger’s life. Kisiel argues that ironically the quotation is often taken out of context, given that at the time Heidegger was developing his “hermeneutics of facticity”, which stresses “the interplay of the ontic and the ontological” and the “equiprimordiality of the historical with the systematic”. Kisiel also points out that Heidegger had begun another course on Aristotle two years earlier (in 1922) by “noting that the ‘life and works’ of the philosopher are presuppositions for the course” (GA 62: 8; Kisiel 1993: 287, 540 n.3).
2. For other biographical highlights see my chronology of Heidegger’s life at the back of this book. Safranski (1998) is a well rounded and illuminating philosophical biography. Ott (1993) is an informatively detailed biography that critically examines what Heidegger once (in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1935) called “the two great thorns in my flesh – the struggle with the faith of my birth, and the failure of the rectorship [of Freiburg University]” (ibid.: 37). Geier (2005) is a concise and very good biography in German. Another excellent source of biographical information available in German is Mehring & Thomä (2003).
3. In trying to steer a middle course between a materialistic and an idealistic understanding of substance, that is, between Thales’ “water” or Anaximenes’ “air” or Democritus’ “atoms” on the one hand, and Plato’s “Forms” or “Ideas” on the other, Aristotle makes a distinction between two senses of substance, and wavers between giving priority to one or the other of these. Substance is either a particular something, a “this”, or it is the universal characteristic that makes a particular something what it is. According to Heidegger, these two notions of substance in Aristotle – which become the fundamental metaphysical distinction between “thatness” (Daß-sein, literally “that-being”) or existentia (existence) on the one hand, and “whatness” (Was-sein, literally “what-being”) or essentia (essence) on the other – are thought by him as “modes of presencing whose fundamental characteristic is energeia”, a word that gets translated in the course of the history of metaphysics as actualitas, actuality and reality (see EP 4–8 = NU 402–7). While Heidegger tends to think of this history as a decline from the greatness of the Greek beginning, he also draws attention to the unthought temporal determination of the Greek notion of substance by translating Aristotle’s ousia as “presence” (Anwesenheit). Heidegger claims that what the Greeks experienced, but failed to fully think, was the “presencing” (Anwesen) of what presences, that is, the temporality of being as an event of emergence (physis) and unconcealment (alētheia).
Davis, B. W. 2007. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Geier, 2005. Martin Heidegger. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag.
Kisiel, T. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kuhn, T. S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd enlarged edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lovejoy, 1964. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
May, R. 1996. Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, G. Parkes (trans., with essay). New York: Routledge.
Mehring, R. & D. Thomä 2003. “Eine Chronik”. In Heidegger Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung, D. Thomä (ed.), 515–39. Stuttgart: .
Ott, H. 1993. Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, A. Blunden (trans.). New York: .
Safranski, R. 1998. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, E. Osers (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
See Heidegger’s Basic Writings; Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927, Being and Time; Country Path Conversations; The Heidegger Reader; Introduction to Metaphysics; Off the Beaten Track; and Path-marks.
For introductory and reference works in English see de Beistegui (2005), Dreyfus & Wrathall (2007), Guignon (2006), Inwood (1999), Polt (1999) and Safranski (1998). In German, see D. Thomä (ed.), Heidegger Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003).
For more advanced studies in English see Bernasconi (1993), Krell (1986), Macann (1996), Pöggeler (1987), Richardson (2003), Sallis (1990, 1993) and Wood (2002).