4   The Turning of Thought: Truth and World

“Dasein” names that which is first of all to be experienced, and subsequently thought accordingly, as a place [Stelle]—namely as the locality [Ortschaft] of the truth of Being.

—Heidegger, “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’”1

The path from Heidegger’s earliest thinking to Being and Time is essentially directed toward the attempt to articulate the fundamental idea of our being in the world as a matter of our being as “situated”—a matter of our being “there”—and of being as itself tied to just such situatedness. What characterizes Being and Time is the attempt to provide a detailed analysis of the structure of such “being-there” as a whole in its more particular character as temporal. It aims to do this, moreover, through a form of transcendental grounding that consists in exhibiting the hierarchical dependence of what appears, at first, to be an essentially spatial structure on the structure of world, on the structure of care, and so on originary temporality. This attempt turns out to be one that Heidegger cannot complete, but the reasons that underlie this lack of completion bring to light a number of issues important in Heidegger’s rethinking of what is at stake here: above all, as noted at the end of the last chapter, notions of ground, world, the human relation to world, truth, and also, though still not in a properly thematic way, place.

Some of the works that appear in the period immediately following Being and Time, most notably the lectures of the Basic Problems of Phenomenology from 1927, and the Kantbuch of 1929 (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), include materials from the abandoned second part of Being and Time itself—particularly the critical engagement with (the “de-struction” or “dis-mantling” of) the history of ontology. Thus the lectures on phenomenology contain extensive discussions of Aristotle and Descartes, as well as Husserl. The Kantbuch, moreover, attempts to exhibit the Kantian transcendental project as a precursor to Heidegger’s own transcendentalontological analysis in Being and Time, both in terms of the Kantian project as attempting a “laying of the foundation” for metaphysics, and so as engaged in a certain sort of “grounding,” and also, in the inquiry into such a ground, as essentially oriented toward the question of unity understood in terms of temporality. Heidegger’s claim, significantly, is that Kant ultimately recoils from the nature of the ground that is opened up in this inquiry. The concern with ground is explicit in the 1929 essay “On the Essence of Ground,” but it can also be seen as present in Heidegger’s repeated attempts to formulate an account of the unity that is essential to that which in Being and Time he called “disclosedness,” and which is itself understood as the essence of truth. Indeed, in the period after Being and Time, truth rather than meaning becomes a central concern, and the reason for this is closely tied to Heidegger’s attempt to rearticulate the nature of the unity that is characteristic of the “there,” as well as of world, in a way that refrains from treating that unity in a way that would allow it to be understood as something “projected” by, or grounded in, “being-there” (at least insofar as the latter is tied to a human mode of being). Being-there is seen as itself gathered into the unity of truth, rather than the unity of truth being something projected by, or on the basis of, “being-there.”

Although Heidegger emphasized the way in which his thinking was always “on the way” rather than having “arrived,” his work during the period from the time of the publication of Being and Time until at least 1936 has to be seen as having a quite specific transitional character as it moves from the thinking of meaning to the thinking, or re-thinking, of place (in fact, as I will suggest below, this transition should be seen as continuing past 1936 and into the 1940s). Moreover, this period also encompasses the time of Heidegger’s political engagement and his entanglement with Nazism. However one interprets that engagement, there can be no doubt that it is an entanglement that, even during the 1930s, becomes a source of difficulty for Heidegger philosophically, politically, and personally. Not only does he resign the rectorate at Freiburg after only one year, but he is also forced to rethink what it was that prompted his engagement with Nazism in the first place, to rethink the terms of that engagement, to rethink whatever it was that he saw as the “inner truth and greatness” of the movement.² It is perhaps no surprise, given the emergence of the problematic character of Being and Time coupled with the failure of his political ambitions,³ that the period should indeed have been a transitional one—a time of “turning” and of “return.”

4.1 Turning and Return

The question of being that is taken to be at the heart of Heidegger’s thinking is, as we saw in chapter 1, a question that properly emerges only in conjunction with the personal involvement of the philosopher in the question—thus the question of being is itself always entangled with the being of questioning as such. In this respect, the forgetfulness of being that Heidegger takes to be characteristic of the philosophical tradition, and which is itself an expression of a deeper and more pervasive forgetfulness that characterizes our ordinary lives, can be understood as a forgetfulness of the questionability of being, and so also a forgetfulness of the way in which being only arises as a question in conjunction with the recognition that what is in question here is also our own being. Such forgetfulness is, says Heidegger, “nothing accidental and temporary, but on the contrary is necessarily and constantly formed.”⁴ Overcoming such forgetfulness requires a recognition of the questionability of being, of the question of our prior entanglement with being, but also, from the very start, a recognition of the question of being as inevitably tied to the question of the “there.” The overcoming of forgetfulness is, of course, a matter of remembering. As Joseph Fell puts it: “‘Remembering’ (Andenken) is a reversal (Kehre) of the movement of ‘forgetting’ such that thought recovers itself as it really always already is—that is, as ‘ruled’ by being.”⁵ For thought to recover itself as “ruled by being” is to recover itself as already belonging to being, as already given over to the happening of world, of presence, of disclosedness. Recovery or remembering is thus always a returning, or turning back, to that which we already are—a turning back to that which is “originary,” that to which we already belong, that which is our proper ground, that in which we already find ourselves. The reversal of forgetting is also a turning back to our proper place—and it is in just this sense that Heidegger will frequently, in his later writing, call upon the idea of the reversal of forgetfulness as a matter of “homecoming” (Heimkunft)— although, as a return to the questionability of being, such a homecoming is not a simple return to the familiar, but a turning back to that which is both closest to us and also furthest away, to that which is both familiar and yet also essentially “uncanny” (unheimlich).

The idea of thinking as a form of remembering, recovery, or returning is a theme that runs throughout Heidegger’s thinking. It is embedded in Husserl’s own phenomenological method and the slogan “Back to the things themselves” (Zu den Sachen selbst); it is a part of the hermeneutical idea of the recovery of meaning as a moving back to that in which meaning is grounded; it is evident in the Eckhartian idea of the soul’s return to its place in God. But as with so many of Heidegger’s key concepts, the idea of return or turning back does not admit of any single reading or interpretation. The idea of a return, a turning back to origin, that is at issue here is not the idea of something that is performed only once and then completed. It is instead a movement that is perpetual and constant—a movement essential to thinking and so also to philosophy (although it is unlikely to be given universal recognition as such). Yet we can understand the idea of a return that is at issue here in another way too—as the return that is performed, not merely in every act of thinking as we try to engage with the subject matter that drives the thought, nor in philosophical thinking as it attempts to engage with its own origin, but also in thinking as it tries to recover its own sense of origin and to rearticulate itself at certain crucial moments in its development. Thus we may come to a point at which, while our thought is always caught up in an attempt to recover its own origin, we also find ourselves forced to make a more self-conscious reorientation in our thinking, a more explicit “turning back.”

Hannah Arendt once said of Heidegger’s thought that it was always returning to its point of origin, continually beginning anew,⁶ and this is true in both the senses at issue here. All of Heidegger’s thinking can be construed, in the terms I have presented it here, as an attempt at a certain sort of recovery, retrieval, or remembrance—what is recovered is being’s own questionability, as well as the “place” or “placedness” within which such questionability arises. This sense of “turning” refers to the character of Heidegger’s thought as such, and to Heidegger’s thought as it instantiates the turning movement of all thought, rather than to any particular turning that occurs at a point within the historical development of Heidegger’s thinking. Yet there is also a sense in which Heidegger’s thinking does indeed exhibit certain specific turnings within its own path. These turnings occur at many different stages on that path—for instance, in the shift away from logical inquiry and toward the hermeneutics of facticity in the period 1917-1919, in the shift toward the engagement with Aristotle, and then with Kant, in the mid-1920s, in the espousal of the language of “existence” prior to the publication of Being and Time. There is also, however, a more particular and significant turning that occurs in the 1930s that relates to the overall conception and understanding of Heidegger’s thought as such. This turning relates directly to the turning that already appears in the plan of Being and Time—the “turning” from the temporality of being-there to the temporality of being that was supposed to have occurred in the shift from division 2 of part 1 to division 3, and thence to the completion of the work in part 2. Thus, in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” written in response to a letter from Jean Beaufret in the autumn of 1946, and published in 1947, Heidegger comments that:

In the publication of Being and Time the third division of the first part, “Time and Being,” was held back (cf. Being and Time, p. 39). Here everything is reversed {in terms of the “what” and “how” of that which is thought-worthy and of thinking}. The division in question was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying {letting itself show} of this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics. The lecture “On the Essence of Truth,” thought out and delivered in 1930 but not printed until 1943, provides a certain insight into the thinking of the turning from “Being and Time” to “Time and Being.” This turning is not a change of standpoint {i.e., of the question of being} from Being and Time, but in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the locality of the dimension out of which Being and Time is experienced, that is to say, experienced in the fundamental experience of the oblivion of being. {First edition, 1949: Forgottenness— λ θη concealing—withdrawal—expropriation: event of appropriation [Ereignis].}⁷

The difficulties that arise in Heidegger’s attempt to carry out the task originally envisaged in Being and Time—a task whose attempted completion itself stands as an instance of the constant turning of thought back to its origin—thus lead Heidegger to return to the task, and to rearticulate the matter at issue. As Heidegger emphasizes, this turning is not a change in standpoint, but rather what might be thought of as a “reorientation” that enables the proper recognition of the place, the locality, in which thinking already finds itself.

The “Letter on ‘Humanism’” presents the turning as a movement in thinking, as a movement, not properly accomplished, within the structure of Being and Time and also as a movement, an event, in the course of Heidegger’s own philosophical biography. In the last of these three senses, the turning refers to the shift in Heidegger’s thinking that has its inception in 1930, with “On the Essence of Truth” (although Gadamer reports that already in 1928 Heidegger acknowledged that the terms of his thinking had begun to “slip”⁸), and that is often taken to reach its culmination in 1936 with the writing of the massive Contributions to Philosophy (which Heidegger finishes working on in 1938, but holds back from publication).⁹ 1936 certainly marks an important point in the turning of Heidegger’s thought—it marks, in particular, the appearance of the idea of the “event,” the “Ereignis,” that dominates Heidegger’s later thinking (and that will be a starting point for the discussion in chapter 5 below)—but there is also a significant sense in which the mode of thinking that is opened up in the Contributions in 1936 does not become entirely clear until around 1946 with the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” and the works that follow it, and in this respect it is significant that Heidegger publishes very little, although he is by no means inactive, in the ten-year period from 1936 to 1946. Thus one can also envisage the turning as actually comprising two movements, the first occurring between around 1930 and 1936, between “The Essence of Truth” and Contributions, and the second between 1936 and around 1946, between Contributions and the “Letter on ‘Humanism.’”¹⁰ The first period sees the working through of the problematic presented by Being and Time, and the second the articulation of the reoriented framework inaugurated in Contributions.

Thomas Sheehan has recently argued, however, that it is a mistake to identify the turning or “change” that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking in the period after Being and Time and that seems to culminate in the Contributions with the “turning” or “return” that is at issue in the movement of thought itself (Sheehan distinguishes between the “change”—die Wendung—in Heidegger’s own thinking and the Turning—die Kehre—of thinking as such).¹¹ As Sheehan bluntly puts it:

Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters—on the one hand “the turn” (die Kehre) and on the other “the change in Heidegger’s thinking” (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger.¹²

Although I think that there is some point to Sheehan’s argument here, I nevertheless think that it oversimplifies matters, implying a more straight forward distraction than is actually warranted. The shift in Heidegger’s thinking that occurs between 1930 and 1936, and is probably not really completed until 1946, can itself be understood as a singular instantiation, if in the mundane terms of a particular biography of thinking, of a movement of return that was always present in Heidegger’s thinking and that is a feature of all thinking. But inasmuch as it is such an instantiation, so the turning in Heidegger’s thinking cannot be wholly separated from the turning of thinking as such. In this sense, too, the turning of thought and the turning that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking in the period of the 1930s (as well as the many other shifts that can be discerned along the way from the beginning to the end of Heidegger’s philosophical career) cannot be entirely separated from the turning that is projected, but not completed, within the structure of Being and Time. Sheehan draws attention to Heidegger’s own comment that “First and foremost the Kehre is not a process that took place in my thinking and questioning. It belongs, rather, to the very issue that is named by the titles ‘Being and Time’/‘Time and Being.’ . . . The turn operates within the issue itself. It is not something that I did, nor does it pertain to my thinking only.”¹³ But even a comment such as this is not decisive in the way that Sheehan seems to suppose. Indeed, it seems that Heidegger’s point here is to emphasize the priority of the turning as something that does not belong to his thinking alone, but to the issue for thinking as such, and this emphasis does not rule out, but actually implies, that the turning does indeed also belong to Heidegger’s thinking—belongs to it, not as something Heidegger does, but as something that Heidegger’s thought undergoes. Indeed, it is always important to attend to the polemical context of comments such as this, and so to the particular point that they might be intended to rebut¹⁴—in the case of the passage quoted, Heidegger’s concern seems to be to reject the idea that the turning is something peculiar to his own philosophical biography, or that it is something he himself brought about.

As both a movement that is intrinsic to thinking as such, and as a movement evident in a particular way within Heidegger’s own thought, the turning is an especially important idea for the understanding of topology and place. The task of topology is always directed at the recovery of that place in which we are already situated. Indeed, it is the fact of our situatedness that impels us toward such a recovery, that makes it possible, and that also determines the character of the articulation in which such a recovery must consist. In Being and Time, moreover, the “failure” of the turning, which is the “failure” of the work as a whole, is itself closely tied to the inadequacy of that work in its attempt to articulate the spatial and the topological as such. This is a large part of the point behind Joseph Fell’s claim that the Heideggerian turning is itself “the ‘turn’ of space . . . ‘into’ place, which it originally and always is.”¹⁵ Moreover, this can be said to apply to the turning that was supposed to occur in Being and Time, to the historical turning in Heidegger’s own thought, and to the turning in thinking itself—in each case the turning is a turning back from space to place, just as it is also a turning back to being. The full realization of this turning is something that we will not come to until chapter 5. For the moment the task is to arrive at a better understanding of the way the turning in Heidegger’s thinking arises out of the difficulties encountered in Being and Time and the way this develops in the writings and lectures that follow, particularly those of the late 1920s and early to mid-1930s.

In this respect, it cannot be sufficient to characterize the turning in the general terms that are commonplace in so much of the literature or simply to describe the shift in Heidegger’s thinking that is at issue. To say that the turning is indeed a turning “back” to being, or back to “place,” does little to help understand what is really at issue here. What is required, in fact, is some account of what impels Heidegger’s shift from the mode of philosophizing exemplified by Being and Time to the thinking that is inaugurated in Contributions. What is it in the “matter for thinking” and in Heidegger’s own response to that matter that brings about this change? Any adequate answer to this question must take its cue from the way Heidegger himself characterizes the turning in general, as well as in the terms in which it might be applied to his own thought (for instance, in comments such as that which I quoted above from the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”), and also from the difficulties that we have already identified as present in the argument of Being and Time itself. One would hope to find some convergence between these two sources, so that the difficulties we have encountered in Being and Time would turn out to connect up with the ideas that Heidegger also takes to be characteristic of the turning and that he identifies as elements in his own reorientation of his thinking. As we have already seen, two central concepts around which many of the difficulties of Being and Time cluster are those of ground and world— and both also implicate issues of space and place. The concept of world, and its articulation, is the primary focus for much of division 1, part 1. What became evident in the discussion in chapter 3 above, however, is the problematic character of the relation between being-there and world as that is set out in Being and Time—thus the character of being-in-the-world itself presents difficulties. But the difficulty does not merely concern how the structure of being-in-the-world, of being-there in relation to world, is to be described, but how that structure is to be understood as a whole, and this is just the problem of how the relation between being-there and world is to be grounded, that is, how its unity is to be explicated. These difficulties—of the relation between being-there and world; of the proper ground, and so the unity, of being-there and world—are issues that also turn out to be at stake in the way Heidegger understands the turning both as it applies to the matter for thinking and as it occurs in his own thinking. In the period from around 1928 and into the early 1930s, these difficulties emerge in terms of a preoccupation with the concept of world and the role of being-there in the “founding” of world that often appears in terms of a preoccupation with the idea of ground, and more specifically with the notion of “transcendence” as that which refers us to the ground, and so also to the unity, of being-there and world. Transcendence is a crucial notion in the reorientation in Heidegger’s thinking that is the turning, but so too is the concept of truth. Indeed, what emerges in Heidegger’s thinking in the early to mid-1930s is a turn toward the truth of being itself understood in terms of a “topological” happening of world that also grounds.

4.2 Transcendence and Subjectivity

One of the most obvious changes in Heidegger’s thinking from Being and Time to the works that appear after 1936 involves a shift away from beingthere as the primary focus of Heidegger’s analysis. In Contributions, for instance, it is not being-there as it is thought primarily in connection with human being that commands Heidegger’s attention, but a radically reformulated concept of being-there as the ground of the truth of being, and so as integrally bound up with the “Event,” the “Ereignis,” to which human being is itself “appropriated,” but which is certainly no merely human happening.16 This apparent shift away from the mode of being that is human being might be taken to suggest that the turning should be understood, even if only in part, as an attempt to overcome a problematic prioritization of human being within the project of Being and Time. This might seem to be confirmed by the way in which the problem of “subjectivity” often arises as a central concern in his discussions of the reasons for the breaking-off of the work that appeared in truncated form in 1926.

“Meaning” is the term that Heidegger uses to frame the question of being that is the main concern of Being and Time, but that term itself seems to lend itself to a subjectivist construal. In the 1969 Seminar in Le Thor, Heidegger comments on this as follows:

Meaning has a very precise signification in Being and Time, even if today it has become insufficient. What does “meaning of being” mean? This is understandable on the basis of the “project region” unfolded by the “understanding of being.” “Understanding” [Verständnis], for its part, must be grasped in the original sense of “standing before” [Vorstehen]: residing before, holding oneself at an equal height with what one finds before oneself, and being strong enough to hold out. Here “meaning” is to be understood from “project,” which is explained from “understanding.” What is inappropriate in this formulation of the question is that it makes it all too possible to understand the “project” as a human performance. Accordingly, project is then only taken to be a structure of subjectivity—which is how Sartre takes it, by basing himself upon Descartes. . . . In order to counter this mistaken conception and to retain the meaning of “project” as it is to be taken (that of the opening disclosure), the thinking after Being and Time replaced the expression “meaning of being” with “truth of being.”¹⁷

The connection between meaning, project, and understanding is one with which we have already met in the discussion of the nature of dependence or derivation in section 3.5 above. In the passage just quoted, Heidegger suggests that one of the problems, perhaps the problem, with Being and Time is the way in which the emphasis on “meaning,” and so on “project,” lends itself to what is an essentially subjectivist or voluntarist reading that would make the meaning of being something that was accomplished by human being-there. Significantly, Heidegger does not affirm that the position set out in Being and Time is subjectivist or voluntarist, merely that it makes such a reading “all too possible.” The problem that Heidegger identifies here is one that can also be seen to arise, in more specific fashion, in terms of the way in which the account set out in Being and Time seems to make spatiality, for instance, dependent on the projective activity, ultimately grounded in temporality, of individual being-there. It also indicates the way in which the emphasis on meaning and projective understanding threatens to make problematic the relation between being-there and world. Inasmuch as the structure of world, at least as set out in part 1, division 1 of Being and Time, seems crucially to be determined by the structure of the “toward-which” or “in-order-to” of equipmental ordering, and as such, appears ultimately to depend upon a set of essentially human concerns, purposes, and interests, so the world itself begins to look like a “projection” of being-there’s own existentiality.

That the relation between being-there, or more broadly, the human, and the world does indeed threaten to become a problem within the framework of Being and Time is explicitly recognized by Heidegger elsewhere. In the 1956 “Appendix” to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger notes an ambiguity in the way in which that essay refers to the “setting-to-work of truth,” an ambiguity “in which it remains undetermined (though determinable) who or what does the ‘setting,’ and in what manner.” Here, says Heidegger, “lies concealed the relationship of being to human being. This relationship is inadequately thought even in this presentation—a distressing difficulty that has been clear to me since Being and Time, and has since come under discussion in many presentations.”¹⁸ The rethinking of what Heidegger here calls “the relationship of being to human being” is central to the turning of the 1930s—and the above quotation from 1956 indicates the extent to which, as Heidegger saw it, that rethinking was not yet complete even in 1935-1936, during which the original lectures that make up “The Origin of the Work of Art” were first presented (in fact, the published text of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is that taken from three lectures given in Freiburg in November to December of 1936 at a time when Heidegger was already hard at work on Contributions in which the account of the relation at issue here was developed in a radically reconfigured form).¹⁹ The problem is one that can be seen as an almost inevitable consequence of the way in which, from Heidegger’s early thinking onward, the question of being is itself necessarily entangled with the nature of our own being as essentially questionable—indeed, it is only thus that the question of being emerges as a question—and this entanglement of human being with being itself is not something from which Heidegger ever resiles. The turning is a rethinking of the nature of that entanglement, but does not entail its rejection.²⁰

As Heidegger indicates, the question concerning the relation between being and human being is one to which he returns in a number of places. Sometimes he does so, as in the passage from the “Appendix” to “The Origin of the Work of Art” or from the Le Thor Seminar, in ways that make explicit reference back to Being and Time, and on a number of occasions he talks about the matter, as he does in the Le Thor Seminar, as a problem concerning “subjectivism,” “voluntarism,” or “anthropomorphism.” Thus, in a brief comment in Contributions, for instance, where the concept of being-there is itself rethought, Heidegger writes that “In Being and Time Da-sein still stands in the shadow of the ‘anthropological,’ the ‘subjectivistic,’ and the ‘individualist,’ etc.”²¹ In one of the Nietzsche lectures from 1940, Heidegger also writes of the way in which the lack of understanding with which he claims Being and Time was met is based in what he terms “our habituation, entrenched and ineradicable, to the modern mode of thought” according to which “man is thought as subject, and all reflections on him are understood to be anthropology,” and yet he also acknowledges that among the reasons that Being and Time itself breaks off is that “the attempt and the path it chose confront the danger of unwillingly becoming merely another entrenchment of subjectivity.”²²

On the basis of such comments, as well as the evident shift in Heidegger’s thinking away from the analysis of being-there, it is not surprising to find that the turning that occurs after Being and Time is indeed often interpreted in terms of a turning away from the supposed subjectivism of the earlier work. One example of such a reading is to be found in William Blattner’s work, with which we already have some acquaintance from the discussions in chapter 3. Blattner argues that Heidegger did view Being and Time as subjectivist and that he took this as the main failing of the work. But Blattner also argues that the reason Heidegger originally judged such subjectivism to be problematic, and so turned away from the particular account set out in Being and Time, was that he recognized what Blattner terms “an argumentative failure” within that account—a failure that consists in the inability successfully to derive ordinary temporality from “originary temporality,” that is, from the temporality that is tied to being-there’s own ontological constitution.²³ To a large extent, this claim is forced upon Blattner by the fact that he reads Being and Time as articulating an ontologically idealist position according to which being is dependent upon human being, and he sees this position as based in what he terms Heidegger’s “temporal idealism,” the view “the doctrine, roughly, that time depends on the human ‘subject,’ Dasein.”²⁴ On that basis, subjectivism could not as such be a reason for Heidegger’s rejection of the position set out in Being and Time since Being and Time itself aims to articulate a form of subjectivism, namely, idealism. Consequently, Heidegger’s dissatisfaction with what Being and Time attempts, at least initially, must be due to something that became apparent in the attempt itself. Blattner acknowledges that Heidegger may later have come to express this dissatisfaction differently, and, indeed, he takes Heidegger’s later thought to be characterized by a “mysticism” that is antithetical to subjectivism,²⁵ but also claims that such later considerations cannot have been what originally turned Heidegger away from the philosophy of being as set out in Being and Time.

Although Blattner is not alone in seeing subjectivism as the core problem in Being and Time, his account is somewhat unusual in basing that claim on such a detailed working out of the nature of the subjectivism that is supposedly at issue. Moreover, Blattner’s account is also significant in its recognition of the exegetical consequence that follows from the claim that Being and Time is subjectivist or idealist in character. If one accepts that Heidegger’s later thinking is indeed antisubjectivist, then any interpretation of Being and Time as intentionally committed to some form of subjectivism (“idealism,” “anthropologism,” “voluntarism,” or whatever) needs to explain why such subjectivism is abandoned, and that means showing that what goes wrong with the project of Being and Time is indeed tied up with its supposed subjectivism. In its simplest terms, the point is that if Heidegger was committed to a subjectivist philosophy in 1926, but espoused an antisubjectivist position in 1936, then the shift from the one position to the other cannot be explained simply by pointing to the subjectivist character of that earlier position. Blattner recognizes this, and so attempts to explain the shift in terms of a breakdown that Heidegger recognizes in his own analysis.

I am in agreement with Blattner in his diagnosis of a failure in terms of the argument that Being and Time sets out, but I differ in seeing the failure at issue as arising, not out of Heidegger’s subjectivist commitments, but rather out of his inadequate articulation of the spatial and topological concepts that are necessarily at issue in the work, concepts that are tied to the original problem of situatedness, and out of his adoption of a particular methodological commitment that tries to combine both mutual and hierarchical modes of dependence, and so brings with it a problematic conception of what it is to unify and to ground. This means, however, that I do not see a commitment to subjectivism in Being and Time itself as the reason for Heidegger’s dissatisfaction with that work. Indeed, it seems to me mistaken to treat Being and Time as “subjectivist.” One reason for this arises out of reflection on the relation between being-there and being as that is understood in Being and Time. Blattner takes Heidegger’s idealism to be expressed, in one form, in the comment in Being and Time section 43 in which Heidegger writes that “only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of being is ontically possible), is ‘there’ Being [‘gibt es’ Sein].”²⁶ Blattner notes that Heidegger himself refers to this passage later in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” writing:

But does not Being and Time say on p. 212, where the “there is/it gives” comes to language, “Only as long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] being”? To be sure. It means that only as long as the clearing of being propriates does being convey itself to human beings. But the fact that the Da, the clearing as the truth of being itself, propriates is the dispensation of being itself. This is the destiny of the clearing. But the sentence does not mean that the Dasein of the human being in the traditional sense of existentia, and thought in modern philosophy as the actuality of the ego cogito, is that entity through which being is first fashioned. The sentence does not say that being is the product of the human being.²⁷

Although Blattner’s main discussion of this passage focuses on the first three sentences, and so on Heidegger’s shift to talk of the “clearing” of being,²⁸ Blattner also responds to Heidegger’s antisubjectivist or antiidealist comments in a lengthy note. There Blattner argues that, as a reading of Being and Time, Heidegger’s gloss on the passage from section 43 “is highly implausible” on the grounds that “it reverses the conditionality” of the claim in question. Thus, while Being and Time has it that “only as long as Dasein is, is there being,” the “Letter on Humanism” claims that “only as long as the clearing of being obtains, does being convey itself to Dasein.”²⁹

Certainly, a conditional of the form “x depends on y” expresses a different relation of dependence than does “y depends on x,” but these two dependence relations need not be incompatible. Indeed, they would be so only if the relation being expressed was a relation of hierarchical, rather than mutual, dependence. Moreover, if we take such a relation of mutual dependence, or equiprimordiality, to be what underpins Heidegger’s claim in the passage from Being and Time section 43 and is expressed in it (albeit somewhat ambiguously), then the passage from the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” can indeed be seen to clarify what is at issue in the original claim— it aims, in fact, at clarifying something that remains obscure in the idea of the equiprimordial structure that, in Being and Time, is the belonging together of being-there and being. To read Being and Time as subjectivist or idealist (whether in the specific manner advanced by Blattner or more generally) requires that one read that work as committed to an understanding of the relation between being-there and being as one in which a hierarchical dependence obtains between being and being-there such that being-there has priority over being. Blattner may argue that the exhibiting of such hierarchical dependence is indeed one of the results of Being and Time;³⁰ I would suggest that, inasmuch as it can be taken to be a result of the analysis of the work, then it is a result that indicates, and is taken by Heidegger to indicate, the problematic character of that analysis. To suppose that being is hierarchically dependent on being-there is to suggest that being is not after all what is primordial here, at least not when it stands in relation to being-there, and this would seem to go against Heidegger’s own emphasis on the primacy of the question of being as such (notice that such primacy does not rule out a mutual dependence between being and being-there, in which being would remain primordial, but primordial in a way equal to being-there).

The way in which the relation between being and being-there emerges as a problem here runs through much of the analysis in Being and Time in more specific ways. Perhaps most significantly for the discussion of topology, it is what can be seen to underlie the problem that arose, in section 3.3 above, concerning the relation between the existential spatiality of being-there and the public spatiality associated with world—what Dreyfus refers to as an “incipient subjectivism” in Heidegger’s account of spatiality. More broadly, it underlies the whole question of the relation between world and being-there—a question that can be understood as concerning the nature of the unity of being-in-the-world and that already emerges as an issue close to the very beginning of Heidegger’s analysis in the question concerning the nature of “being-in.” The way in which Being and Time approaches the question of being in terms of the question of the being of being-there is a key element in the structure of the work, and one that is well grounded in Heidegger’s recognition of the primacy of questionability in what is at issue, and so of the necessary entanglement of being-there with being. Yet the manner in which Heidegger develops the focus on being-there in his analysis also creates problems for that analysis because of the way it threatens to destabilize the proper relation between being-there and being in favor of being-there. This is, moreover, a problem that arises internally to Being and Time as such, and it is thus that Heidegger is forced to rethink the very framework within which Being and Time operates.

Such an account of what is at issue here seems fully in keeping with what Heidegger himself says quite consistently about Being and Time and the problems to which it gives rise. When Heidegger talks about subjectivism, of whatever form, in relation to the work, it is not in terms of the work being itself committed to subjectivism, but rather in terms of the way in which the work makes itself vulnerable to such subjectivism or to being understood in subjectivist terms—the way in which its mode of thinking brings with it, as Heidegger puts it in the Nietzsche lectures quoted above, “the danger of unwillingly becoming merely another entrenchment of subjectivity.” Indeed, Heidegger frequently emphasizes the point that Being and Time is not subjectivist, but has indeed already left behind “all subjectivity of the human being as subject.”³¹ Moreover, Heidegger makes the same point about those other forms of subjectivism with which Being and Time is often taken to be implicated—“voluntarism,” “anthropologism,” and “anthropocentrism.” Such charges were already being made against Being and Time very soon after its publication, and Heidegger takes issue with them at an equally early stage. Thus he writes in “On the Essence of Ground,” from 1929, that:

As regards the reproach . . . of an “anthropocentric standpoint” in Being and Time, this objection that is now passed all too readily from hand to hand says nothing so long as one omits to think through the problem, the entire thrust, and the goal of the development of the problem of Being and Time and to comprehend how, precisely through the elaboration of the transcendence of Dasein, “the human being” comes into the “centre” in such a way that his nothingness amid beings as a whole can and must become a problem in the first place.³²

Admittedly, comments such as this can also be interpreted so as to confirm a subjectivist element in Heidegger’s thinking, yet not only does this mean ignoring the antagonism that Heidegger clearly expresses here, and elsewhere, toward “anthropocentrism,” or more generally, “subjectivism,” but it also seems to depend on already assuming a notion of subjectivity when that is just what is here in question. Indeed, the way in which Being and Time aims to render “human being,” and with it subjectivity, as itself a problem is evident, in fact, whenever the issue of subjectivism or idealism arises within the context of Being and Time itself. Thus, of idealism, Heidegger writes:

If what the term “idealism” says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is “transcendental” for every entity, then “idealism” affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant. But if “idealism” signifies tracing back every entity to a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its being and is best characterized negatively as “un-Thing-like,” then this idealism is no less naïve in its method than the most grossly militant realism.³³

Moreover, when later Heidegger inveighs against subjectivism and its variants, it is not on the basis of some vague “mystical” commitment at which he arrived after Being and Time,³⁴ but instead derives from the “topologism,” itself a form of “nonsubjectivism”³⁵ that is already embedded in his thinking as early as 1919—and that incorporates the idea of a factical involvement of ourselves “in” the world that is prior to both subjectivity and objectivity. The problem is how to articulate this insight. What Heidegger comes to realize in the period after 1926 is that the particular mode of articulation that he adopts in Being and Time ends up threatening to lead him back into the very subjectivism (or we may equally say, “objectivism,” since for Heidegger the one is not strictly thinkable without the other³⁶) that his original starting point already showed to be inadequate.

Blattner’s account of the way subjectivism supposedly arises as a problem in Being and Time focuses on the specific failure of the attempt to establish the ecstatic temporality of being-there as the ground for temporality as such. As Blattner acknowledges, however, nowhere does Heidegger himself indicate that this failure is the basis for his turning away from the approach set out in Being and Time. Indeed, while Heidegger later admits the mistaken character of his attempt to derive existential spatiality from temporality, he does not appear to give any explicit recognition to the particular “argumentative failure” identified by Blattner. The reason for this is simple: it is not the failure of an argument necessary to establish an idealist conclusion that leads Heidegger to abandon Being and Time as originally conceived, but rather a recognition of the inability of Being and Time adequately to provide an articulation of the topological structure that is its central concern—a structure that is neither “subjective” nor “objective” in any of the usual senses of those terms. In this respect, the focus for much of Heidegger’s rethinking in the years immediately after Being and Time (certainly in the period until “The Essence of Truth” in 1930) is the idea of “transcendence” (and with it the idea of the “transcendental”) that appears in the passages from “The Essence of Ground” and Being and Time quoted just above. In the engagement with this concept, Heidegger can be seen both to be taking up the problem of “subjectivism,” or better, the “distressing difficulty” of the relation between being and human being, as well as the problem of the unity of being-in the-world as such, along with the methodological problem concerning dependence and derivation that I identified in chapter 3 as an underlying issue in the structure of Being and Time as a whole. In this latter respect, the problem of transcendence is identical with the question of “ground” as that question underlies the methodological problem of “dependence” as such. All of these problems, of course, are problems that we have seen to arise in a particularly pressing way in relation to the analysis of spatiality, and one of the reasons for this is that the problem of spatiality in Being and Time is, as we have seen in the discussion above, a critical point of focus for the problem of world and for the question of the unity of being-in-the-world.³⁷

The concept of transcendence appears at a number of points in Being and Time, usually in conjunction with the concept of world, and although its significance may not be entirely clear from the way it is presented in that work as such, in “On the Essence of Ground” in 1929, Heidegger tells us that “what has been published so far of the investigations on ‘Being and Time’ has no other task than that of a concrete projection unveiling ‘transcendence’ (cf. secs. 12-83; especially sec. 69).”³⁸ Nevertheless, the concept of transcendence is not itself given any straightforward or explicit elucidation within Being and Time, and Heidegger seems to assume it to be already well understood, presumably on the basis of its existing usage within the philosophical tradition. Certainly the notion of transcendence clearly connects up with the idea, taken from medieval thought, of being as a “transcendens”—that is, as that which goes beyond any category or class and whose unity is not itself that of any such class, but is “analogical.”³⁹ Transcendence thus characterizes being itself, such that “Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. Being is the transcendens pure and simple.”⁴⁰ Moreover, transcendence also belongs to being-there just insofar as beingthere is being-in-the-world.⁴¹

The closest Heidegger does come to an explicit elucidation of “transcendence” in Being and Time itself would seem to be in his discussion of “The Problem of the Transcendence of the World” in section 69, in chapter 4 of division 2 (the section he refers to in the passage from “On the Essence of Ground” quoted above). There he writes that:

Circumspective concern includes the understanding of a totality of involvements, and this understanding is based upon a prior understanding of the relationships of the “in order-to,” the “toward-which,” and the “for-the-sake-of.” The interconnection of these relationships has been exhibited . . . as significance. Their unity makes up what we call the “world.” The question arises of how anything like the world in its unity with Dasein is ontologically possible. In what way must the world be, if Dasein is to be able to exist as Being-in-the-World? . . . The significance relations which determine the structure of the world are not a network of forms which a worldless subject has laid over some kind of material. What is rather the case is that factical Dasein, understanding itself and its world ecstatically in the unity of the “there,” comes back from these horizons to the entities encountered within them. Coming back to these entities understandingly is the existential meaning of letting them be encountered by making them present; that is why we call them entities “within-the-world.” The world is, as it were, already “further outside” than any “Object” can ever be. The problem of transcendence cannot be brought round to the question of how a subject comes out to an Object, where the aggregate of Objects is identified with the idea of the world. Rather we must ask: what makes it ontologically possible for entities to be encountered within-in-the-world and Objectified as so encountered? This can be answered by recourse to the transcendence of the world—a transcendence with an ecstatic-horizonal foundation.⁴²

The problem of transcendence concerns the unity of being-there and the world. Transcendence, and the unity of being-in-the-world, is not to be construed, however, in terms of a subject reaching out to an object that stands apart from it, as if transcendence were essentially a form of selftranscendence performed by the subject. Instead transcendence is identical with the opening up of the world, and so with the happening of disclosedness in the “there,” which is itself “ecstatic-horizonal” in character. Transcendence thus belongs to both being-there and to world, since it names their unity (in “On the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger claims, somewhat problematically as it turns out, that “world co-constitutes the unitary structure of transcendence”⁴³), and transcendence belongs, of course, to being as well. One can already see, even in the dense, and somewhat opaque, explication that Heidegger offers here, the way in which the “problem” of transcendence encompasses the problem of subjectivity, and so of the relation of being and human being. Moreover, the way in which the idea of transcendence also refers back to a set of Aristotelian and medieval ideas concerning unity and analogy is indicative of transcendence as connecting up with a certain conceptual framework, and so with a set of background assumptions, that is determinative of the nature of Heidegger’s inquiry. Indeed, not only does the idea of transcendence refer us directly to the problem of the unity of being-in-the-world (in much the same way as the medieval idea of the “transcendens” refers us to the categorical unity of entities), but it also points toward a way of explicating the structure of the unity that is at stake here in terms of the unifying of an otherwise differentiated structure through something like the structure of analogy itself—in this respect the idea of transcendence points us in the direction of Heidegger’s appropriation, not only of Aristotle, but also of Kant and the Kantian idea of the transcendental.

The way in which transcendence figures in Being and Time without itself being a focus of explicit elucidation or interrogation changes quite dramatically in the works that follow in the late 1920s. Transcendence, along with the concept of world, is directly thematized in a number of works including “On the Essence of Ground” (written in 1928), The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (lectures delivered in the summer semester, 1928), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (lectures delivered in the winter semester, 1929-1930), and in the Kantbuch (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) from 1929. In “On the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger connects the idea of transcendence directly with the notion of subjectivity:

[Transcendence] belongs to human Dasein as the fundamental constitution of this being. . . . If one chooses the title of “subject” for that being that we ourselves in each case are and that we understand as “Dasein,” then we may say that transcendence designates the essence of the subject, that it is the fundamental structure of subjectivity.⁴⁴

Yet even in making this connection, it is quite clear that the concept of subjectivity is not to be merely assumed, but is itself part of what is brought into question. Thus Heidegger also writes that:

World belongs to a relational structure distinctive of Dasein as such, a structure that we called being-in-the-world. . . . How then is Dasein’s relation to world to be determined? Since world is not a being, and supposedly belongs to Dasein, this relation is evidently not to be thought as a relation between Dasein as one being and world as another. Yet if this is the case, does not world then get taken into Dasein (the subject) and declared as something purely “subjective”? Yet the task is to gain, through an illumination of transcendence, one possibility for determining what is meant by “subject” and “subjective.” In the end, the concept of world must be conceived in such a way that world is indeed subjective, i.e., belongs to Dasein, but precisely on this account does not fall, as a being, into the inner sphere of a “subjective” subject. For the same reason, however, world is not merely objective either, if “objective” means: belonging among beings as objects.⁴⁵

Elsewhere in the same essay Heidegger provides a more direct characterization of transcendence than he offered anywhere in Being and Time. “Transcendence,” he says, “means surpassing [Übersteig],” and he goes on:

Transcendence in the terminological sense to be clarified and demonstrated means something that properly pertains to human Dasein . . . it belongs to human Dasein as the fundamental constitution of this being, one that occurs prior to all comportment. ...If one chooses the title of “subject” for that being that we ourselves in each case are and that we understand as “Dasein,” then we may say that transcendence designates the essence of the subject, that it is the fundamental structure of subjectivity. . . . We name world that toward which Dasein as such transcends, and shall now determine transcendence as being-in-the-world.⁴⁶

A similar conception is evident in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic in a passage that echoes some of the ideas that appeared in the discussion of the problem of transcendence in Being and Time, although here too Heidegger’s approach is somewhat clearer and more direct:

transcendence means the surpassing, the going beyond. . . . Transcendence is . . . the primordial constitution of the subjectivity of a subject. . . . To be a subject means to transcend. . . . Transcendence does not mean crossing a barrier that has fenced off the subject in an inner space. But what gets crossed over is the being itself that can become manifest to the subject on the very basis of the subject’s transcendence. ...Therefore, what Dasein surpasses in its transcendence is not a gap or barrier “between” itself and objects. But beings, among which Dasein factically is, get surpassed by Dasein . . . beings get surpassed and can subsequently become objects. ...That “toward which” the subject, as subject, transcends is not an object, not at all this or that being. . . . That toward which the subject transcends is what we call world . . . because this primordial being of Dasein, as surpassing, crosses over to a world, we characterize the basic phenomenon of Dasein’s transcendence with the expression being-in-the-world.⁴⁷

The way in which Heidegger characterizes transcendence in these passages makes clear the close connection of the idea of transcendence with the idea of world—world is that toward which transcendence is directed (although world is not itself thereby transcended) as a “surpassing” of entities—as well as with the idea of the subject. Subjectivity is essentially transcendence, and transcendence is being-in-the-world.

As Heidegger employs the term, “transcendence” is also connected, as I indicated briefly above, with the Kantian idea of the transcendental. Indeed, Heidegger says of the “transcendental” that “this term names all that belongs to transcendence and bears its intrinsic possibility thanks to such transcendence.”⁴⁸ Yet Heidegger’s conjoining of the idea of “transcendence” with that of the “transcendental” also creates some complications here, as he himself acknowledges. These complications arise from the fact that transcendence has two different senses, the distinction between which is essential in relation to the transcendental, especially in connection with the appearance of that term in Kant (and it is significant, perhaps, that Heidegger only feels the need to inquire into these senses and to distinguish them, in the period after Being and Time, when transcendence starts to become a problematic concept in his thinking). The first sense is that outlined above—it refers to the way in which being-there transcends beings in the direction of world (or, as Heidegger also puts it in the passage I quote below, transcends objects in the direction of their objectness).⁴⁹ The second is the sense involved in the idea of transcendence as that which goes beyond, not objects, but beyond the world as such. This latter sense of transcendence is involved in all those attempts that look to ground being or the world in something that is transcendent of them. That which is designated as transcendent in this second sense may also be said to be itself transcendental inasmuch as that which transcends in this way is itself traditionally taken to ground that which it transcends, in just the way that, for example, the supersensible (God, the Ideas, or whatever) may be said to ground, as well as to transcend, the sensible. There is thus a very close relation between the concept of transcendence and the idea of ground, and this is evident in Heidegger’s discussion: “The question concerning the essence of ground becomes the problem of transcendence.”⁵⁰

Heidegger’s understanding of the question of ground here is itself determined, however, by his understanding of transcendence in the first rather than the second of the two senses distinguished, and this is indicative of the way in which Heidegger’s thinking can be understood as a continuation of Kant’s own radical reinterpretation of the notion of the transcendental to designate a mode of grounding in which the ground is not itself “transcendent” of that which it grounds, although it is nevertheless the condition of possibility for that which is grounded. Of course, this Kantian understanding of the transcendental leads Kant himself to present his notion of the “transcendental” as standing in clear opposition to the idea of transcendence in the second of the two senses distinguished above. Thus, as Heidegger notes in The Principle of Reason, “Kant names ‘transcendent’ that which lies beyond the limits of human experience, not insofar as it surpasses objects in the direction of their objectness; rather insofar as it surpasses objects along with their objectness—and this without sufficient warrant, namely, without the possibility of being founded,”⁵¹ and in “On the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger explicitly directs attention to the way in which Kant uses the transcendental in opposition to the notion of transcendence, telling us that “For Kant the transcendental has to do with the ‘possibility’ of (that which makes possible) that knowledge which does not illegitimately ‘soar beyond’ our experience, i.e., is not ‘transcendent,’ but is experience itself.”⁵²

Although Heidegger acknowledges the opposition between the terms “transcendence” and “transcendental” in Kant, he also tends to treat the problem of “transcendence” as he understands it as underlying the Kantian inquiry. As a consequence, Kant’s investigation of the ground and limit of experience (an investigation into that which both grounds the structure of experience and also exhibits as ungrounded the attempt to go beyond experience) is understood essentially an inquiry into the structure of transcendence.⁵³ In the context of Heidegger’s thought, the concepts of both transcendence and the transcendental relate primarily to just such a “surpassing.” The attempt to elucidate the structure of transcendence, which is also the essential structure of subjectivity, is the uncovering of the transcendental. In that elucidation, the ground of transcendence is exhibited, but so too is the ground of subjectivity. Thus Heidegger can talk of transcendence as grounded in the essential structure of being-there, while being-there is itself grounded in the structure of transcendence—the two amount to one and the same. Yet the elucidation of transcendence is also essentially a matter of the elucidation of the phenomenon of world, since, as Heidegger says, “[t]o transcendence there belongs world as that toward which surpassing occurs,”⁵⁴ and, indeed, it is characteristic of Heidegger’s discussion of transcendence, whether in Being and Time or elsewhere, that those discussions also center on the problem of world. Thus, in “On the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger tells us that what is attempted is “an interpretation of the phenomenon of world, which is to serve the illumination of transcendence as such.”⁵⁵

Given this understanding of transcendence, it is easy to see how it maps back onto the structure of Being and Time—although it also maps onto that structure in a way that connects up with virtually all of the key concepts in the work. Transcendence names the “surpassing” of entities by beingthere in the direction of world—it is just that movement that Heidegger describes in terms of the way in which being-there “comes back” from the ecstatic horizon that is given in its understanding of itself and its world to the entities encountered within those horizons and so lets those entities be encountered “by making them present.” In this respect, transcendence can also be said, within Being and Time, to be another name for the phenomenon of “disclosedness” that is the focus of section 44 (“Dasein, Disclosedness and Truth”). The transcendental names the proper structure of transcendence, that which belongs to it, and so to being-there, and can thus be said to name that which makes such transcendence possible. In Being and Time, ecstatic temporality is the ground of transcendence—that which transcendence properly is. Transcendence itself clearly stands in a close relation to the notion of “project,” and so to the ideas of “meaning” and “understanding.” The “surpassing in the direction of world” that is transcendence can be taken as identical with being-there’s projective understanding by which the world is opened up as horizonal, and so as that “within which” entities appear—that “projection” of world is also the opening up of the context of significance or meaning that allows entities to show up as meaningful. In the late seminar on “On Time and Being,” Heidegger characterizes the “transcendental” in terms that bring many of these notions together—as the summary of the seminar has it:

Being and Time is the attempt to interpret Being in terms of the transcendental horizon of time. What does “transcendental” mean here? It does not mean the objectivity of an object of experience as constituted in consciousness, but rather the realm of projection for the determination of Being, that is, presencing as such, caught sight of from the opening up of human being (Da-Sein).⁵⁶

The way Heidegger characterizes the transcendental in this late seminar, however, puts the emphasis on a reading of the transcendental, as well as on the notion of projection, that has a slightly different emphasis from that which is apparent in Being and Time, or in the works of the late 1920s. In the later characterization, the emphasis is on “the realm of projection for the determination of being . . . caught sight of from the opening up of human being” and this places the realm of projection at the center with human being as that from which that projection is now glimpsed. The realm of projection is not itself dependent upon human being in any direct way, even though human being may be implicated in it (as it must be if it is to be that from which the realm of projection is glimpsed). In the earlier work, however, the structure of transcendence appears with a slightly different emphasis that is also indicative of a problematic tendency or ambiguity in Heidegger’s analysis—the later passage can be viewed, in fact, as an attempt to dispel that ambiguity in a manner very similar to that which is at issue in the passage from the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” discussed in relation to Blattner above.

Understood as a surpassing by being-there in the direction of world, transcendence is already viewed as comprising two elements, being-there and world (although these are not distinct entities) and as belonging to both. The problem of transcendence is the belonging together of those elements—it concerns their proper unity. Transcendence is not only that which names the unity of being-there and world, however, but also refers to the essential ground of being-there. This need not in itself present a problem since what it amounts to is just the claim that being-there cannot be understood as something apart from world—being-there is being-inthe-world—and so long as this is kept in view, there is always the possibility of being able to give an account of the “ground” that is at issue here that remains oriented to the task of exhibiting a unity that is more primordial than any “subjectivity” or, indeed, any form of “objectness” (and so of giving an account that remains focused on the “realm of projection” as such). Yet there will nevertheless be a tendency, simply because of the way transcendence is configured as a “relation” between being-there and world, to look to ground that relation in one or another of the two poles of that relation, and since transcendence is explicitly characterized as a “surpassing” by being-there in the direction of world, it seems almost inevitable that it will lead to a conception of the grounding to be accomplished here as one that looks to find the ground of transcendence in being-there.

The idea of transcendence brings with it a tendency to understand the grounding of transcendence as something to be accomplished by looking to one of the elements within the structure of transcendence—that is, by looking to being-there—and this tendency parallels the way in which Heidegger’s own attempt to ground the unity of being-in-the-world proceeds, in Being and Time, in a way that looks to unify, and so to “ground”, the elements that are together constitutive of being-in-the-world by exhibiting their hierarchical dependence on that which is more primordial within that unity. Indeed, in general, Heidegger’s manner of proceeding in Being and Time is “transcendental,” which means that it looks to “ground” by exhibiting certain necessary “conditions of possibility”—the meaningfulness of entities is thus grounded in, and thereby shown to be possible on the basis of, the original projection of meaning in temporalized understanding. Inasmuch as the transcendental is thereby understood as a mode of grounding that grounds the unity of one structure in the more primordial unity of another, so the transcendental appears to exemplify a mode of grounding that is identical to that to which the structure of transcendence itself tends—and this is no surprise, of course, given the way in which, at least in Heidegger’s account, transcendence and the transcendental are tied together. Indeed, Heidegger’s explicit focus on the concept of transcendence in the period from 1928-1930 is carried out with almost constant reference to Kant’s own thinking⁵⁷—not surprisingly, Heidegger’s move away from the concept of transcendence as a foundational element in his thinking is thus also accompanied by a move away from the engagement with Kant. Heidegger later refers to this engagement with Kant as constituting a refuge rather than “a permanent dwelling place” (the latter phrase itself referring us back to Kant’s own description of Humean skepticism). As Heidegger wrote in the preface to the republished edition of the Kantbuch: “With Being and Time alone—: soon / clear that we did not enter into / the real question. . . . A refuge—underway and / not new discoveries in Kant Philology.”⁵⁸ Significantly, Heidegger’s own reading of Kant in the Kantbuch itself gives a central place to the concept of transcendence, while it also aims to show how Kant recoiled from the grounding of such transcendence in the transcendental imagination and so in the unitary structure of time.⁵⁹

Understanding the way in which Heidegger treats the transcendental as configured in terms of the notion of transcendence (the transcendental is that which concerns the structure or ground for transcendence) itself enables us to see how the transcendental takes on the particular character it does in Being and Time since, as I indicated briefly in chapter 3, transcendence may itself tend toward a conception of the grounding relation in terms of hierarchical dependence.⁶⁰ If transcendence concerns the unity of being-there and world, and that unity is seen to be grounded in the unity of being-there (analogously to the way in which the unity of the structures that make up being-there are themselves grounded in originary temporality), then exhibiting the proper unity of being-there and world can be taken to depend upon showing how that unity is necessarily and uniquely determined by the unity of being-there as such, and so by the unity of being-there in its essence, that is, as ecstatic temporality. If there were no such relation of unique and necessary dependence between beingthere and world, then given that transcendence already posits these two, albeit somewhat obscurely (since they do not relate as separate “beings”), as standing apart from one another—something that seems to be implied by the very idea of transcendence as a surpassing—the unity at issue would be open to being understood as an arbitrary and accidental one and so as a unity that need not even be said properly to belong to being-there and world as such. The “problem” of transcendence is thus to show how it is that being-there and world can be unified when they are already posited as distinct, and this leads to the positing of a more primordial unity that can only belong to being-there and whose “projection” is the opening up of world.⁶¹

As we have already seen throughout much of the previous discussion, Heidegger’s thinking is essentially oriented to the problem of understanding things as gathered into a certain sort of fundamental “relatedness” by means of which they are also “disclosed.” Thus Heidegger’s inquiry into being is always centrally concerned with the articulation of an essential unity that belongs to being or, as we shall see shortly, to the “truth” of being—it is just this unity that is itself at issue in the question of “ground.” One of the underlying themes in Heidegger’s work is the question as to how such unity is to be articulated and understood, and the “turning” that characterizes Heidegger’s work as a whole, as well as being specific to the period after Being and Time, can be seen as a return to, and rethinking of, just this question of unity. This is so inasmuch as the turning is itself a certain constant “beinggathered” back into the original and originary unity of the truth of being, as well as in the way in which the idea of unity itself requires a constant rethinking and rearticulation. The notion of transcendence—of which Heidegger says in “On the Essence of Ground” that it “comprises an exceptional domain for the elaboration of all questions that concern beings as such, i.e., in their being”⁶²—constitutes one form of such a rethinking and rearticulation, and yet it also turns out not to think the unity at issue here in a sufficiently fundamental manner. In Contributions Heidegger says that:

Even when “transcendence” is grasped differently than up to now, namely as surpassing and not as the super-sensible as a being, even then this determination all too easily dissembles what is ownmost to Dasein. For, even in this way, transcendence still presupposes an under and this-side [Unten und Diesseits] and is in danger of still being misinterpreted after all as the action of an “I” and subject.⁶³

Why is it a problem to presuppose “an under and this-side” as belonging to “what is ownmost to Dasein” or to take what is ownmost as “the action of an ‘I’ and a subject”? The reason is that what belongs to “what is ownmost” is that unity into which being-there is first gathered, and this unity is precisely that which comes prior to any “side,” to any “action,” to any “subject.” Even when we try to keep to this conception of prior unity in our thinking of transcendence, as Heidegger surely does in Being and Time, still the very structure of the concept of transcendence itself will pull us toward a mode of thinking that threatens to obscure and cover over the original unity that is at issue here. The way in which this unity is made problematic when understood from the perspective of transcendence also seems to be something to which Heidegger draws attention in one of the marginal comments to the section on transcendence in “On the Essence of Ground.” To a passage in which Heidegger discusses the occurrence that is the entry of beings into world and which is identical with “the existing of Dasein, which as existing transcends,” Heidegger adds “But Dasein and beyng itself? Not yet thought, not until Being and Time, Part II. Da-sein belongs to beyng itself as the simple onefold of beings and being; the essence of the ‘occurrence’—temporalizing of Temporality [Temporalität] as a preliminary name for the truth of beyng.”⁶⁴

It is the articulation of this “simple onefold of beings and being” that is the focus for much of Heidegger’s later thinking, in which it is no longer a matter of understanding being-there’s transcendence as such, but rather of grasping the way being-there already belongs to the truth of being. Indeed, in the later thinking, the emphasis on the simple onefold (which is sometimes also presented as a simple, a unitary, “twofold”⁶⁵) of the happening of the truth of being goes so far as even to leave behind, in a certain fashion, the ontological difference between being and entities that figures so often in the writings of the 1930s.⁶⁶ The way in which this thinking focuses directly on the articulation of unity—although a unity that is itself always differentiated—is indicative of the way in which the idea of ground is itself clarified, and to some extent, transfigured, in the course of Heidegger’s thinking. The idea of ground is always, in Heidegger, closely tied to the idea of unity—to ground is to exhibit the unity of that which is grounded—the unity at issue here is also a unity that is always differentiated. The question of ground is, one might say, the question of the essential unity of unity and of difference. Heidegger is sometimes led to take up this question of ground, particularly when it is understood in relation to the notions of transcendence and the transcendental, in ways that also seem to compromise the nature of the unity at issue here (whether through the implicit reliance on a notion of hierarchical dependence, or through a tendency toward subjectivism or idealism). Still, the question of ground as such is never relinquished, for the question of ground is the question of being. As Heidegger tells us in 1957: “Being and ground/reason belong together. Ground/reason receives its essence from its belonging together with being qua being. Put in the reverse, being reigns qua being from out of the essence of ground/reason.”⁶⁷ As ground, being is not itself in need of ground, and so is neither grounded nor groundless.⁶⁸ It is, says Heidegger, like the rose of which Angelus Silesius says, it is “without why; it blooms because it blooms/It cares not for itself; asks not if it’s seen.”⁶⁹ This understanding of the intimacy of the relation between being and ground, as well as the understanding of ground that is implicated here, is also indicative of the intimate relation between being, ground, and place. To speak of ground is to speak of that on which one stands, that which preserves and sustains, which shelters and protects, and which does so in no generalized or abstract fashion, but in terms of my very being in this place—ground and the “there” are, as the analysis of Being and Time itself might be taken to show, one and the same. Moreover, the “there,” the place, requires no such grounding of its own since it is ground, “placedness,” as such.

The account that I have presented here concerning the problematic character of Being and Time, and the work immediately following it, as it is configured in relation to transcendence and the transcendental, is not intended to show that there is some simple “error” which vitiates the work, but rather to set out the way in which the concept of transcendence sets up an “instability” that is internal to the work itself and that makes the work vulnerable to certain sorts of misunderstandings and misconstruals of the issues at stake. This is, indeed, how Heidegger himself seems to present matters in his own comments on the earlier work—it is not that Being and Time represents a mistaken entry into the question of being, but that the manner in which it enters into that question predisposes it toward misunderstanding. Indeed, it is characteristic of the way in which later Heidegger views Being and Time that he consistently emphasizes the importance of the work as a necessary stage in thinking—it may be a “Holzweg,”⁷⁰ yet as he writes in the preface to the seventh edition (1953), “the road it has taken remains even today a necessary one, if our Dasein is to be stirred by the question of Being.”⁷¹ Some paths, it seems, may lead nowhere in particular (which is what a “Holzweg” does), but it may still be necessary to follow them. The mistake would be to remain stuck on such a path, and in this respect, it is very clear that the path of Being and Time, while necessary, remains only a stage on the way. The idea of transcendence (along with the associated notions of “meaning” and “projection”) does indeed take up, and provide an articulation of, a central element in the phenomenon with which Heidegger is concerned, namely, the way in which situatedness always opens out into “world”—a phenomenon that is also at issue in the ontological difference that “obtains” between being and entities. Moreover, the attempt to understand what is at issue in the idea of such transcendence, to understand the proper unity of the “there,” of “world,” and so of “being,” is by no means something to be accomplished easily, nor is the direction in which to proceed in pursuit of such an understanding already laid out in advance.

Although the account set out in Being and Time presents certain undeniable problems, it is nevertheless always possible to interpret that account in ways that reveal the essential concerns that it is designed to address, as well as the way in which, even if imperfectly and at times obscurely, it nevertheless continues to point toward the “same” unity of meaning, truth, and place that is already indicated in the hermeneutics of facticity in the early 1920s and that is rearticulated through the idea of the poetic saying of the Event in the later 1930s. In this respect, the underlying consistency of Heidegger’s thinking is not undermined by the shifts in his thinking, nor by the uncertainties that thinking often displays, or even by the changes in vocabulary and style. Its underlying consistency resides in its engagement with the subject matter that calls it forth—with what I have argued can be understood as the attempt to “say” the place of thinking, which is also the place of the opening up of world, the place of the truth of being. Moreover, it is not that Heidegger first attempts this through a saying that grounds that place in the human, or in the subject, and then later attempts to ground it in the “Event.” The entanglement of the human in the place at issue here is already part of the matter that demands to be thought—in this respect, “subjectivity” names a problem that never disappears from Heidegger’s thought: the way in which human being is “claimed” by being—and the task is to find a mode of articulation that acknowledges that entanglement and yet does not mislead as to its nature. The period in Heidegger’s thought from 1929-1930 onward marks the opening up of the attempt to achieve just such a mode of articulation—a mode of articulation that not only shifts away from the focus on transcendence, but which also moves away from talk of meaning to talk of the truth of being, and which also aims to re-think the idea of being-there as such.⁷²

4.3 Being and Being-There

In the very late lectures on the principle of “reason” (Grund) from 1957— lectures that take up the same problem of reason or “ground” that is also the focus for the 1929 lecture “On the Essence of Ground”—Heidegger summarizes the manner of the human entanglement with being as follows:

We are the ones bestowed by and with the clearing and lighting of being in the Geschick of being. . . . But we do not just stand around in this clearing and lighting without being addressed [unangesprochen]; rather we stand in it as those who are claimed [Anspruch] by the being of beings. As the ones standing in the clearing and lighting of being we are the ones bestowed, the ones ushered into the time playspace. This means we are the ones engaged in and for this play-space, engaged in building on and giving shape to the clearing and lighting of being—in the broadest and multiple sense, in preserving it.73

Heidegger then immediately goes on to add that:

In the still cruder and more awkward language of the treatise Being and Time (1927) this means that the basic trait of Dasein, which is human being, is determined by the understanding of being. Here understanding of being never means that humans as subjects possess a subjective representation of being and that being is a mere representation. . . . Understanding of being means that according to their essential nature humans stand [steht] in the openness of the projection of being and suffer [aussteht] this understanding [Verstehen] so understood. When understanding of being is experienced and thought of in this way, the representation of humans as subjects is, to speak in line with Hegel, put aside. According to their essential nature, humans are thinking beings only insofar as they stand in a clearing and lighting of being.⁷⁴

The way in which the question of being implicates human being is not a matter to be avoided. Not only can we not understand human being independently of the way human being is “addressed” or “claimed” by being, but being itself requires human being—human being is that which is engaged in the “building on and giving shape to,” in “preserving,” the clearing and lighting of being. This does not mean, however, that human being “produces” being or that being is “dependent” on human being in the way that implies the sort of ontological dependence associated with idealism or subjectivism. Indeed, as I indicated in the discussion above, the mere fact that a relation of dependence obtains between two terms does not imply that the one term can therefore be understood as ontologically more fundamental or more basic than the other: the dependence at issue may be one of “equiprimordiality”—a relation that is mutual not hierarchical.

Moreover, the precise nature of the dependence of being on human being is in terms of the manner of its “projection”—the “appearing,” “disclosedness,” or “presencing” of being is always in terms that relate to human being; yet the “fact” of that projection, which includes the projection of human being itself—the fact that “there is” [es gibt] being—is not itself anything that is, as such, dependent on the human. Julian Young puts this point by saying that:

What is subjective, human-being-dependent, therefore is not what our horizon of disclosure discloses . . . but rather the fact that that particular feature rather than some other . . . is disclosed. What is subjective . . . is not what we experience as characterizing reality but rather the selection we make from the infinite richness of attributes possessed by reality itself.⁷⁵

Of course, talk of “selection” here may make it sound as if the nature of the “projection” or “disclosure” at issue is something we could choose, but for such choice to be possible we would already have to stand in some sense apart from that disclosure, whereas we are ourselves part of that very disclosure as such—what is determined is the manner of projection that encompasses the disclosure of our own being (as understanding always brings with it a particular mode of self-understanding). We might say, in fact, that the disclosure or disclosure of being is always a disclosure that determines the disclosure of being as a whole, and so is always a disclosure that occurs in relation to our being, not only inasmuch as we are already encompassed by being, but also inasmuch as it must be a disclosure into which we are able to enter as witnesses to and preservers of such disclosure. Furthermore, that we are indeed “preservers” here is indicative of the way the disclosure as such is not itself dependent on any act that we may perform, but as disclosure happens in a way beyond any “choice” or “action” on our part. The difficulty with Being and Time, and with the analysis of disclosure in terms of “transcendence,” is that it encourages a tendency to overlook this latter aspect of the disclosure that is at issue here—it tends to place the emphasis on the manner of disclosure or projection (on what we might characterize in terms of “intelligibility”), and so on the way that is determined by being-there, rather than on the fact of disclosure as such. As we shall see in the discussion below, the turning can be construed as a turn toward just this aspect of disclosure—a turning toward that which itself remains “concealed” even in that primordial disclosure that is the disclosure of being.

In taking up the idea of disclosure, and with it the ideas of clearing and lighting that have begun to appear in the passages from Heidegger quoted above, in a more direct fashion, the thinking of being takes on a much more explicitly topological character. Disclosure always involves the opening up of a cleared “space” within which specific beings are able to come forth as what they are—a “space” that allows beings to be “freed up” so as to be the beings that they are and that also allows entrance to those to whom such beings are disclosed. Disclosure thus presupposes a certain cleared, opened place—a place that gives space to beings—and while that place must be configured in ways appropriate to such disclosure (“tuned” to it), the place is not thereby determined as such either by the beings disclosed or by those who witness such disclosure. In the same way, when I encounter another person, the possibility of such encounter depends on our coming into a common “proximity,” into a common “place” in which we are both situated and within which we appear in ways that enable us to recognize one another. Although the place of the encounter is itself partly configured by the encounter, it is nevertheless within that common place that the encounter occurs and on the basis of which it “takes place”; and while the fact that we appear to one another in ways that enable our mutual recognition, and so appear in ways partly determined by the conditions such recognition requires, it is nevertheless we ourselves whom we each recognize and who participate in that recognition, not any “mere appearance.” Of course, if we focus on such an encounter in terms that emphasize our own role in determining the nature of the encounter—on the way the encounter, and the place in which it occurs, is determined by what we bring to that encounter—then it may seem as if it is we who play the decisive role here. But this is already to shift the focus away from the place in which the encounter occurs and the mutuality of the encounter in that place; it is to focus on the encounter as something brought about, rather than something that happens; it is to underestimate the complexity of the interconnections that obtain in that encounter. The shift that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time is a shift that aims at moving away from such a tendency, not because Being and Time is already given over to such a way of thinking, but because its manner of presenting matters does not do enough to rule it out.

Although he does not draw on quite the same set of ideas, Gadamer characterizes the shift in Heidegger’s thinking from Being and Time to the later thought in terms that are nevertheless explicitly topological. Drawing attention to a marginal note in Being and Time in which Heidegger talks of “the place of the understanding of Being” [Stätte des Seinsverständnisses], Gadamer comments that with this expression:

Heidegger wants to mediate between the older point of departure from Dasein (in which its being is at stake) and the new movement of thought of the “there” [Da] in which das Sein or Being forms a clearing. In the word place [Stätte] this latter emphasis comes to the fore: it is the scene of an event and not primarily the site of an activity by Dasein.⁷⁶

I would take issue with this characterization on only two grounds (and they constitute differences in emphasis more than anything else): first, by insisting that the being of being-there, or at least, of human being, always remains at stake in the question of being—in the later thinking this is clearest in terms of the way in which human being is gathered into the place of the truth of being through their essential being as beings that can die, that is, as mortals (die Sterblichen); second, by emphasizing that this shift is not a shift in which place (itself better understood in terms of the German “Ort,” which is indeed the term Heidegger himself comes to use, rather than Stätte) only first comes to appearance with this “new movement of thought.” As I have argued at some length in the discussion above, beingthere already implicates the idea of place—being-there is itself a “topos.” The way Heidegger puts this in the passage that I quoted at the head of this chapter is such that “‘Dasein’ names that which is first of all to be experienced, and subsequently thought accordingly, as a place.”⁷⁷ Yet in a marginal comment added to his copy of the essay, Heidegger writes “Inadequately said: the locality dwelt in by mortals, the mortal region of the locality.” The point is not that being-there is not to be understood in terms of place, but, rather, that the understanding of being-there as “place” that was already present in Being and Time contained an ambiguity that allowed being-there to be taken as identical with the place that is really at issue here, as identical with the “place of the truth of being.” Heidegger’s marginal comment thus points to the same issue that lies at the heart of the problematic that has been the focus for the discussion immediately above: the “relation” between being-there and being (what might also be called the problem of the “between” or of the “and”). The shift from “the early point of departure” and “the new movement of thought” is thus, as Gadamer’s own way of putting this may also be taken to suggest, a shift in the understanding of the place that is already at issue here—in my own terms, place is to be understood, not as a “site” projected by being-there, but as the “taking place” of place as such, a “taking place” into which being-there is itself gathered.

The shift away from transcendence as a founding notion in Heidegger’s thinking and toward the more explicit “topology” which Gadamer’s comments seem to invoke is closely tied to Heidegger’s articulation or rearticulation of a number of key concepts, not only the concept of place, itself only implicit in much of Heidegger’s earlier thought, but including also the concept of being-there, as well as that of world. The shift in Heidegger’s thinking of being-there is particularly important, but also particularly complex—and it is a shift that is sometimes obscured by the fact that, even in his later thinking, Heidegger still occasionally uses the term “being-there” in ways that refer back to its usage in Being and Time. In part, the shift in the meaning of the term is one that takes us away from the individualistic connotations that appear (though somewhat equivocally) to be present in Being and Time—thus, in the early 1930s, for instance, beingthere is more often referred to in terms of the being-there of a historical “people” (Volk), where “people” is itself understood in terms of the belonging-together of a human community, rather than in terms of the being-there that wields equipment. Yet while the term contains some ambiguity within it, being-there comes increasingly to refer, particularly in the late 1930s and the 1940s, not so much to that which each individual human being is, but rather to a mode of being that is “the ground of the future humanness that holds sway in the grounding”;⁷⁸ to a mode of being “in” the “there” that no longer closes off its own character as such a mode; to a mode of being in which human being, and that of the world, is evident in the “there” in which it always already belongs. It is the turning back to such “being-there” that constitutes the “other beginning” to which Heidegger’s later thinking looks,⁷⁹ and which is the happening of the “Event” (Ereignis), understood as that mode of world-disclosedness that constitutes the “coming-home,” the “remembrance,” of being. In this respect, “beingthere,” which is now regularly hyphenated in a way that emphasizes the “being” and the “there,”⁸⁰ seems to take on a much more obviously “topological” character. Thus, in Contributions, Heidegger writes that:

Da-sein is the turning point in the turning of Ereignis. . . . Da-sein is the between [das Zwischen] between man (as history-grounding) and gods (in their history). The between [Zwischen] [is] not one that first ensues from the relation of gods to humans, but rather that between [Zwischen] which above all grounds the time-space for the relation.⁸¹

It is significant that Heidegger emphasizes elsewhere in Contributions that the “between” that is at issue here is not to be understood in terms of transcendence, “[r]ather, it is the opposite: that open to which man belongs as the founder and preserver wherein as Da-sein he is propriated [er-eignet] by be-ing itself—be-ing that holds sway as nothing other than propriative event [Ereignis].”⁸² In characterizing the between as “the opposite” to transcendence, Heidegger emphasizes the way in which the between is that to which the human is gathered and to which the human already properly belongs, rather than, as in the case of transcendence, that which is somehow gathered by, or in relation to, the human (as transcendence is a surpassing of entities by the “subject”).

In Contributions, and other works from the same period (for instance, the lectures from 1937-1938, titled Basic Questions of Philosophy), being-there also refers to a mode of being “in” the “there” that is the proper “destiny” of human being:

Truth . . . is grounded as the ground through that which we call Da-sein, that which sustains man and is entrusted to him only rarely, as both donation and destiny, and only to those among men who are creative and are grounding. The “Da” [the “there”] refers to that clearing in which beings stand as a whole, in such a way that in this “Da” the Being [Sein] of open beings shows itself and at the same time withdraws. To be this “Da” is a destiny of man, in correspondence to which he grounds that which is itself the ground of the highest possibilities of his being.⁸³

In these passages, the idea of being-there has been transformed into that which is a defining possibility of human being, which is its proper “destiny,” which also makes possible human being as such, and yet which is not yet realized, but will only be realized by those “few, solitary, and uncanny ones” (as Heidegger says elsewhere⁸⁴) who are yet to come. Much the same ideas reappear in Heidegger’s very last seminar in 1973, and there Heidegger is specifically concerned to address the way in which the human belongs to what he terms the “clearing” [Lichtung] of being, rather than such a clearing being identical with or produced by the human:

To leave the region of consciousness and attain to that of Da-sein: and thus to see that, understood as Da-sein (that is, from the ek-static), the human only exists in coming from itself to that which is wholly other than itself, in coming to the clearing of being. This clearing . . . this freed dimension, is not the creation of man, it is not man. On the contrary, it is that which is assigned to him, since it is addressed to him: it is that which is destined to him.⁸⁵

Here, as in the earlier lectures, Heidegger also emphasizes that the proper entry into the domain that is referred to as “Da-sein” is something for which thinking can only prepare—it is something still to be awaited.

The ideas of the “Event” (Ereignis), “the truth of being,” and the “clearing” that appear in these passages (and related ideas such as that of “the Open”—das Offene) are all bound up with Heidegger’s thinking as it develops in the period after 1930, and particularly, in the case of the “Event,” with Heidegger’s thinking as it develops from 1936 onward. Consequently, given that we have yet to embark fully on the elucidation of that later thinking, those ideas must remain, for the moment, somewhat enigmatic. What should already be quite clear, however, on the basis of what has been said so far—especially what was said toward the end of the last section (sec. 4.2) above—is the way in which Heidegger’s re-thinking of being-there involves a move that de-emphasizes the role of human activity. The human is itself seen as gathered into the “there,” into the “event,” rather than being that which “performs” such a gathering. Much the same move is evident in Heidegger’s rearticulation of the other concepts at stake here also, including, as we shall see, the concept of world. Rather than thinking world in terms of transcendence, and so as that in the direction of which being-there transcends or “surpasses” entities, world comes to be understood in terms of the gathering, and thereby also the disclosing, of things—by the time of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in 1935-1936, world is seen as that which is established through the happening of the truth of being as it occurs in and through the work of art and in which all things, including the human, are first gathered into relation with one another, and thereby come to “appearance.”⁸⁶

The concept of world is itself very much at stake in Heidegger’s discussions in the late 1920s. That should not be surprising given the centrality of that concept, together with the notion of “environing world” or “environment” (Umwelt), throughout Heidegger’s thinking, especially his early thinking—an indication of its importance is given in Heidegger’s comment, appended as a note to the final sentence of section 14 of Being and Time (division 1, chapter 3), that the analysis of the environing world (Umwelt), and the associated hermeneutics of facticity, had been “presented repeatedly” in his lectures “since the winter semester of 1919-1920,”⁸⁷ while in the lectures making up The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he notes that “The elucidation of the concept of world is one of the most central tasks of philosophy. The concept of world and the phenomenon it designates that has never yet been recognized in philosophy at all.”⁸⁸ Moreover, as I noted above, the critical notion of transcendence, when it appears in Being and Time itself, is invariably employed as that which pertains to world, and, in similar fashion, the phenomenon of world is also specifically taken up in relation to transcendence in essays such as “On the Essence of Ground.”

The centrality of world here should not be surprising: it follows from Heidegger’s original and continuing focus on the fundamental philosophical question as that which concerns the appearing or presencing of things, including ourselves, within a structure of prior interrelatedness. In this respect, we may say that while things are disclosed to us, that disclosure always takes place within a larger structure in which we ourselves as well as the things are already given together—the disclosure of things to us is thus properly the occurrence of a more primordial disclosure in which we are disclosed along with other entities within the world as a whole. The phenomenon of the world thus appears as a primary issue that is inextricably bound to the idea of situatedness—situatedness is always an opening into world. The phenomenon of world is also closely tied to the ideas of “projection” and “disclosure.” World is, we might say, the cleared, lighted realm that is opened up in the projection of the understanding of being and within which beings appear as the beings that they are. In Being and Time, the projection of understanding is the projection of meaning, and the opening up of world is essentially the happening of meaningfulness, significance, or “intelligibility”—an opening up that also seems to be accomplished through being-there.

The rethinking of world that accompanies Heidegger’s thinking in the period after Being and Time is, in part, a rethinking of the role of beingthere in relation to world, and, as such, it is pursued in relation to the idea of transcendence; at the same time, however, that thinking is also a rethinking of the concept of world as such. In the late 1920s, this rethinking moves to resituate the concept of world more directly in terms of the notion of transcendence, and also, as we shall see, freedom. But it also leads Heidegger to interrogate the way in which world, as the “cleared, lighted realm” within which beings come forth, stands in relation to that which is not disclosed, to the realm of concealment, to what he will also call “earth.” The shift in focus that occurs here, one that we might think of in terms of a shift from “unconcealment” to “concealment” (or, at least, to unconcealment and concealment), also takes the form of a shift from “meaning” to “truth.” It is in this shift that place, and with it topology, begins to emerge in a clearer and more articulated fashion.

4.4 Clearing and Earth

In a lecture course from the winter semester of 1929-1930, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the world appears as a central focus for Heidegger’s discussion. There Heidegger characterizes world as the “manifestness of beings as such as a whole”89—thereby placing the emphasis squarely on being as the unitary realm of the disclosedness of beings in a way that follows on from Being and Time.⁹⁰ Yet unlike Being and Time, these lectures also look to an exploration of world that encompasses more than either the analysis of equipmentality or of intersubjectivity. Indeed, Heidegger expresses some dissatisfaction with the focus on these aspects of the analysis of Being and Time in the reception of that work. Thus he writes that:

I attempted in Being and Time to provide a preliminary characterization of the phenomenon of world by interpreting the way in which we at first and for the most part move about in our everyday world. There I took my departure from what lies to hand in the everyday realm, from those things that we use and pursue. . . . In and through this initial characterization of the phenomenon of world the task is to press on and to point out the phenomenon of world as a problem. It never occurred to me, however, to try and claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram.⁹¹

Moreover, a similar emphasis on the preliminary character of the analysis of world of the sort set out in Being and Time already appears in the lectures on The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic from the summer semester of 1928:

We cannot . . . understand world as the ontical context of useful items, the things of historical culture, in contradistinction to nature and the things of nature. Yet the analysis of useful items and their context nevertheless provides an approach and the means for first making visible the phenomenon of world. World is therefore not beings qua tools, as that with which humans have to deal, as if being-in-the-world meant to move among cultural items. Nor is world a multiplicity of human beings. Rather all these belong to what we call intra-worldly beings, yet they are not the world itself.⁹²

The point is also repeated in “On the Essence of Ground” where Heidegger emphasizes the way in which the analysis of the environing world in terms of equipment has “the advantage, in terms of an initial characterization of the phenomenon of world, of leading over into an analysis of this phenomenon and of preparing the transcendental problem of world.”⁹³ Much later, in his very last seminar in 1973, Heidegger returns to the same point, on the one hand reiterating the importance of the analysis of environing world as that is given in Being and Time, yet also stressing that in relation to the project of Being and Time (namely, “to raise anew the question of the meaning of being”), “the analysis of the worldhood of the world . . . is only the concrete way of approaching the project itself. As such the project includes this analysis as nothing more than a means, which remains subordinate in relation to the project.”⁹⁴ The analysis of world as undertaken in Being and Time is thus to be understood only as a way of entering into the question of being as such, and so into the question of world, rather than as providing the definitive analysis of the structure of world. This does not mean that there are not aspects of that analysis that have a broader significance, but we should not expect the phenomenon of world to have been completely spelled out in the analysis of the equipmental or social being of being-there.

The investigation of the “ontical context of useful items” or of the relatedness among the “multiplicity of human being” as a means to approach the phenomenon of world may actually lead to the world being thought of as just an assemblage of such beings, and this would be seriously to misunderstand the phenomenon at issue. It is perhaps for this reason, and so to provide an alternative way into the problem, that the lectures that make up The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics approach the question of world through a contrastive examination of the relation to world of different beings—of the stone, the animal, and the human.⁹⁵ In “On the Essence of Ground,” and the lectures that comprise The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger adopts a “historical” approach, examining the way the phenomenon of world has been taken up by the Greeks, by medieval Christian thought, by modern, rationalist metaphysics, and by Kant. Not surprisingly, Heidegger takes the Greek understanding of world to be of particular significance:

The Greek expression for “world” is κ σµ ς [kosmos]. And what does the term mean? Precisely not what is usually believed; it does not mean extant beings as such, heavenly bodies, the stars, the earth, even a particular being. Nor does κ σµ ς mean something like all beings together; it does not at all mean beings themselves and is not a name for them. κ σµ ς refers rather to “condition” [Zustand]; κ σµ ς is the term for the mode of being [Weise zu sein] not for beings themselves. . . . Beings themselves remain the same, while their total condition, their world, can differ; or, one can hold the view that the world of beings always remains the same. To express this mode of being we use (already in my Freiburg lectures) the verb “to world” [welten].⁹⁶

Talk of the “worlding of the world” harks back directly, as Heidegger himself notes here, to the language employed in his thinking from the early 1920s, and it is a form of words that will also be important in his later thinking. It is indicative of a way of thinking the unity of world as one that is constituted in terms of the original and originary unity of world as such—a unity not “brought about” by anything other than world itself. Moreover, as this passage also makes clear, world is not to be understood as the totality of beings, but rather as the unitary mode of being to which beings belong. Later, in this same lecture, Heidegger will explicate this mode of being, namely the world, in terms of the transcendence of beingthere, and thence as freedom.

World, which Heidegger asserts must always stand in an essential relation to the human,⁹⁷ arises out of being-there’s projecting of possibilities in a way that determines being-there’s own being while it also establishes the world within which being-there finds itself (this is essentially the same structure we encountered in the analysis of Being and Time in chapter 3 above). Heidegger takes such projecting, determining, and opening to be identical with freedom. The possibility of such freedom arises out of the way in which being-there’s own being is at stake for it, and freedom consequently consists in being-there’s necessary projecting of its own possibilities for being out of such questionability (a questionability that means that those possibilities are not simply determined in advance, even though such projecting is always a projecting out of a certain pregiven, “thrown” situatedness). Heidegger also takes such freedom to name the essence of ground since in the free projection of world, what is projected is that on the basis of which being-there comes to be what it is and on the basis of which all beings are disclosed. Since being and ground name the same (a claim, as I noted above, that remains consistent throughout Heidegger’s thinking), so the ground of being-there is being-there’s projection of world, and so of that in which itself and all other beings first come to appearance. Moreover, this convergence of ground, world, and freedom also turns out to implicate truth, and to do so in a way that crucially reorients the thinking that is underway here.

In Being and Time, section 44, Heidegger takes issue with the traditional understanding of truth as expressed in terms of three ideas: that truth is primarily located in relation to judgment or “assertion”; that truth is essentially a matter of agreement between judgment and its object (expressed in the Latin formula that characterizes truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei”—adequation of intellect and thing⁹⁸); and that the role of judgment and of agreement in the understanding of truth has an essentially Aristotelian provenance.⁹⁹ Against the idea that truth belongs primarily to the judgment, Heidegger argues that truth is located in relation to the entity, and more fundamentally, in relation to being-there; against the idea of truth as agreement, Heidegger advances a conception of truth as the original “uncoveredness” (Entdecktheit) of the entity by which the entity first shows itself as what it is and so as that with respect to which the judgment is or is not in agreement. Heidegger thus takes “being-true,” in its primordial sense, not as the obtaining of an agreement between the judgment and its object (although this is a sense of truth, it is not the primordial sense¹⁰⁰), but rather as the “being-uncovering” (Entdeckend-sein) of the entity that makes possible any such agreement.¹⁰¹ “Being-true” is a matter of the “being-uncovered” of entities; the being of truth is the “being-uncovering” of being-there as such, whose own primordial mode of being is in the “there” of disclosedness. It is this disclosedness that Heidegger presents as the primordial phenomenon of truth.¹⁰² Heidegger claims that this understanding of truth is already present in Greek thought and is contained in the Greek term, usually translated unproblemtically as “truth,” namely “aletheia.”¹⁰³ Consequently, the idea that truth is primarily a matter of the agreement between assertion and its object, and so is primarily located in relation to the assertion, is not an idea that is to be found in Greek thought, not even in Aristotle.¹⁰⁴ The claim that, as Heidegger puts it, “the assertion is the primary locus of truth” cannot be defended by reference to Aristotle, nor can it be defended by reference to the structure of truth as such. Indeed, in a significant turn of phrase, Heidegger says that the assertion is not the “locus” of truth, rather “assertion is grounded in Dasein’s uncovering, or rather in its disclosedness. The most primordial ‘truth’ is the ‘locus’ of assertion.”¹⁰⁵

In “On the Essence of Ground,” the question of ground is seen as directly related to the question of truth, and both are explicitly tied to the issue of transcendence as part of a single, tightly knit problematic:

[T]he essence of truth must be sought more originarily than the traditional characterization of truth in the sense of a property of assertions would admit. Yet if the essence of ground has an intrinsic relation to the essence of truth, then the problem of ground too can be housed only where the essence of truth draws its inner possibility, namely, in the essence of transcendence. The question concerning the essence of ground becomes the problem of transcendence.¹⁰⁶

Truth is seen here, in similar fashion to Being and Time, to have its essence in something more fundamental than the accordance of an assertion or judgment with its object (a point to which I shall return shortly), and the idea of ground is also seen to be connected with this essence. Moreover, as in Being and Time too, the essence of truth, and of ground, is itself found in disclosedness, which here appears in terms of the idea of transcendence. The line of thought that proceeds further in “On the Essence of Ground,” however, and that can also be discerned in the Logic lectures from 1928, takes the essence of ground, and so, presumably, the essence of truth with it, as well as the elucidation of transcendence, to come together in the concept of freedom: “[t]he essence of the finitude of Dasein is . . . unveiled in transcendence as freedom for ground.”¹⁰⁷ In “On the Essence of Ground” we thus find an argument that moves from the question of ground, itself understood as implicated with the essence of truth, to the idea of transcendence, and thence to an understanding of ground as the freedom for ground revealed in transcendence. Significantly, in the work that Heidegger identifies as the point from which the turning in his thinking properly begins, “On the Essence of Truth,” although the notion of transcendence has disappeared, freedom is explicitly identified as naming the essence of truth:

The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom. The latter is ek-sistent, disclosive letting beings be. Every mode of open comportment flourishes in letting beings be and in each case is a comportment to this or that being. As engagement in the disclosure of beings as a whole as such, freedom has already attuned all comportment to beings as a whole.¹⁰⁸

“On the Essence of Truth” seems, then, to pick up on the analysis of “On the Essence of Ground,” but in a way that has shed the focus on transcendence, as well as on meaning, and has moved truth to the very center of the picture.

The disclosure of the essence of truth as freedom appears in section 5 of Heidegger’s discussion in “On the Essence of Truth.” If we take the idea of freedom as it appears there as actually picking up on what was at issue, if somewhat problematically, in the notion of transcendence (something confirmed by the way Heidegger characterizes freedom here in terms of the “ek-static, disclosive letting beings be . . . engagement in the disclosure of beings as a whole as such”), then the shift that occurs in “On the Essence of Truth” from section 5, “The Essence of Truth” to section 6, “Untruth as concealing” is especially significant. In a marginal note appended to the very end of section 5, Heidegger writes “Between 5. and 6. the leap into the turning (whose essence unfolds in the event of appropriation [Ereignis]).”¹⁰⁹ The “leap into the turning” is precisely located in the shift away from what in “On the Essence of Ground” was understood in terms of “transcendence,” but in “On the Essence of Truth” is “freedom,” and toward what Heidegger refers to here as “concealment.” The turning, it thus appears, is the turning into what Heidegger calls the “mystery”—the mystery of concealing as that which is always conjoined with unconcealment. It is essentially a shift from a focus on world as the realm of cleared, open projection—as, to use the phrase from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the “manifestness of beings as such as a whole”—to world as it stands in relation to the realm of that which is unmanifest, that which is concealed and impenetrable. It is a turn toward what Heidegger, by the mid-1930s, will come to call “earth” (Erde)—a term that first appears in in a significant way in the 1934-1935 lectures on Hölderlin.¹¹⁰

Heidegger’s inquiry into truth represents a continuation of Being and Time’s focus on “meaning”—in both cases what is at issue is the disclosedness or “presencing” of beings, which in Being and Time is also understood in terms of projection, and, up until “On the Essence of Truth,” in terms of transcendence. Already in Being and Time, it is evident that truth, disclosedness, stands in an essential relation to “untruth,” to concealment. In similar fashion, projection, tied to existentiality and understanding, also stands in an essential relation to thrownness, to facticity, “state-of-mind,” and mood. In Being and Time, however, the emphasis tends to be on the priority of disclosedness over concealment, of truth over untruth, of projection over thrownness. There is an important sense, of course, in which the way world is founded, in Being and Time, in the ecstatic unity of temporality implies that world, as meaningful, is founded on that which, although it is the “meaning” of the being of being-there, is not itself “meaningful”—originary temporality, and so the being of being-there, cannot be “uncovered” in the way that entities in the world can be “uncovered” since it is the ground of being-uncovering, of disclosedness. Yet this is not thematized in terms of an essential concealment at the heart of disclosedness. Indeed, inasmuch as world is seen as distinct from the ecstatic unity in which it is grounded, so Being and Time posits a separation of the unconcealment of world from the “concealment” of its ground, while, at the same time, concealment is not understood as playing a positive role in relation to disclosedness, but rather is treated, for the most part, in terms of the tendency to falling, and so to the covering up of the original disclosedness of things.¹¹¹

The issues at stake here are worked out in various ways in Heidegger’s thinking between 1927 and 1930, and not only in the explicit rethinking that is tied to the idea of truth. As I have already noted, this period is one in which Heidegger pays close attention to a reconsideration of the phenomenon of world, and in which the analysis of world in terms of equipmental or intersubjective engagement is, to a large extent, left behind (which is not to say that it is thereby abandoned, but that it is seen as providing only a preliminary way into what is at issue here).¹¹² This reconsideration of world proceeds, in part, through the more direct focus on transcendence, and on world as it is tied to such transcendence, that has already come to light as an important feature of Heidegger’s thinking in the period immediately following Being and Time. Indeed, once one relinquishes the idea that what is at issue in the question of transcendence is the grounding of transcendence “in” human being and instead focuses on what is at issue as a gathering of being-there with world, then what emerges as the real issue here is nothing other than the simple happening of world as such. It is just this question of the happening of world that seems increasingly to move to the center of Heidegger’s thinking in the period from 1928 to 1936. In conjunction with this move from transcendence to a more direct focus on world, however, there is also a move away from the idea of world as the realm of disclosedness or unconcealment alone to a thinking of world that also looks to world as it stands in relation to concealment, to what Heidegger refers, in “On the Essence of Truth,” as the “mystery.” By 1936 this will lead to the understanding of the happening of the world in terms of the revealing-concealing of the truth of being that is the happening of world as it contends with “earth,” and thence in terms of the happening of the “Event.” In the late 1920s, however, the rethinking of world is pursued in terms that are geared much more to themes already present in Being and Time, but which nevertheless pick up on elements that are suggestive of concealment rather than disclosedness— thus, in the period from 1928-1930, Heidegger gives particular attention to that which appears in Being and Time as the affective counterpart to “projective understanding” (existence), namely, thrownness or facticity, and particularly to the way in which such throwness is manifest in “stateof-mind” and mood (or “attunement”).

In Being and Time, state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) was already understood as that by which we first find ourselves in the world—as the structure of the German “Befindlichkeit” (deriving from the verb “finden,” to find) itself suggests. State-of-mind and mood thus constitute our original “affectedness” (or, as I noted above, our prior “situatedness”) whereby we are already given over to the world in some way or another such that things can show as meaningful or significant.¹¹³ For the most part, state-of-mind and mood reveal the world in ways that orient being-there in particular ways toward the world, and so underpin being-there’s active engagement in the world, but in the case of one particular mood, namely anxiety, beingthere is dis-oriented—the world is revealed, along with being-there’s own being-in-the-world, in a way that is severed from the familiarity of the world’s meaningfulness, and so as having no intrinsic meaningfulness of its own. Being-there is revealed as pure thrownness in the face of the “‘nothing’ of the world.”¹¹⁴ In Being and Time, the significance of anxiety lies in the way it is revelatory of the being of being-there as a whole, and so of the way in which it also reveals being-there in the authenticity of its own potentiality-for-being¹¹⁵—the significance of anxiety is thus in its revealing of being-there as thrown projection, and so in opening up beingthere to a recognition of its own “responsibility” in relation to its being. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, as well as in “What Is Metaphysics?,” there is a similar concern with the basic role of state-of-mind or mood in the disclosure of world and, more particularly, with the revealing of the world and our being-in-the-world—with the emphasis now on its character as transcendence—through anxiety, and also boredom.

Yet while Heidegger’s thinking in these works remains continuous with that of Being and Time and does indeed develop themes that, as we have seen, are already present in Being and Time, what becomes evident here is a deepened concern with the way in which such fundamental moods or “attunements” as boredom and anxiety open up the question of world as it is simply “given” and as it stands in relation to finitude and to ground. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, finitude itself is explored through the notion of “solitude” (Einsamkeit), and the lectures take certain lines from Novalis as their starting point: “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere. Where, then, are we going? Always to our home.”¹¹⁶ The question of solitude, and of finitude, is a question concerning how it is possible for us to find ourselves “at home” (zu Hause) in the world. This is not a question about how we stand in relation to the world understood as the ordering of things, or of human sociality, but rather how we stand in relation to our own being, and so to being as such. It is indeed a question of what might be called the proper “groundedness” (Bodenständigkeit)¹¹⁷ of the world and of our being in it.¹¹⁸ The world is thus first encountered, not in terms of the opening up of a realm of intelligibility, but rather in terms of our own inexplicable being given over to world and to a situatedness in the midst of beings—such inexplicability is part of the original meaning of “facticity” and indicates the way in which the question of finitude and of ground opens up, not in the direction of something that is a determinate ground, but rather in the direction of a “ground” that is “nothing” at all.

The focus on the “nothing” is, famously, the focus for much of Heidegger’s thinking as set out in “What Is Metaphysics?” The question that is placed at the end of that essay as the guiding question of metaphysics—“Why are there beings at all, and why not far rather Nothing?”¹¹⁹—brings together the question of being with the question of ground, and in a way that also indicates the character of the metaphysical forgetting of being. Metaphysics looks to answer this question by reference to beings, and is thereby oblivious of being; in looking to answer the question by reference to beings, metaphysics is also oblivious of the nothing. The question of ground, when taken up metaphysically, thus turns us away from being and the nothing in the direction of beings—in the direction, that is, of that which is meaningful, that which is intelligible, that which is explicable—and so away from what is indeed at issue in the question of ground. If we turn back to what is at issue here, however, then we must turn back, not to what is meaningful, intelligible or explicable, but to being as the nothing, to ground as that which, in the language of Introduction to Metaphysics, is an absence of ground (Abgrund).¹²⁰ It is, moreover, in mood and attunement that this first occurs, and it is in moods such as anxiety (though not only this) that the encounter with the nothing also takes place:

Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the manifestness of the nothing—does the “why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things. Only because we can question and ground things is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher.¹²¹

None of this, of course, is obviously incompatible with the account set out in Being and Time, but it does indicate a shift in the primary focus of Heidegger’s thinking. Not only do the works in the late 1920s exhibit a shift away from the account of world as given in terms of being-there’s engagement with things and with other persons, but they also exhibit a shift to a more sustained interrogation of the way in which the disclosedness of world is underpinned by the impenetrability of what we might call “ground,” by the “nothingness” of being, and which is revealed in the affectivity of mood and attunement.

The idea of nature provides another point of focus for the increasing “intrusion” into Heidegger’s thinking, from the late 1920s onward, of a certain impenetrable “ground” out of which world emerges, but to which world is intimately bound. Nature seems to appear in Being and Time largely through the absence of any proper discussion of it, and on the few occasions when it does appear, it is in a way that seems to leave the being of nature unexplained.¹²² In a note appended to “On the Essence of Ground,” Heidegger comments directly on this apparent “omission”:

if nature is apparently missing—not only nature as an object of natural science, but also nature in an originary sense (cf. Being and Time, p. 65 below)—in this orientation of the analytic of Dasein, then there are reasons for this. The decisive reason lies in the fact that nature does not let itself be encountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor in general primarily as something toward which we comport ourselves. Nature is originally manifest in Dasein through Dasein’s existing as finding itself attuned in the midst of beings. But insofar as finding oneself [Befindlichkeit] (thrownness) belongs to the essence of Dasein, and comes to be expressed in the unity of the full concept of care, it is only here that the basis for the problem of nature can first be attained.¹²³

It is significant that nature is here referred to in specific relation to beingthere’s “finding itself attuned in the midst of beings” and to thrownness. The question of nature is thus seen as directly connected with the way in which we find ourselves already given over to the world and to our own “affectedness” in being so given over. Indeed, Joseph Fell argues that it is in mood that nature itself is disclosed—focusing specifically on anxiety as the disclosure of nature, or an aspect of nature.¹²⁴ In his later thinking, Heidegger will explore the concept of nature through the Greek “physis,” exhibiting “physis” as standing in intimate relation to “aletheia”—nature, in this primordial sense, itself appears as a mode of the concealing/revealing of being. Thus Heidegger says in Basic Questions of Philosophy (from 1937-1938) that “The fundamental character of [physis] is [aletheia], and , if it is to be understood in the Greek sense and not misinterpreted by later modes of thought, must be determined on the basis of .”¹²⁵

The way in which the various issues that come to light here connect to the question of world, transcendence, and the concealing-unconcealing of truth is somewhat tangled, and, in the period of the late 1920s, and even into the early 1930s, is not yet clearly worked out in Heidegger’s thinking. Yet it should already be apparent that what emerges is a set of issues centered around the attempt, not only to think the happening of disclosedness, and so of world, in a way that would rule out any grounding of that happening in the human, but also to understand it in a way that encompasses the “mystery” of that happening, and so does not treat it merely as the happening of disclosedness, but also of that which is not disclosed, that which remains concealed or else appears as concealment.

The emphasis on concealment can be seen as itself tied to that to which I referred at the end of chapter 3 above in terms of the essential “finitude of being”—the character of the happening of being, and so of the opening up of world, as always tied to the happening of the “there.” It is a happening both of disclosedness and the opening up of a free, “cleared” realm in which beings can take a stand, but the opening up of that realm is also a concealing that itself provides the ground on which such a stand is possible. This is most obviously so in the sense that, although disclosedness is always a disclosure of things as what they are, it is never a disclosure of things as all that they are. The appearing of something in the open space of disclosedness is nevertheless always an appearing within a certain “locale,” a certain “situatedness,” a certain “clearing”—like the open, but also bounded space of a forest clearing (Lichtung)—in which the thing appears in a particular way that leaves open, but thereby also conceals, other such ways of appearing. Consequently, Heidegger presents the concealing that occurs in disclosedness as a form of “sheltering” or “protecting”—in the remaining concealed of things even in their disclosedness, things remain as more than is given in any such disclosure—and so truth is presented as properly a “sheltering that clears [lichtendes Bergen].”¹²⁶

Yet not only are things both revealed and concealed in the happening of world, the happening of disclosedness conceals itself in such disclosedness. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the happening of world is not a “happening” in the usual sense—it is not a happening like the happening that is my typing of these words, like the happening that is “today,” like the happening that is the holding of a football match or a birthday party—and so it does not itself appear in the way of such “happenings.” The “happening” of concealing-revealing thus “withdraws” in that concealing-revealing, and so is concealed, in much the same way as the appearing of an object within the field of vision is accompanied by the receding, the “withdrawal,” of the horizon within which the object is situated. The concealing that occurs here is thus not the absolute concealing of absence or obliteration (the horizon is not absent in being withdrawn), but the concealing that occurs through the withdrawing of that within which things come forth into appearance—indeed, the dynamic of concealing-revealing as such is the same as this dynamic of withdrawingcoming forth.¹²⁷ As revealing is always a withdrawal, a concealing, so revealing is withdrawn, not just from appearance in the manner of some specific “thing,” “entity,” or “event,” but from any sort of “grounding” also. The happening of disclosedness (and notice that as there is only one happening here that is both revealing and concealing, to refer to disclosedness is always also to refer to concealment) cannot be grounded in anything other than itself, and, in this respect, can even appear as a refusal of ground. It thus appears as “mysterious,” as impenetrable, as once again a form of “concealing”—in lacking any “ground” (for it is itself “ground”), just as it lacks any “appearance” in the manner of the appearances that occur within it, the happening of disclosedness is “nothing.” The character of truth as both concealing and revealing is captured in Heidegger’s emphasis on the “privative” character of the Greek term “a-letheia”— unconcealment comes out of concealment, but always stands in a relation to it. Yet the privation at issue here is not the privation of diminution or loss, and in this sense is no “privation” at all. So Heidegger claims that: “Concealment deprives λ θεια of disclosure yet does not render it στ ρησις (privation); rather, concealment preserves what is most proper to λ θεια as its own.”¹²⁸ Concealment means that revealing (un-concealing—revealing out of concealment) does not appear in the manner of any usual appearance, it has no ground, no “horizon,” with respect to which it stands, it always occurs with respect to the finite and the particular, and yet such revealing is not closed off by “privation,” but is the opening up into the “excess” of world.

The turn to concealing as that out of which unconcealment emerges and in relation to which it stands is itself indicative of the topological orientation of Heidegger’s thinking. Indeed, it is in the thinking of truth that Heidegger’s thinking most properly becomes a topology, for the thinking of truth, or at least of truth as a “concealing-revealing,” also brings with it a thinking of place. This should already be evident from the way in which the question of the happening of truth is tied to the issue of the finitude of being as elaborated immediately above—and particularly in the idea of truth as a “sheltering that clears” and the image of the “clearing” that comes with this—but it also comes to light when one considers more closely what might be involved in Heidegger’s argument concerning the need for a more fundamental understanding of truth than that which takes truth to be “a property of assertions.” As Heidegger puts matters in 1936-1937, if what we are concerned with is a statement such as “the stone is hard,” and if the statement is supposed somehow to “conform to the object,” then:

This being, the stone itself, must be accessible in advance: in order to present itself as a standard and measure for the conformity with it. In short, the being, in this case the thing, must be out in the open. Even more: not only must the stone itself— in order to remain with our example—be out in the open but so must the domain which the conformity with the thing has to traverse in order to read off from it, in the mode of representing, what characterizes the being in its being thus and so. Moreover, the human who is representing, and who in his representing conforms to the thing, must also be open. He must be open for what encounters him, so that it might encounter him. Finally, the person must be open to his fellows, so that, co-representing what is communicated to him in their assertions, he can, together with the others and out of a being-with them, conform to the same thing and be in agreement with them about the correctness of the representing. In the correctness of the representational assertion there holds sway consequently a four-fold openness: (1) of the thing, (2) of the region between thing and man, (3) of man himself with regard to the thing, and (4) of man to fellow man.¹²⁹

Truth as correctness thus seems to presuppose a more fundamental mode of openness that pervades the entire realm in which statement, “object,” and human beings are situated in relation to one another. This openness is what is already at issue in Being and Time in the original phenomenon of disclosedness, and so is approached through the ideas of “meaning,” projection, and understanding, but which, in being approached this way, is thereby understood in terms of the primacy of unconcealment over concealment. Yet the thinking of truth in terms of the open, in terms of unhiddenness or unconcealment, is not a matter of viewing truth in terms of some open space that stands “between”—a “clearing” that merely stands “cleared.” The openness at issue is always an openness of engagement or involvement. Yet this means that openness itself is always to be construed in terms of the happening of such openness and so in terms of the coming of unconcealment out of concealment.

Perhaps the simplest way to see this is by considering the way in which the opening up of a region occurs only through movement within that region. A space may thus be “open,” and yet if there is no movement within it, nothing will emerge as standing within that space. Yet, in movement, things are never exhibited “all at once”; instead one grasps them in terms of changing aspects and perspectives. Indeed, it is through those changes that things are grasped as things. Moreover, grasping things as things through the constant changes in their position and the aspects presented also requires that we ourselves grasp our own situatedness in relation to the things grasped, and so that we grasp the character of the region as a region. What starts to emerge here is the way in which the appearing of things within an open region is always a matter of the dynamic articulation of the region and of the things within it. In terms of the “four-fold openness” by means of which Heidegger characterizes the open region he describes in the quotation above, this dynamic articulation occurs in relation to the thing, to thing in relation to “man,” that is, to the human, to the human in relation to the thing, and to the human in relation to other humans. Understood as the articulation of a “region,” the structure that Heidegger lays out here is thoroughly “topological,” not only in the sense of topology that is specific to Heidegger, but also in a more mundane sense according to which topology is the method by which a region is mapped out through the interrelating of the elements within it (see sec. 1.3 above).

It is this “topological” conception of truth, in which the interplay of unconcealment and concealment in place first begins to come properly to light, that emerges for the first time in “On the Essence of Truth.” Yet it reaches a particularly important point of development in the lectures given between November 1935 and December 1936, and first published in 1950 as “The Origin of the Work of Art” in the volume of essays titled Holzwege (literally “Woodpaths”—“paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden”).¹³⁰ Gadamer takes those lectures as marking a new direction in Heidegger’s thinking, and as the major point of departure for his own work, which he characterizes as an attempt to adhere to, and to make accessible in a new way, the line of thinking that extends from there into Heidegger’s later thought.¹³¹

Certainly, given what we have already seen in relation to the shift in Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time, “The Origin of the Work of Art” takes up many of the central themes that are at issue here, but it also makes clear Heidegger’s increasing preoccupation with poetry, which Heidegger takes to be the essence of art in all its forms. Perhaps most significantly for the inquiry into place and topology, however, these lectures also give a central role to a mode of place. Although neither “Ort” nor “Platz,” nor even “Raum” play any significant role in the essay, Heidegger does employ the term “Stätte,” and it is this that takes Edward Casey’s attention in his discussion of the way place appears here: “The work of art is bound to be in place: place that, though framed, is not a mere position or site. . . . It is a Stätte, with all that this latter term implies of the continuous and settled—even of home.”¹³² Gadamer claims, however, that the real innovation in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” from the perspective of the development of Heidegger’s own thinking, is the introduction of the concept of “earth,” which Gadamer claims Heidegger finds in poetry, and particularly in Hölderlin,¹³³ and which does indeed seem first to appear in the Hölderlin lectures that precede “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1934-1935. Joseph Fell writes that “Earth is not a category, nor is it advanced by Heidegger as a speculative ground. It is intended concretely, as an experienced place. Here the philosophical term “ground” ceases to be metaphorical; its original, literal, root meaning is recalled.”¹³⁴ It is indeed the appearance of this concept of “earth,” both in the lectures on the work of art and in the early lectures on Hölderlin, that represents the introduction of a new direction in Heidegger’s thinking that moves explicitly in the dimension of place.

The primary focus for “The Origin of the Work of Art” is the nature of the artwork, and yet it is not merely art that is at stake in the essay so much as the relation between art and truth, and so, also, the way in which art may function in relation to world. Indeed, Heidegger argues that the artwork is not to be construed in representational terms, but rather in the opening up or “clearing” of world as such. Heidegger takes as his central example here a Greek temple.

Of the temple Heidegger writes:

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rocky, fissured valley. The building encloses the figure of a god and within this concealment allows it to stand forth through the columned hall within the holy precinct. Through the temple, the god is present in the temple. . . . It is the temple work that first structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny. The all-governing expanse of these open relations is the world of this historical people. . . . Standing there, the temple work opens up a world while, at the same time, setting this world back onto the earth which itself first comes forth as homeland [heimatliche Grund]. . . . Standing there, the temple first gives to things their look, and to men their outlook on themselves.¹³⁵

Although there is, to my knowledge, no evidence of any cross-influence, something of the way Heidegger describes the working of art in the temple is echoed in Vincent Scully’s famous and exhaustive study of Greek temple sites in his The Earth, the Temple and the Gods from 1962 (Heidegger’s essay is, of course, much earlier than Scully’s book, and while Scully undoubtedly came to be familiar with Heidegger’s work later, there seems no evidence that it had an impact on his thinking here). Scully writes:

The mountains and valleys of Greece were punctuated during antiquity by hard white forms, touched with bright colors, which stood in geometric contrast to the shapes of the earth. These were the temples of the gods . . . the temples were not normally intended to shelter men within their walls. Instead they housed the image of a god, immortal and therefore separate from men, and were themselves an image, in the landscape, of his qualities . . . the temples and the subsidiary buildings of their sanctuaries were so formed themselves and so placed in relation to the landscape and to each other as to enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict, the basic meaning of what was felt in the land.¹³⁶

The Greek temple, as Scully presents it, is not merely a building constructed for the practical purpose of providing a site for certain religious activities. Instead, the temple brings the gods into their proper place, in a way that locates them as separate from human beings, and yet also in the vicinity of human beings, and at the same time, brings the landscape—earth, sea, and sky—into view in relation to the god, and so also in relation to human beings themselves. The temple brings into view a “sacred” landscape, which is also a meaningful landscape, and it does so through the way in which it works in relation to the landscape in which it is situated—through the way it works to “enhance, develop, complement, and sometimes even to contradict” that landscape.

In Scully’s account the landscape is established through, in part, the contradiction between the architectural feature placed within it and the landscape as such; in Heidegger, the opening up of world occurs through the “strife” ( polemos) that occurs between world and earth as this strife is brought to occurrence in the site of the temple. In each case it is notable that what is established or opened up itself plays a central role in that establishing or opening up as such: the landscape is established through itself standing in tension with the temple; the world is opened up through the way it stands in conflict with the earth. The elements that are named here are thus brought into the open, are themselves disclosed, through the interplay that occurs between them. Inasmuch as the opening of world is that which allows for the disclosing of both earth and world, as well as the temple, so world also, in a certain sense, encompasses, “world,” “earth,” and temple “within it”—this means that we can speak, as does Heidegger, of the opening up of world as an opening up of both world and earth.

Moreover, as earth is disclosed in this opening or clearing of world as that which supports and grounds the temple as well as the world that opens up around it, so earth is also that which supports and grounds its own disclosedness as earth, and so supports and grounds its own character as concealing. The interplay of these elements means that there is no possibility of viewing them in a way that leaves them clearly and simply delineated with respect to one another or as they each stand in relation to the overall structure of the happening of the strife of earth and world—earth and world, while they constantly oppose one another, also constantly project into and around one another.

The strife between earth and world that Heidegger describes seems akin to that which the pre-Socratic Greek thinker Xenophanes seems to have envisaged, though in perhaps somewhat simpler terms, as obtaining between earth and sky: “Earth pushing upward, sky pushing down.” As Mourelatos elucidates this fragment, and others related to it,¹³⁷ it is the strife between earth and sky that establishes the open plain that is the dwelling place for mortals, and the cosmology in which the fragment seems to be embedded suggests a dual axis—that which obtains between the up/down axis given in the upward press of earth and the downward press of sky, and which thereby also opens up the crosswise axis (north and south, east and west) of the plain on which humans act. The structure is constituted through the ongoing opposition of earth and sky, while the plain of human life is itself one of constant movement—a plain stretching out in all directions across which the heavenly bodies unceasingly pass. Although there seems no reason to suppose that the Xenophanes fragment played any role in the development of Heidegger’s “twofold” of earth and world, the fragment does indicate something of the Greek character, and the broadly Greek provenance of the Heideggerian picture.¹³⁸ The Xenophanes fragment is also useful in providing an independent means to illuminate the idea of the “twofold” structure at issue here. Earth and sky are each determined in Xenophanes’ account by their relation to each other— we might put this in terms of their opposition, but we can also describe it in terms of their essential belonging together in that opposition. It is, moreover, in this determination through such oppositional belonging that the “between” of human dwelling is opened up. Although it is world that is opened up in the happening of truth that occurs through the templework, and it is in the opening of the world that beings come into view, along with earth and world themselves, it is actually earth that seems to be given a certain primacy in Heidegger’s description—a primacy that mirrors the primacy he gives in “On the Essence of Truth” to concealment over unconcealment, and that is itself indicated by the “privative” character of “aletheia.” It is earth on which the temple, the artwork, rests, and earth that shelters and protects it.

It might be supposed that here, in this account of the “worlding of world” as it occurs in and through the work of art, and so as a working or happening in which even human being is itself first brought into view, not only do we have an account that begins to come closer to a true “topology of being,” but we also have an account of the truth of being that allows us to understand its unitary character, and so also to understand the proper relation between being and human being. Yet as Heidegger himself admits in the 1956 “Appendix” to the essay, in the comment quoted in section 4.2 above, there is still an inadequacy in the way matters are presented here. In the “Appendix,” Heidegger refers to two “ambiguities” in the essay:

On p. 49 an “essential ambiguity” is mentioned with respect to the definition of art as the “setting-to-work of truth.” On the one hand, “truth” is the “subject,” on the other the “object.” Both characterizations remain “inappropriate.” If truth is subject, then the definition “setting-to-work-of-truth” means the setting-itself-to-work of truth (compare p. 44 and p. 16). In this manner art is thought out of the Event. Being, however, is a call to man and cannot be without him. Accordingly, art is at the same time defined as the setting-to-work of truth, where truth now is “object” and art is human creating and preserving. Within the human relation lies the other ambiguity in the setting-to-work which, on p. 44, is identified as that between creation and preservation. According to pages 44 and 33, it is the artwork and artist that have a “special” relationship to the coming into being of art. In the label “setting-to-work of truth,” in which it remains undetermined (though determinable) who or what does the “setting,” and in what manner, lies concealed the relationship of being to human being. This relationship is inadequately thought even in this presentation—a distressing difficulty that has been clear to me since Being and Time, and has since come under discussion in many presentations. . . . The problematic issue that prevails here, then, comes to a head at the very place in the discussion where the essence of language and of poetry is touched upon, all this, again, only in reference to the belonging together of being and saying.¹³⁹

Thus, for all the focus on truth and world here, the question of the relation between being and human being remains at issue. Indeed, the period from 1930 to 1935-1936 is one in which truth comes to the fore in Heidegger’s thinking, but in which truth is still thought of in a way that allows it to be seen as founded in or by the activity of human being.¹⁴⁰ From 1936 on, however, Heidegger starts more directly to articulate the happening of truth as itself that which is primary here, and so as determinative of human being, rather than as “founded” in the human—it is this which is a crucial element in the thinking of the “Event” (Ereignis) that appears in 1936-1938.

4.5 Language and Metaphysics

In the essays and lectures from the period after the publication of Being and Time through to the writing of Contributions, from “What Is Metaphysics?” in 1928 through to Introduction to Metaphysics in 1936, Heidegger returns frequently to the question of the nature and origin, as well as the necessary forgetfulness, of metaphysical thinking. This is no mere accident, but is directly connected to Heidegger’s own diagnosis of the difficulties that surround Being and Time as having their source in the way the work retains an essentially metaphysical approach to the question of being. In the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” this criticism is directly connected with the idea that Being and Time operates within a framework centered on the idea of transcendence: “being is thought on the basis of beings, a consequence of the approach—at first unavoidable—within a metaphysics that is still dominant. Only from such a perspective does being show itself in and as transcending.”141 In this context, Heidegger repeats the crucial sentence from the Introduction to Being and Time in which he states that: “Being is the transcendens pure and simple,”¹⁴² commenting that this statement “articulates in one simple sentence the way the essence of being hitherto has been cleared for the human being,” and as such “remains indispensable for the prospective approach of thinking toward the question concerning the truth of being.”¹⁴³ Yet he also adds, “[b]ut whether the definition of being as the transcendens pure and simple really does name the simple essence of the truth of being—this and this alone is the primary question for a thinking that attempts to think the truth of being.”¹⁴⁴ In the introduction to “What Is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger comments that “every philosophy that revolves around an indirect or direct representation of ‘transcendence’ remains of necessity essentially an ontology, whether it achieves a new foundation of ontology or whether it assures us that it repudiates ontology as a conceptual freezing of experience.”¹⁴⁵ Thus, although Heidegger constantly insists on the radical character of Being and Time and on the necessity of the path it follows, it is nevertheless the case that he also views the focus on transcendence, with all that implies, as itself bringing an ontological or metaphysical orientation with it.

This conclusion is, however, one to which Heidegger comes only gradually. In 1928, while already engaged in the rearticulation of aspects of the analysis of Being and Time, he still holds to a metaphysical perspective, writing that: “Several times we mentioned how all these metaphysical, ontological statements are exposed to continual misunderstanding, are understood ontically and existentially. One main reason for this misunderstanding lies in not preserving the proper metaphysical horizon of the problem.”¹⁴⁶ The continued preoccupation with transcendence in the period up until 1929-1930 is indicative of Heidegger’s continued attempt to work from within metaphysics, even if it is a metaphysics that also requires a radical “dis-mantling.” By the time of “On the Essence of Truth,” given as a lecture and revised a number of times between 1930 and 1932 (and further revised prior its publication in 1943), the attempt to persevere within a metaphysical frame seems to have finally given way, even if that attempt is not fully carried through, and so Heidegger comments in the concluding “Note” to the text of the lecture (presumably written closer to 1943 than 1930) that:

The decisive question (in Being and Time, 1927) of the meaning, i.e., of the projectdomain (see Being and Time, p. 151), i.e., of the openness, i.e., of the truth of Being and not merely of beings, remains intentionally undeveloped. Our thinking apparently remains on the path of metaphysics. Nevertheless, in its decisive steps, which lead from truth as correctness to ek-sistent freedom, and from the latter to truth as concealing and as errancy, it accomplishes a change in the questioning that belongs to the overcoming of metaphysics. The thinking attempted in the lecture comes to fulfillment in the essential experience that a nearness to the truth of Being is first prepared for historical human beings on the basis of the Da-sein into which human beings can enter. Every kind of anthropology and all subjectivity of the human being as subject is not merely left behind—as it was already in Being and Time . . . rather, the movement of the lecture is such that it sets out to think from this other ground [Da-sein]. The course of the questioning is intrinsically the path of a thinking that, instead of furnishing representations and concepts, experiences and tests itself as a transformation of its relatedness to Being.¹⁴⁷

The shift that is indicated here is a shift away from the focus on the inquiry into the truth of being as that might be understood through the focus on the structure either of transcendence, or what is termed here “ek-static freedom,” as given in being-there, and toward concealment, the “mystery,” the “there” of being (Da-sein). The shift is thus a shift away from metaphysics (although it may seem, even in this lecture, as Heidegger acknowledges, to remain to some extent metaphysical), and it is also, therefore, an attempt to begin the task of finding a new path or “way” for thinking that no longer moves by means of “representations and concepts,” but through its own experience and testing of itself in its relatedness to Being.

The exact character of the way of thinking that is indicated here is by no means clear from what Heidegger tells us in “On the Essence of Truth.” Yet elsewhere Heidegger is emphatic that what is at issue is fundamentally a matter of language. Thus, in the Le Thor Seminar from 1969, we are told that:

The posing of the question of being as being in Being and Time amounts to such a transformation of the understanding of being that it at once calls for a renewal of language. But the language of Being and Time, says Heidegger, lacks assurance. For the most part, it still speaks in expressions borrowed from metaphysics and seeks to present what it wants to say with the help of new coinings, creating new words. ...Heidegger now says...that through Hölderlin he came to understand how useless it is to coin new words; only after Being and Time was the necessity of a return to the essential simplicity of language clear to him.¹⁴⁸

Similarly, in his response to Ernst Jünger in 1955, Heidegger emphasizes the quite general point that “[t]he question concerning the essence of being dies off if it does not relinquish the language of metaphysics, because metaphysical representation prevents us from thinking the question concerning the essence of being.”¹⁴⁹ The difficulties that appear in Heidegger’s thinking in Being and Time, and in the work immediately after, can thus be seen as arising out of Heidegger’s appropriation of concepts and ways of proceeding from the existing tradition that are taken up because they seem to offer ways of articulating the original unity that is at issue, and yet those concepts and modes of proceeding also tend to carry with them tendencies and presuppositions that run counter to key aspects of Heidegger’s project.¹⁵⁰ Much of Heidegger’s thinking up until 1936 can be seen as an attempt to disentangle himself from such concepts and modes of thinking, and so from the metaphysical tradition to which they belong, and this means finding a path on which thinking may nevertheless continue—it also means finding a language appropriate to this new path.

The need for a renewal of language is consequently a theme that runs through much of Heidegger’s later thinking—and not only is it present as an explicit theme, but it is also apparent in the very different character of Heidegger’s work in the period from the mid-1930s onward (and especially in his postwar writings and lectures) compared to that of the 1920s, or even the early 1930s. The transformation or “renewal” that is indicated in “On the Essence of Truth” is thus a transformation or “renewal” of language, and the thinking that “experiences and tests itself as a transformation of its relatedness to Being” is a thinking that also stands in a transformed relation to language as such—a thinking that stands in an essential relation, as the reference to Hölderlin suggests, to the poetic. This shift takes two forms, both of which are, to some extent, already evident in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: it is a shift in the character of Heidegger’s own approach—a shift toward a mode of presentation that is concerned less to “explain” or “analyze” than to “describe” and evoke, and so employs a more “evocative” and descriptive language; it is also a shift toward a more developed understanding of language that sees language as essentially bound up with the question of the truth, and the place, of being.

Language was already, of course, an important topic in Being and Time, where it appears in relation to “discourse” (Rede). Discourse is named along with understanding, state-of-mind, and falling as part of the essential structure of disclosedness. Discourse is world-articulation, and though it does not stand in an exclusive relation to language, it is through language that discourse is expressed (see the discussion in section 3.4 above). Language takes on a much more central role, however, in Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time, in which it is essentially related to being (and also, as we shall see later, to place and space), in a manner that the earlier work seems not to envisage. Heidegger famously writes in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” that language is “the house of being,”¹⁵¹ while in “The Origin of the Work of Art” he tells us:

Language is neither merely nor primarily the aural and written expression of what needs to be communicated. The conveying of overt and covert meanings is not what language, in the first instance, does. Rather, it brings beings as beings, for the first time, into the open. . . . Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. . . . Poetry is the saying of the unconcealment of beings. . . . Language itself is poetry in the essential sense.¹⁵²

What it is for language to be poetry is for it to stand in an essential relation to the concealment and unconcealment that we have already seen is the essence of truth and that is also tied to the happening of place. The role that language plays here is something that will be explored in more detail in the discussion in chapter 5 below (see especially section 5.4)—the crucial point for the moment is that it is indeed language as understood poetically, and so as essentially disclosive, that is, as tied to the happening of the truth or place of being, that lies at the heart of Heidegger’s concern with language in the 1930s and beyond. It is this same conception of language that also underpins Heidegger’s own more poetic thinking in the period from 1935 onward, and especially in the period after 1945.

This turn towards poetic language and poetic thinking is a turn away from metaphysics, and as such, it also comprises a shift away from any attempt to “ground” the “truth of being” (which includes the truth of our own being) in terms that would “explain” or “analyze” it. Even the transcendental mode of proceeding that looks to the uncovering of a structure of necessary conditions is no longer operative here—not merely because of the disappearance of the language of “transcendence,” but because the very attempt to exhibit such conditionality, along with the distinction between condition and conditioned, is now seen as problematic—indeed, if we are to regard Heidegger’s late thinking as in any sense “transcendental” (as he himself does not), then it must be in a sense that takes the transcendental as another term for “topological” and does not tie the transcendental to the exhibiting of “conditions” in any strong sense. As a result, it would be a mistake to view Heidegger’s thinking on language as advancing any form of “philosophy of language”—rather, like the later Wittgenstein, Heidegger provides no “theory” of language, although, unlike Wittgenstein, he aims instead to exhibit language in its “essence” (of course, what such talk of “essence” means for Heidegger is quite different from what Wittgenstein, or most readers of Wittgenstein, would take it to mean). In “On the Essence of Truth,” although it is still the case that truth as unconcealment is seen as the necessary ground for truth as correctness, the articulation of truth as unconcealment is not itself undertaken by means of any analysis that neatly “unpacks” the ideas at issue—there is no conditionality at work within the phenomenon of truth as unconcealment, and the different concepts used to elucidate it are not related in any analytically transparent fashion.

Even at this stage in Heidegger’s thinking, then, a stage at which the turning in his thought is only going through its first, if nonetheless significant, movement, the manner in which he proceeds is through a mode of language that is itself essentially “disclosive” (and so also, in a certain fundamental sense, “phenomenological”), and that thereby aims to exhibit the phenomenon that is at issue through often overlapping and intersecting ideas and images. Gadamer said of Heidegger that he was a thinker “who sees,” and Godamer goes on:

And this “seeing” occurs not only in momentary evocations in which a striking word is found and an intuition flashes for a fleeting moment. The entire conceptual analysis is not presented as an argued progression from one concept to another; rather the analysis is made by approaching the same “thing” from the most diverse perspectives, thus giving the conceptual description the character of the plastic arts, that is, the three-dimensionality of tangible reality.¹⁵³

Although seemingly intended by Gadamer to characterize Heidegger’s thinking in general, this seems a particularly apt characterization of that thinking as it develops during the 1930s and onward. Moreover, it also gives another sense to the way in which Heidegger’s thinking is essentially “topological” since this “seeing” of things in the manner of “the plastic arts” is also a seeing of things as they stand in their located, embodied “concreteness.” In this respect too, inasmuch as Heidegger remains concerned with a certain project of “grounding,” the grounding that is attempted is, as we saw earlier, not the grounding in some underlying “reason” or “cause,” but is rather the grounding that is given in and through the exhibiting of something in its gathered unity, in the place in which it properly stands.

The turn to the poetic in Heidegger’s thinking is, in an important additional sense, a turn toward what he himself calls the “mythical.” This is not only evident, however, in his later talk of the “gods” (itself drawn, not only from the Greeks, but more directly from Hölderlin), so much as in the way in which his thinking invariably comes to depend on the articulation of a complex structure of meaning as it is concentrated in a single idea, a single image, a single word.¹⁵⁴ Heidegger himself seems to present “myth” as standing in a direct relationship to the poetic through the way in which he views myth (µυθ ς), as well as “ethos” ( Π ς),¹⁵⁵ as intimately tied to language as disclosive, that is, to language as logos (λ γ ς):

Mυθ ς, Π ς, and λ γ ς belong together essentially. “Myth” and “logos” appear in an erroneously much-discussed opposition only because they are the same in Greek poetry and thought. In the ambiguous and confusing title “mythology,” the words µυθ ς and λ γ ς are connected in such a way that both forfeit their primordial essence. To try to understand µυθ ς with the help of “mythology” is a procedure equivalent to drawing water with the aid of a seive. When we use the expression “mythical,” we shall think it in the sense just delimited: the “mythical”—the µυθ ςical—is the disclosure and concealment contained in the disclosing-concealing word, which is the primordial appearance of the fundamental essence of Being itself. The terms death, night, day, the earth, and the span of the sky name essential modes of disclosure and concealment.¹⁵⁶

This turn to the mythical is, no less than the turn to the poetic, not a turn to the arbitrary or the “irrational,” but quite the contrary—it is a turn to that which is the proper essence of reason, to the essence of logos. It is a turn back to the original gathering and unconcealing of things that determines all “rationality” as such. Indeed, our being as rational creatures is nothing other than our being as entities that stand in an essential relation to the logos that is named here—as the original Greek has it, “zoon logon echon” (the living being with the logos). Understood as “mythical,” Heidegger’s thinking does not lose itself in the telling of impossible and fantastic stories, then, but instead turns back to our original experience of being and of truth, aiming to articulate that experience, to unfold the “story” that belongs to it in a way that allows it to be disclosed in its own terms.

Although “The Origin of the Work of Art” is notable for the way in which it gives center stage to art and poetry, and also, one might say, to a certain “mythos,” Heidegger’s turn toward the poetic had already become evident in the lecture series, given immediately following his resignation from the rectorate in 1934, on Hölderlin’s hymns “The Rhine” and “Germania.” These are Heidegger’s first real and sustained engagements with poetry as part of his own path of thinking, and it is here too that the idea of dwelling, presaged in Being and Time, but in no way developed, reappears, in conjunction with the image of “earth,” as well as with the idea of “Heimat,” the “homeland”—the latter understood, “not as the mere place of birth, or as the simply familiar landscape, but rather as the power of the earth, on which man, each time according to his own historical Dasein, ‘poetically dwells’ [‘In Lovely Blue . . .’ VI, 25, v. 32].”¹⁵⁷ The turn toward the poetic is thus also, and not unexpectedly, a turn toward a more explicit thematization of place; a turn of which Stuart Elden writes that it “seems to be initiated in the lectures on Hölderlin, where Heidegger seems to designate ‘space’ as conforming to Cartesian notions, and to replace it with a more originary understanding of ‘place.’”¹⁵⁸ Julian Young also gives a crucial role to Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin, arguing that the critical shift in Heidegger’s own thinking as it occurs in 1936-1938 corresponds to, and is driven by, a development in his reading of the poet.¹⁵⁹ Heidegger’s engagement with Hölderlin continues up into the 1940s, and beyond, and is undoubtedly one of the crucial elements in the turning toward the later thought, especially in terms of the topological development of that thought. Indeed, in the Der Spiegel interview from 1966, Heidegger says of his thought in general that it “stands in a definitive relation to the poetry of Hölderlin.”¹⁶⁰

Heidegger’s focus on Hölderlin in the period from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s is matched, however, by a similar preoccupation with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche—yet while Heidegger increasingly comes to identify his own thought with that of Hölderlin, he increasingly comes to define it in opposition to Nietzsche. In this respect, although one can see the shift in Heidegger’s thinking having already begun in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a result of the particular “problem-dynamic” present in Being and Time, it is the engagement with Hölderlin and Nietzsche that is crucial to the formation of Heidegger’s new mode of thinking that emerges from 1936 onward and reaches a fuller articulation in the period after 1945. Indeed, Heidegger regarded both these thinkers (and it is quite clear that Heidegger views Hölderlin as no less a thinker than Nietzsche) as standing in a similar, and equally critical, position in relation to the metaphysical history of Europe, and so too, of the West.

Inasmuch as Heidegger’s “re-thinking” of Being and Time involves a “rethinking” of metaphysics, so it also involves a “re-thinking” of Western thought, and of the thought of modernity, as it stands in relation to its history, which also means, if we take the analysis of Being and Time itself at all seriously, in relation to its future (moreover, although there is not the space to explore this here, it also implicates a rethinking of the political, and with it an implicit rethinking of Heidegger’s own political entanglement of the 1930s).¹⁶¹ Indeed, Heidegger claims that we find ourselves in a unique position in relation to the thought that is at issue here that forces us to reflect back on the originary beginning of that thought:

We must reflect on the first beginning of Western thought because we stand at its end. Our use of the word “end” is ambiguous here. On the one hand, it means we stand in the domain of that end which is the end of the first beginning. In this sense, end does not mean either the mere cessation or the waning of the power of the beginning. On the contrary, the end of a real and essential history can itself only be an essential one. . . . The greatness of the end consists not only in the essentiality of the closure of the great possibilities but also in the power to prepare a transition to something wholly other. At the same time, however, “end” refers to the running out and dissipation of all the effects of the previous history of Western thinking. That is, it refers to a confusion of the traditional basic positions, value concepts, and propositions in the usual interpretation of beings.¹⁶²

Heidegger claims that it is Hölderlin and Nietzsche who “had the deepest experience” of the end of the West in this double sense, it is these two who:

could endure this experience and could transform it in their creative work only through their concomitant reflection on the beginning of Western history, on what for the Greeks was necessity. . . . That these two knew the Greek beginning, in a more original way than all previous ages, has its ground uniquely in the fact that they experienced for the first time the end of the West. . . . they themselves, in their existence and work, became the end, each of them in a different way.¹⁶³

Heidegger rejects the then-current interpretation of both these thinkers,¹⁶⁴ looking to each of them as providing an indication of the tasks to which thinking must now attend. In the case of Nietzsche, this comes to mean, as Heidegger’s reading develops over the 1930s and into the 1940s, the articulation of nihilism as the essential problem of modernity, particularly as that is expressed in Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of god” and the recognition of the “will to power” as that which dominates modernity and is realized in the mode of disclosure associated with the technological—the mode of disclosure that Heidegger names das Gestell—“Enframing” or “the Framework.” In the case of Hölderlin, this means looking, not only to the first beginning of thinking among the Greeks, but, as I noted above, to another beginning for thinking (although not a “second” beginning)—namely, the beginning associated with the happening of the Event as such—and so to a thinking that is still to come, but of which Hölderlin is himself the harbinger. It also means the articulation of the proper dwelling place of human beings, the dwelling place that is the “there” of being (the “being-there” that is “the turning point in the turning of Ereignis”) and that is both a concealing or sheltering and a revealing or clearing. It is in returning to this dwelling-place, the place in which we already are and yet are not, that we come into the “being-there” that belongs to our “future humanness.”

In the postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger says of the difference between thinking and poetry that “[t]he thinker says being. The poet names the holy.”¹⁶⁵ In Nietzsche, Heidegger finds a saying of being, expressed in the ideas of the “death of god” and the “will to power,” that identifies the understanding of being that is determinative for human being as it is in modernity; in Hölderlin, Heidegger finds a naming of the holy as that realm in which human being always dwells, and yet in which, in modernity, human being has yet to find itself. In Hölderlin and Nietzsche, then, we find the two who point the way into Heidegger’s later thinking, just as they also point, in different ways, to the beginning—the “first” and the “other”—of all thinking. It is to Heidegger’s later thought, already begun in 1936, but not properly opened up until at least 1945-1946, that we must now turn.