1. “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 12 (GA [Gesamtausgabe] 13:84). Although first published in 1954, Heidegger notes that the lines were composed in 1947.
2. As I indicate in the discussion below, this “middle” period includes the period of the so-called Turning (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking that is usually taken to have occurred in 1930-1936. This “middle” period can thus be construed as actually comprising two periods: what is essentially a “transitional” period from 1930-1936 and a more developed period (in which the unpublished Contributions volume of 1936-1938 [GA 65] plays a key role) from 1936-1946. See my comments below, sec. 4.1, pp. 149-155.
3. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
4. See Casey, The Fate of Place, pp. 243ff; see also my review of Casey in “Remembering Place (Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place),” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2002), 92-100. To what extent Heidegger’s pathway should indeed be viewed as “indirect” seems to me a matter open to debate.
5. Fell, “Heidegger’s Mortals and Gods,” Research in Phenomenology 15 (1985), 29.
6. See Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault, and the Project of a Spatial History (London: Continuum, 2001), esp. pp. 1-7.
7. See Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Other recent works that are relevant include: James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and also Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias (London: Routledge, 1998). In Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1991), Adrian Del Caro takes a Heideggerian approach to Hölderlin himself (although a Heideggerian approach taken, notes Del Caro, “with more than a grain of salt,” Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being, p. 21).
8. Joseph Fell’s Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) was one of the first works to investigate the idea of place throughout Heidegger’s work, while Heidegger’s treatment of place is, as noted above, also dealt with in Casey’s The Fate of Place, as well as having a role, though not taken up in any detail, in Julian Young’s work referred to above—see his “Poets and Rivers: Heidegger on Hölderlin’s Der Ister,” Dialogue 28 (1999), 391-416, and “What is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World,” in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Modernity, and Authenticity—Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 187-204. It is notable, however, that most of the treatment of Heidegger on this topic takes space rather than place as the main theme of investigation. To some extent, this is true even of Stuart Elden’s Mapping the Present: Heidegger and Foucault on the Project of a Spatial History, even though Elden gives explicit recognition to a distinct concept of place (“Ort”) in Heidegger that stands apart from space and also from the notion of mere “location” (Platz)—see Mapping the Present, pp. 36-37. Didier Franck’s, Heidegger et le problème de l’éspace (Paris: Minuit, 1986) discusses the problem of spatiality in general, although with specific reference to Being and Time, while Alejandro Vallega, in Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2003), deals with aspects of Heidegger’s treatment of space as these relate to concepts of exile and alterity. Emil Kettering’s Nähe: Das Denken Martin Heideggers (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1987) addresses the idea of “nearness” as a central element in Heidegger’s thinking. Specific discussions of spatiality occur in: Yoko Arisaka, “Heidegger’s Theory of Space: A Critique of Dreyfus,” Inquiry 38 (1995), 455-467 and “Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time,” Philosophy Today 40 (1996), 36-46; Robert Frodeman, “Being and Space: A Re-Reading of Existential Spatiality in Being and Time,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23 (1992), 23-35; FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann, “Wahrheit-Zeit-Raum,” in Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), pp. 243-271; Maria Villela-Petit, “Heidegger’s Conception of Space,” in Christopher Macann (ed.), Critical Heidegger (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 134-157; and in Gjermund Wollan, “Heidegger’s Philosophy of Space and Place,” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-Norwegian Journal of Geography 57 (2003), 31-39. Heidegger’s later thinking, particularly in relation to the concept of dwelling (a concept that is clearly very closely tied to notions of space and place), has also been an important focus for a range of discussions in architecture (see the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz , especially his Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture [New York: Rizzoli, 1985]), as well as in “humanistic” geography (see, for instance, Edward Relph, “Geographical Experiences and Being-in-theWorld: The Phenomenological Origins of Geography,” in David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer [eds.], Dwelling, Place, and Experience: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World [Dordrecht: Nijhof, 1985], pp. 15-31).
9. It is this apparent gap in the literature that Place and Experience was intended to fill. Earlier works that make a case for the significance of place, although they tend not to provide any detailed analysis of the concept, include: Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (eds.), The Human Experience of Space and Place (London: Croom Helm, 1980); J. Nicolas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Random House, 1990); Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976); E. V. Walter, Placeways (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988); Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974); Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Even Casey’s work has often tended more toward a descriptive phenomenological approach rather than to an investigation of the way the concepts of place and space are themselves structured—see the exchange between Casey and myself in Philosophy and Geography 4 (2001), 225-240.
10. As I note in Place and Experience, p. 30n33, to some extent this is a feature even of the pioneering work of such place-sensitive writers as Yi-Fu Tuan.
11. This is exactly the claim made by David Harvey (who also figures in the discussion below): “Places, like space and time, are social constructs and have to be read and understood as such”—Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 324. Although I may be thought to be displaying a typically “philosophical” prejudice, I would suggest that the very idea of “social construct” that is invoked by Harvey here is highly problematic, all the more so when applied to notions such as place, space, and time. Are we to suppose that the “social” somehow stands outside of place, space, and time—undetermined by them, but determining of them? Indeed, the reification of the “social” that appears here, and its apparent prioritization over other concepts, threatens to turn the “social” into something fundamental and yet almost completely inexplicable.
12. In a review of Place and Experience in Mind 110 (2001), 789-792, Bruin Christensen seems to assume just such a view of place, and from it he infers the obvious falsity of the claim (advanced in Place and Experience) that place has any determining or constituting role in relation to self-identity. Although Christensen agrees that everything has to be “in” place, he claims that nothing significant follows from this in terms of the identity of that which is in place since places are constituted and determined by the entities located within those places, not the other way around. Yet not only does this ignore the explicitly holistic account of place and the relation between place and other elements that is advanced in Place and Experience (and that is also a key element in the argument that I develop in relation to Heidegger), but it also assumes a very specific understanding of place that is itself open to challenge.
13. Hence the title of the opening chapter of Place and Experience: “The Obscurity of Place.”
14. Although it should be noted that the general account of place that I argue can be found in Heidegger and that is also a feature of my own work will be inconsistent with any account that cannot allow for what I explain in sec. 5.2 below in terms of the “iridescence” of things—the possibility for things to be disclosed in multiple ways. Consequently, reductionist approaches and approaches that insist on the unique exclusivity of certain vocabularies or of certain descriptive or analytic schemata will turn out not to be compatible with the sort of topological or topographic approach that I elaborate here and which is also to be found in Place and Experience.
15. John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumour of the Hidden King (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 38. See also Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001), p. 188.
16. See especially his discussion in The Young Heidegger, chaps. 12-13, pp. 250ff.
17. Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 251.
18. See John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1978).
19. The topological character of philosophical thinking is not, I would claim, peculiar only to Western thought, but basic is to any attempt at a certain “fundamental” thinking and obtains irrespective of the cultural tradition in which such thinking occurs.
20. Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 7.
21. This is a point that seems to me to have been always implicit in my work on these topics. However, in trying to make sense of Heidegger’s own use of the term “transcendental” and the special role it plays in his thinking (something explored further in chapter 4), I have sometimes used the notion of the Transcendental as an idea that stands in tension with the topological—see, for instance, “From the Transcendental to the ‘Topological’: Heidegger on Ground, Unity, and Limit,” in Jeff Malpas (ed.), From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 75-99.
22. See Being and Time, H7, H152-153.
23. Being and Time H1, from Plato, Sophist 244a.
24. See “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Martin Heidegger Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 285 (GA 9:376): “By recalling the beginnings of that history in which Being unveiled itself in the thinking of the Greeks, it can be shown that the Greeks from early on experienced the Being of beings as the presence of what is present.”
25. On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 7 (Zur Sache des Denkens [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969], pp. 6-7).
26. “On the Question of Being,” trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks, p. 302 (GA 9:400).
27. Taylor Carman, for instance, argues that, in Being and Time at least, being is not identical with presence at all—see Taylor Carman, “On Being Social: A Reply to Olafson,” Inquiry 37 (1994), 203-223. Carman’s piece is, as its title indicates, a response to Frederick Olafson’s contrary claim in Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (New Haven: Yale, 1987), esp. pp. xvii-xviii. Olafson replies to Carman in “Individualism, Subjectivity, and Presence: A Response to Taylor Carman,” Inquiry 37 (1994), 331-337—see esp. pp. 333-334.
28. Olafson points out that one of the complications here is that this term is also used by Heidegger to refer to the Greek “ousia”—see Olafson, “Individualism, Subjectivity, and Presence,” 333.
29. On Time and Being, pp. 12-13 (Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 13-14).
30. Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 10.
31. Ibid., p. 12.
32. In one respect, treating “presence” as possibly referring to beings as well as to being might be taken to suggest an overlooking of the distinction between being and beings that is the “ontological difference,” since if being can be construed as presence, and presence can mean beings or being, then the possibility of misconstruing being in terms of beings has already been introduced. It seems to me, however, that this actually counts in favor of using “presence” in this broad fashion—not because it condones the forgetting of the ontological difference at issue (although that difference should not be too readily assumed even in Heidegger, as will become evident in chapters 4 and 5), but because it allows us to see how that forgetting might arise.
33. See Heidegger’s discussion of presence and “the present” in “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, pp. 11-12 (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 12): “the present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the sense of the now that the present as presence can in no way be determined in terms of the present as the now. The reverse would rather seem possible (cf. Being and Time, sec. 81). If such were the case, the present as presence and everything which belongs to such a present would have to be called real time.” Both “presence” and “the present” are being used equivocally here in a way that allows Heidegger to retain the insistence on the centrality of “presence” and “the present” in a way that seems compatible with the critique of “presence” and “the present” in Being and Time.
34. See, for instance, “Time and Being,” pp. 9-13 (Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 9-14).
35. See Being and Time (GA 2), H220-221. The appearance of this notion in Being and Time should itself indicate the way in which presence cannot be treated, even there, in the purely narrow sense of that “which is present in the present.”
36. It seems to me fundamentally mistaken, although an extremely widespread tendency, to view Being and Time as itself the expression of a subjectivist or idealist position. The way in which Heidegger’s analysis proceeds nevertheless lends itself to subjectivist or idealist interpretation, and so contains within it elements that can be seen to tend toward subjectivism and idealism. A work that already aims, from the beginning, to think “beyond” any simple distinction between subject and object, thus ends up, in a certain way, reinscribing that distinction (albeit it in a different form). For more on this issue, see the discussion in chapter 3, sec. 3.6 and also chapter 4, secs. 4.2 and 4.3.
37. A point to which van Buren gives particular emphasis in his discussion of the early Heidegger—see The Young Heidegger, esp. pp. 105-110, where it is discussed in relation to the use of analogy in Heidegger’s habilitation dissertation.
38. “Seminar in Le Thor 1968,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 19 (GA 15:302).
39. Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 60 (GA 51:71-72).
40. In my emphasis on the centrality of unity here, I am taking issue with James Phillips’s contrary emphasis in his, otherwise excellent, Heidegger’s Volk. Indeed, on this point, Phillips seems to me to misread both Heidegger and Aristotle. I will return to the issue of unity in sec. 2.2.
41. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 209.
42. Indeed, Heidegger is a frequent commentator on his own thinking, but those commentaries, while often instructive, can sometimes also mislead if they are not integrated with a broader understanding of Heidegger’s thinking as derived from the body of his writings as a whole.
43. Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” trans. Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo, in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 95 (GA 16:655).
44. The list of works that deal with this issue is already considerable, and it seems that it has not yet reached an end. Much of the English-speaking controversy was sparked by Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Although Farías’s work had appeared in French in 1987, it drew heavily on research already undertaken by Hugo Ott, but not available in book form until 1988. Ott’s Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988) appeared in English as Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allen Blunden (London: Harper Collins, 1993). As Julian Young points out, however, the basis for much of the case against Heidegger, namely his speeches during the 1930s, had already been compiled and published by Guido Schneeberger some years earlier as Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Suhr, 1962), although it provoked little interest at the time—see Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2n4. The most comprehensive and currently definitive source is Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, Gesamtausgabe 16 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000). Much of the original documentation relevant to this issue, as well as other material, is included in English in G. Neske and E. Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, trans. L. Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990), as well as in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
45. David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 209.
46. Ibid., p. 277. Although, see also Harvey’s later, and rather more nuanced discussion, in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 299-324.
47. Doreen Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner (eds.), Mapping the Futures (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 64, 67. Massey goes on to comment that “These arguments, then, highlight a number of ways in which a progressive concept of place might be developed. First of all, it is absolutely not static and in no way relates to the Heideggerian view of Space/Place as Being. If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not static, they are processes. One of the great one-liners in Marxist exchanges has for long been ‘ah, but capital is not a thing, it’s a process.’ Perhaps the same should be said also about places; that places are processes, too.”
48. It is not at all clear that there is any such incompatibility, moreover Heidegger’s later thinking is explicit in the way it thinks time and space together as “Zeit-Raum” (time-space)—see, for instance, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), p. 16 (GA 41:16).
49. In spite of her indication of the possibility of developing a more progressive concept of place than that which she finds in Heidegger, Massey’s view of place in the essay in which she discusses the Heideggerian concept seems generally rather negative. Elsewhere, however, she has advanced a much more positive conception—see for instance, her discussion in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 117-172—esp. her comments on pp. 119-123.
50. See Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 191-204.
51. Neil Leach, “The Dark Side of the Domus: The Redomestication of Central and Eastern Europe,” in Neil Leach (ed.), Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 151.
52. Ibid., p. 155.
53. Leach appears to assume, presumably on the basis of Heidegger’s own tendency to look to rural examples, that the concept of dwelling must indeed be tied to a rural paradigm that can have no relevance to the urban. There may be a question about how one dwells in an urban setting, but one cannot simply assume that such a mode of dwelling is ruled out from the start.
54. Leach does quote from Heidegger at one point (“The Dark Side of the Domus,” pp. 151-152), although it is significant that the quotation comes from the infamous Rectoral Address of 1933, “On the Self-Assertion of the German University,” rather than from any of the later writings.
55. Young draws attention to Heidegger’s complaint, in the Hölderlin lectures of 1934-1935, concerning the present “snivelling about people and blood and soil [Volkstum und Blut und Boden]”—Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Gesamtausgabe 39, p. 254; see Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, p. 12n3 (it is significant that such a comment should occur in these lectures since it is here that Heidegger first begins to articulate his thinking in relation to the notion of “earth” that is so important in his later thought). Young also notes criticism of the idea of Volk in texts from the late 1930s. James Phillips argues, however, that “Heidegger’s disillusionment with National Socialism is not a disillusionment with the notion of the “Volk” (Heidegger’s Volk, p. 3), but instead arises out of a deep incompatibility between National Socialism and the concept of the “people” on which Heidegger originally saw the movement as nevertheless attempting to draw.
56. This is clear in Young’s account of the “völkisch” politics that underlay Heidegger’s Nazi involvement (see Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, pp. 11-51), as well as in James Phillips’s detailed investigation in Heidegger’s Volk. For an approach that takes Heidegger’s thinking as nevertheless remaining compromised by a “dangerous commitment to autochthony,” see Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, quotation from p. 217.
57. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 143-161 (GA 7:145-164). This essay is itself the focus, however, for an important essay by J. Hillis Miller that does attempt to do more in the way of providing an argument for the politically dangerous character of Heidegger’s place-oriented thinking—see J. Hillis Miller, “Slipping Vaulting Crossing: Heidegger,” in Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 216-254.
58. There is another element here, however, that should be acknowledged: Leach, in particular (and there is sometimes an element of this in Massey), seems to argue that place-based thinking is out of kilter with the character of the contemporary world—in Leach’s case, with the impact of technology and globalization. I would argue, and the argument is indicated at various places in the discussion over the next few chapters, that such a claim rests on a misunderstanding concerning the nature both of place and of the contemporary world.
59. For instance, Leach’s claim that there have been such changes in the “ways in which we relate to the world” that “we must ask whether a concept that is so placespecific can any longer retain much authority” seems to me particularly contentious—and also surprisingly uncritical.
60. One might argue that those arguments often reduce to a form of argumentum ad hominem (“against the person”—an attempt to refute an idea on the basis of some fact about the person who advances that idea), or else as embodying a version of the genetic fallacy (an attempt to refute an idea based on the source or context out of which the idea comes). John van Buren, however, refers us to “the lengthy list of Heidegger’s tasteless and discriminatory acts before, during and after his Rectorship (combined ambiguously with acts of kindness and generosity) that has been compiled by Farías, Ott, Sheehan and others,” adding that “When conducted rightly, this historical research is not mere ad hominem argumentation, but shows within the workings of practical reason the logical consequences of the ideological tendencies in Heidegger’s ontology itself and alerts us to the need to criticise his ‘ideas’”—The Young Heidegger, p. 392. Whether there is an ad hominem element here does indeed depend on whether or not one can show Heidegger’s actions as “logical consequences” of his “ideas.” One of the ironies of this discussion is that so much emphasis seems to be placed on an implied consistency of action and idea by authors, and to some extent this is true of van Buren, who are elsewhere suspicious of the homogeneity and “unity” of thought as such. Independently of this issue, however, I think there are good reasons to suppose that the sort of “logical” demonstration that van Buren claims here is highly unlikely to be successful. Indeed, van Buren’s own comments are indicative of some of the difficulties. If the “lengthy list of Heidegger’s tasteless and discriminatory acts” are indeed “ambiguously combined” with “acts of kindness and generosity,” then we may well take the acknowledged inconsistency in Heidegger’s actions to cast doubt on the claim that there could be a consistency of the sort implied by talk of “logical consequence” between “actions” and “ideas.” Moreover, between just which ideas and which actions, we may ask, is such consistency supposed to obtain? And whichever ideas and actions are the focus here, why focus on those ideas and actions in disregard of others? Why should consistency in some cases, in the face of inconsistency in others, count as adequate to support the general claim that Heidegger’s discreditable actions are a logical consequence of Heidegger’s “ideas”?
61. A particularly interesting example of this strategy appears in Giorgio Agamben’s book, The Open. There Agamben discusses the work of the pioneering ethologist von Uexküll as well as Heidegger. Agamben writes of certain experimental studies by von Uexküll that they: “follow a few years after those by Paul Vidal de la Blanche on the relationship between populations and their environment (the Tableau de la géographie de la France is from 1903), and those of Friedrich Ratzel on the Lebensraum, the ‘vital space’ of peoples (the Politische Geographie is from 1897), which would profoundly revolutionize human geography of the twentieth century. And it is not impossible that the central thesis of Sein und Zeit on being-in-the-world (In-der-Weltsein) as the fundamental human structure can be read in some ways as a response to this problematic field, which at the beginning of the century essentially modified the traditional relationship between the living being and its environmentworld. As is well known, Ratzel’s theses, according to which all peoples are intimately linked to their vital space as their essential dimension, had a notable influence on Nazi geopolitics. This proximity is marked in a curious episode in Uexküll’s intellectual biography. In 1928, five years before the advent of Nazism, this very sober scientist writes a preface to Houston Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), today considered one of the precursors of Nazism”—Giogio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 42-43. The way in which Agamben combines together works and thinkers who, while superficially similar in their deployment of notions of place and environment, are also representative of quite different approaches, coupled with a mode of argument that depends on little more than juxtaposition and suggestion is quite startling. And although this style of argument is not unusual in discussion of these topics, it is nonetheless a style of argument that itself seems to depend upon some highly dubious rhetorical techniques. The suggestion of a connection between Heidegger and Ratzel, and thence also between a certain form of “geographically” oriented mode of thinking and Nazi race ideology, is pursued further by Troy Paddock in “Gedachtes Wohnen: Heidegger and Cultural Geography,” Philosophy and Geography 7 (2004), 237-251, and although Paddock’s discussion of the historical material at issue is rather more detailed than anything in Agamben, his argument does not advance the matter much further. Paddock seems to think that the key point of commonality between Ratzel and Heidegger is a geographic rather than geometric understanding of space (Raum), allied with an organicist, “völkisch” conservatism, and that this remained even in Heidegger’s late thinking, constituting a key point of affinity between Heidegger’s thought and “the volkish thought” that “helped to spawn National Socialism” (p. 248). My own view is that the truth of the matter is rather more complicated in relation, not only to Heidegger (as the work of scholars such as Phillips and Young would also suggest), or indeed to Ratzel (see, for instance, Mark Bassin, “Race contra Space: The Conflict between German Geopolitik and National Socialism,” Political Geography Quarterly 6 [1987], 115-134), but also to the concepts of space and place that are at issue here.
62. “Only a God Can Save Us,” p. 104 (GA 16:668). But see my comments below, p. 385n211.
63. As in his sometime use even of anti-semitic rhetoric—see the discussion in Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, pp. 39-40.
64. That all of these are to be found as elements in Heidegger’s political commitments during the 1930s is explicitly acknowledged by Young—see Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, pp. 11-51. Young’s account, however, is rather more moderate than that of many other critics—compare, for example, Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Philosophy and Nazism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
65. See Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, pp. 11-51.
66. For a detailed account of the entanglement between Heidegger’s Nazi commitments and his ideas concerning university reform, see Iain Thomson, Heidegger’s Ontotheology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
67. In this respect, the tendency to look to Heidegger’s account of historicality, particularly as given in sec. 74, of Being and Time, as the basis for his political involvement—a tendency that usually looks to Heidegger’s own comment, as reported by Karl Löwith, that “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit) was the basis of his, that is, Heidegger’s, political involvement (see Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986], reprinted in Neske and Kettering [eds.], Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, pp. 157-159).
68. Julian Young points to Being and Time, H384, to support the identification of “people,” as Heidegger uses it, with “community”—see Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 33n5. Certainly, while “Volk” may also have other connotations in Heidegger’s thinking at various times (and the use of the term during the Nazi period is, to say the least, problematic), this sense seems to capture best what is at issue in many places where the term occurs, for instance, in the Hölderlin lectures of 1934-1935.
69. See Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk, p. 3.
70. Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, “Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination,” in George L. Mosse (ed.), Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), pp. 65, 69, and 74; taken from Clauss, Die nordische Seele: Eine Einführung in die Rassenseelenkunde, 5th edn. (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns 1936), pp. 19ff.
71. Thus Leach comments that: “It can be seen that it is precisely in the context of an identity rooted to the soil that those groups not rooted to the soil become excluded. Traditionally, Jews and gypsies are both ‘wanderers,’ although each for different reasons: the gypsies largely by choice, the Jews mainly by necessity. Neither are rooted to the soil. The ‘wanderer’ does not fit within the concept of situatedness or rootedness to the soil and therefore does not fit within the philosophy of the heimat. . . . The ‘wanderer’ is therefore treated as the ‘other,’ the excluded one, and is perceived as a threat to the nation”—Neil Leach, “The Dark Side of the Domus,” pp. 152-153.
72. This marks an important point of difference between the racial psychology of such authors as Clauss, and of Nazi ideology, and the “geographical” or “environmental” determinism associated with, for instance, Friedrich Ratzel. In spite of the fact that is in Ratzel’s Politische Geographie (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1879) that the infamous notion of “Lebensraum” (Living-space) is first articulated (the notion might be thought to be implicit in Clauss’s claim that “every authentic racial stock is bound up with its space” since, presumably, if the racial stock is to develop and expand, so too must its space), Ratzel’s thinking seems to have diverged sharply from the ideas of such thinkers as Clauss, or of Nazi thinkers more generally, precisely in its rejection of the emphasis on race—on this see Mark Bassin, “Race contra Space: The Conflict between German Geopolitik and National Socialism,” as well as the brief discussion in David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 196-202.
73. Although it should be noted that one recent work that focuses on the idea of Heimat, Peter Blickle’s Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002), does indeed argue for the inherently exclusionary and reactionary character of the notion. However, in many ways, Blickle’s study appears to run against the general tone of much recent scholarship in this area. Thus, in her review of the book in Modern Language Review 99 (2004), pp. 1121-1122, Anne Fuchs claims that Blickle’s study “fails to engage with the complexity of ‘Heimat’ discourse which is neither intrinsically antirational and regressive nor utopian” (Fuchs, “Review of Blickle,” p. 1122).
74. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 212.
75. See William Rollins, “Heimat, Modernity, and Nation in the Early Heimatschütz movement,” in Jost Hermand and James Steakley (eds.), Heimat, Nation, Fatherland: The German Sense of Belonging (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 87-112; see also Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimschütz Movement 1904-1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
76. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, p. 212.
77. See Place and Experience, p. 120. The primacy of place is, of course, something common to many indigenous modes of thought—see, for instance, in relation to North American Indian culture, Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red (Golden, Colo.: North American Press, 1994) or Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), or, in an Australian context, Fred Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics Among Western Desert Aborigines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) or Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
78. “On the Essence and Concept of Φυ´σις,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, p. 190 (GA 9:248-249). See also “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 53 (GA 15:354).
79. In Der große Duden, 7, Etymologie (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1963), “Ort” is given the following gloss: “Spitze (bes. einer Waffe oder eines Werkzeugs).”
80. “Language in the Poem,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Herz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 159 (GA 12:33). Translation modified.
81. This understanding of boundedness recurs at a number of places in Heidegger’s thinking: see Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 154 (GA 7:156); Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 82 (GA 54:121); “On the Essence and Concept of Φυ´σις,” p. 206 (GA 9:269); “The Origin of the Work of Art—Appendix,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 53 (GA 5:71). It is interesting to note William Blattner drawing on just this distinction in his discussion of death as a “limitsituation” in Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 120.
82. In addition to the discussion here, especially chapter 5, see Place and Experience, pp. 33-34, 157-174.
83. Albert Hofstadter, in his translations of Heidegger’s later essays in Poetry, Language, Thought, particularly “Building Dwelling Thinking,” does not translate “Ort” as “place,” but rather as “location”—one can only assume that Hofstadter, not a native English speaker himself, was not sufficiently sensitive to the difference between these terms. This might be thought to be confirmed by the fact that he uses “place” as a translation for “Platz,” to which the English “place” is certainly etymologically related, but with respect to which there is much less semantic overlap than obtains between “place” and “Ort.”
84. See, for instance, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 82 (GA 53:101).
85. See, for instance, Otto Pöggeler’s discussion of topology in Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantics Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1989), pp. xv-xvi—Pöggeler notes, however, that this treatment of topology places the term “in a context which Heidegger himself did not use” (p. xvi), namely, the context of topic as it occurs in the rhetorical tradition stemming, especially, from Vico. See also Pöggeler, “Metaphysics and Topology of Being in Heidegger,” in Man and World 8 (1975), 3-27.
86. See “On the Question of Being,” p. 291 (GA 9:385)—the sense of “Erörterung” as “situating” or “locating” is explicitly noted by the translators, Pathmarks, p. 375n2.
87. Being and Time, H102.
88. See their note on “Gegend” in Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, p. 136n1.
89. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” pp. 41, 47 (GA 15:335, 344): “Hence the expression topology of be-ing [Topologie des Seyns], which, for example, one finds in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens; also see the text edited by Franz Larese: ‘Die Kunst und der Raum’” (p. 41). The phrase “topology of being” itself occurs only once in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Gesamtausgabe 13; for the full reference, see n. 65 in chap. 4) and, although the volume also contains “Die Kunst und der Raum,” that text does not itself contain the phrase at issue. Presumably the reference to the latter text is indicative of the way that text exemplifies or is a meditation upon what is at issue in such a topology.
90. “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 12 (GA 13:84).
91. “On the Question of Being,” pp. 311-312 (GA 9:412). Here Heidegger talks of the need for a “topography of nihilism” to be preceded by a “topology: a discussion locating that locale which gathers being and nothing into their essence, determines the essence of nihilism, and thus lets us recognize those paths on which the ways towards a possible overcoming of nihilism emerge.”
92. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 47 (GA 15:344).
93. Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, pp. 232, 238 (pp. 287 and 294 in the German edition).
94. See Place and Experience, pp. 40-41. See also my comments in “Place and Topography: Responding to Cameron and Stefanovic,” Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology 15 (2004), 8-10.
95. See Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001), 183-202.
96. Often the ideal of philosophical “precision” seems to depend more on a general willingness to ignore the equivocity of key terms and to operate as if the terms in question could indeed be pinned down to a limited and clear set of meanings. Yet, in fact, philosophical thinking always depends on a certain “equivocity” or “indeterminacy” of meaning even while it presents itself in terms of the “precision” and “clarity” of its terms and concepts.
97. See, for instance, J. Hillis Miller, “Slipping Vaulting Crossing,” p. 229.
98. Again, see Miller, “Slipping Vaulting Crossing.”
99. See Heidegger’s comments in “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 63 (GA 15:370). 100. “Anaximander’s Saying,” in Off the Beaten Track, p. 247 (GA 5:328).
101. “The reference in Being and Time (H54) to ‘being-in’ as ‘dwelling’ is no mere etymological play. The same reference in the 1936 essay on Hölderlin’s word, ‘Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells upon this earth,’ is not the adornment of a thinking that rescues itself from science by means of poetry. The talk about the house of being is not the transfer of the image ‘house’ onto being”—“Letter on ‘Humanism,’” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, p. 272 (GA 9:358).
102. A comment originally made in conversation with Marcelo Stamm. I have asked Henrich about the term myself, and while he could not recall using “irisieren” in this way in print, he confirmed the idea as applicable in certain respects to his own thought, as well as having, in his view, a broader philosophical significance. The image that he used to illustrate the iridescence at issue was the sheen of oil on water. Henrich also added that, in his view, Heidegger thought that the terms of Greek philosophy were especially “iridescent” in this way.
103. See Heidegger, Being and Time, H8—“eine merkwürdige ‘Rück-oder Vorbezogenheit.’”
1. From a draft appended to the elegy “Bread and Wine,” in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke: Historische-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Norbert von Hellingrath, Friedrich Seebass, and Ludwig von Pigenot (Berlin: Propylaen, 1923, 2nd ed.), 4, p. 323; cited by Heidegger in “Remembrance,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 152 (GA 4:130).
2. See my “Beginning in Wonder,” in N. Kompridis (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 282-298; also Place and Experience, pp. 196-197.
3. August 19, 1921, quoted by Kisiel in The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 78; original German text in Dietrich Pappenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (eds.), Zur philosophischen Aktualität Martin Heideggers, vol. 2, Im Gespräch der Zeit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), pp. 27-32.
4. Much of the discussion in chapters 2-4 of Place and Experience could be construed as an investigation of what concrete situatedness actually involves—the claim being that it involves spatiality and temporality, an objective world and a subjective self— that it involves, in short, a sense of place.
5. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 37.
6. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 28 (GA 61:35).
7. In the Kantbuch of 1929, Heidegger challenges Kant’s claim that this fourth question underlies the other three—see Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 150-153 (GA 3:214-218). This is not because he rejects the ontological questionability that is at issue here, but because he takes issue with the specific focus on the human. The underlying question concerns something more basic than our “humanity” as usually understood—see, for instance, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” pp. 262-263 (GA 9:345).
8. Although it is already present quite early on, see for instance, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 11E (dual English-German ed.).
9. Ibid., p. 22E.
10. Being and Time (GA 2), H7.
11. See The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 74-167 (GA 29/30:111-249); “What Is Metaphysics?” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, p. 87 (GA 9:110); and Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 2 (GA 40:3).
12. See Being and Time (GA 2), H184-191, H341-346; also “What Is Metaphysics?” pp. 88-93 (GA 9:111-116).
13. See “What Is Metaphysics?” pp. 95-96 (GA 9:121); and also Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 133-156 (GA 45:153-180).
14. “Blik der Sonne, du schönster, der / Dem siebenthorigen Thebe / Seit langem scheint,” cited from Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles, Antigone, 5.100ff., in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 63 (GA 56/57:74). It is worth noting here the way in which wonder seems to be contrasted with the scientific attitude. In general, Heidegger seems to view wonder as always tied to an experience of the world that he takes to be ontologically more basic than that of scientific inquiry (see, for instance, the discussion of wonder in Basic Questions of Philosophy, pp. 133-156 [GA 45:153-180]).
15. From the lecture course given in the War Emergency Semester (“Kriegsnotsemester”) of 1919, “Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem,” as given in the transcript from Oscar Becker and cited by Kisiel in The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” p. 17; for the German text, see Kisiel, “Das Kriegsnotsemester 1919: Heideggers Durchbruch in die Hermeneutische Phänomenologie,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 99 (1992), 105-122, esp. pp. 106ff. An excerpt from the firsthand transcript of this lecture by Franz Josef Brecht is included in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, pp. 187-188.
16. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, p. 57 (GA 61:76).
17. See van Buren, The Young Heidegger, pp. 264ff., 291-294.
18. “The linguistic precedents for Heidegger’s use of the adjective ‘own’ (eigen) for his concept of a personal Er-eignis, and for his notions of ‘mineness’ and eigentlich (own-ish, authentic) are to be found not in the troubled waters of subjectivism and decisionism, but rather in Scotist ‘haccaeity,’ Eckhartian life that lives ‘out of its own,’ Schleiermachean ‘ownness,’ and the ‘ownmost own’ of the ‘individuity’ that Natorp finds in the mystical tradition”—John van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 317.
19. Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 126 (GA 15:204). See Elden, Mapping the Present, p. 16n28.
20. Das Ereignis, Gesamtausgabe 71 (in preparation) ms. 121.18, cited by Sheehan in “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” p. 193.
21. Zollikon Seminars, ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 120 (Zollikoner Seminare, ed. Medard Boss [Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994], pp. 156-157).
22. Stuart Elden argues, for instance, that to interpret terms such as “Dasein” or “Inder-Welt-Sein” in terms that are taken primarily to connote notions of place or space is “too simplistic, and in certain respects inaccurate”—Mapping the Present, p. 16. Although it would clearly be a mistake to emphasize such connotations in ways that overlooked the existential sense that is clearly intended by Heidegger, it would also be a mistake to prioritize the existential over the “topological”—indeed part of what is at issue in Heidegger’s early thinking is how to make sense of the topological origins of his thinking in the light of the existential fashion in which that thinking develops. In the end, the topological turns out to be more basic than the existential (the existential turns out, in fact, to be tied to the problematic notion of “transcendence” that is at the heart of Heidegger’s rethinking of the framework of Being and Time—see the discussion in sec. 4.2 below).
23. See the comment in the introduction to “What Is Metaphysics?,” p. 283 (GA 9:373), which figures at the head of chapter 4 below.
24. Heraclitus Seminar, p. 126 (GA 15:204).
25. Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” p. 193.
26. Inasmuch as it can be construed as emphasizing the “there” as a mode of being—“being the there.” One might also suggest that there is a further set of alternatives available here that would follow from the translation of “Da” by “here” rather than “there.” I have not given this explicit consideration above, for a number of reasons, but principally because it lacks the connotations associated with “being there” and is rather more strongly associated with a sense of immediate presence (“here, now”). In any case, neither “being-here” nor “here-being” have been much employed in the existing literature as translations for “Dasein.” It should also be noted that one could translate “Dasein” simply as “existence,” as in Elden, but to do so would obscure the topological connections at issue without any obvious compensatory advantage—one of the crucial points here is that “existence” is itself topological.
27. Being There (1979), starring Peter Sellers, directed by Hal Ashby, screenplay (from his novel) by Jerzy Kosinski.
28. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe 58 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992), pp. 80ff.
29. See Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” p. 27.
30. Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 24 (GA 63:29). The phrase “in seinem jeweiligen ‘Da’” is difficult to render into simple and fluent English. I have chosen to use “in its own lingering ‘there’” since it gives more emphasis to the “there” and yet also conveys a sense of the way in which that “there” also carries a certain “while” (it lingers) without it being the case that the “there” can somehow be separated from its “while.” See also p. 5 (GA 63:7): “‘Facticity’ is the designation we will use for the character of the being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Dasein. More precisely, this expression means: in each case ‘this’ Dasein in its being-there for a while at the particular time [jeweilig] ...insofar as it is, in the character of its being, ‘there’ in the manner of be-ing.”
31. Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 69 (GA 63:90).
32. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, pp. 59-60 (GA 56/57:71).
33. Being and Time, H163-164.
34. Ibid., H164.
35. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 61 (GA 56/57:72-73).
36. John van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 251.
37. Wittgensetein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), proposition 1. See Heidegger’s reference to (and apparent misquoting of) Wittgenstein on this point in “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 35 (GA 15:327).
38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. ix.
39. Thus, as Julian Young more directly puts matters: “when he [Heidegger] represents himself as ‘after philosophy’ he is really only representing himself as ‘after bad philosophy’”—Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 2.
40. See my discussion in “From the Transcendental to the ‘Topological,’” esp. pp. 75-79.
41. See Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 130: “Whence, in Heidegger’s discourse, the dominance of an entire metaphysics of proximity, of simple and immediate presence, a metaphorics associating the proximity of Being, with the values of neighbouring, shelter, house, service, guard, voice and listening.”
42. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 125.
43. Basic Concepts, p. 78 (GA 51:92-93).
44. See also Dominique Janicaud, “Presence and Appropriation,” Research in Phenomenology 8 (1978), esp. 73.
45. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 63 (GA 56/57:75).
46. “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 174 (GA 56/57:206).
47. The hyphenation draws attention to the way in which “eigen” (own) seems itself to be a component of “ereignen.”
48. In Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” pp. 46, 329, and 458, and van Buren, The Young Heidegger, esp. pp. 270-294.
49. See especially Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, dual English/German ed.).
50. “The Doctine of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus,” in Frühe Schriften, Gesamtausgabe 1 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978); see also the discussion in van Buren, The Young Heidegger, pp. 108-112.
51. For a different approach to the unity at issue here, one pursued through a discussion of Proust, see Place and Experience, chap. 7.
52. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 26 (GA 40:26). See also Heidegger’s comment in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 221: “To philosophise means to exist from ground” (GA 26:285).
53. See Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 57.
54. Ibid., p. 38.
55. Ibid., pp. 38ff.
56. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, p. 115 (Zollikoner Seminare, p. 150).
57. The sort of “dependence” at issue here is one according to which a priority is established between two structures such that the one structure is dependent upon the other but not the reverse. Such derivation (which I refer to below as “hierarchical dependence”) is a form of grounding, but it is a very specific form. It may sometimes take the form of a reduction (indeed, it could be argued that all reductions are derivations of this sort in that they aim at showing a certain one-way dependence as obtaining between certain entities, processes, structures, or whatever is at issue), but not all such derivations are reductive (or at least, not all are intended to be so). In Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to “interpret” situatedness—the “there” of being-there—in terms of time, and so to exhibit the one-way dependence of the “there” on temporality, but this is not seen by Heidegger as a reduction of one to the other. For more on this, see sec. 3.5.
1. “Art and Space,” trans. Charles Sietert, Man and World 6 (1973), p. 4 (GA 13:205).
2. Heidegger does not, of course, acknowledge any connection here, but this is not unusual. Moreover, in his System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling is explicit in giving priority to time over space, treating time as itself tied to the activity of the self—an idea that also has its parallels in Heidegger. See the discussion in Friedrich Kümmerl, Über den Begriff der Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), pp. 46-47.
3. Being and Time (GA 2), H1.
4. See “Time and Being,” p. 23 (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 24); see also What Is a Thing? pp. 16-17 (GA 41:16-17). The attempted derivation, discussed further below, occurs in sec. 70 of Being and Time. Yoko Arisaka claims, however, that the arguments set out in sec. 70 do not address such a derivation at all: “The concern in this section is whether temporality founds spatiality, in the sense that temporality is the basis for having temporality”—see Yoko Arisaka, “Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time,” Philosophy Today 40 (1996), 42-43n3. I can find no evidence for a clear distinction in Heidegger between “derivation” and “foundation,” although, as will be evident in sec. 3.5 below, I do think Heidegger is implicitly committed to a distinction between the “derivation” associated with spatiality and ordinary temporality, and the “derivation” of care from originary temporality. Such a distinction could be put in terms of one between “derivation” on the one hand and “foundation” on the other, except that every “derivation” is surely also a mode of “foundation.”
5. Heidegger, Being and Time (GA 2), H54.
6. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 157-158 (GA 20:211-212).
7. The connection, however, is noted by Edward Casey in his The Fate of Place, p. 245, as well as by Alejandro Vallega in Heidegger and the Issue of Space, pp. 44ff. Both Casey and Vallega provide extended discussions of the Aristotelian view— Vallega does so in connection with Plato as well as Heidegger, while, in Casey, the Aristotelian view, along with its immediate successors, is explored as part of his more general investigation of the philosophical history of place (see chapters 3 and 4 of The Fate of Place, pp. 50-102).
8. See my discussion in “Kategoriai and the Unity of Being,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy (new serie), 4 (1990), 13-36.
9. See Physics, 208a27-31.
10. Physics, 208a29-31.
11. See Plato’s “Sophist,” trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 73 (GA 19:105-106).
12. Aristotle, Physics, 212a7, quoted by Heidegger in Plato’s “Sophist,” p. 75 (GA 19:108).
13. Aristotle, Physics IV, 5, 212a20, in Aristotle’s Physics Books III and IV, trans. Edward Hussey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Elsewhere Aristotle presents the same idea in slightly different form. Place is “the limit of the surrounding body, at which it is in contact with that which is surrounded” (212a36).
14. Consequently the world does not have a place since “there is nothing besides the universe [to pan] and the sum of things, nothing which is outside the universe; and this is why everything is in the world [ouranos]. (For the world is (perhaps) the universe). The place [of changeable body] is not the world but a part of the world,” Physics IV, 212a31.
15. Being and Time (GA 2), H101.
16. Ibid.
17. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 2, secs. 10, 13, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 227—for the French, see Les Principes de la Philosophie de René Descartes, in vres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, vol. 9 (Paris: J. Vrin., n.d.), pp. 68-69.
18. “Into a certain box we can place a definite number of grains of rice or of cherries, etc. It is here a question of a property of the material object ‘box,’ which property must be considered ‘real’ in the same sense as the box itself. One can call this property the ‘space’ of the box. There may be other boxes which in this sense have an equally large ‘space.’ This concept ‘space’ thus achieves a meaning which is freed from any connection with a particular material object. In this way by a natural extension of ‘box space’ one can arrive at the concept of an independent (absolute) space, unlimited in extent, in which all material objects are contained,” Albert Einstein, Foreword to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. xiii. The modern conception of absolute space that Einstein discusses here is, of course, one that is ultimately abandoned by physics in favor of a relativistic conception. See Einstein’s brief comments on this in the Foreword to Jammer, Concepts of Space, p. xv.
19. See Aristotle, Physics, IV, 2.209b6-13: “If we regard the place as the interval of the magnitude, it is the matter. For this is different from the magnitude: it is what is contained and defined by the form, as by a bounding plane. Matter or the indeterminate is of this nature; when the boundary and attributes of a sphere are abstracted, nothing but the matter is left. This is why Plato in the Timaeus says matter and space are the same; for the ‘participant’ (i.e., receptacle) and space are identical.” The concept of matter that is employed here is of matter as pure mathematical extension—pure dimensionality. Such a concept of matter should not be confused with the idea of matter as that out of which something is formed, notwithstanding Plato’s own use of such an analogy in the Timaeus—see Henry Mendell, “Topoi on Topos: The Development of Aristotle’s Concept of Place,” Phronesis 32 (1987), 213, 213-214n19.
20. See Timaeus, 49—see also the detailed discussion of this and the surrounding text in F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a Running Commentary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 177ff.
21. Although it seems that Aristotle did once hold a more “Platonic” view of place or space. See Categories 6—see also Mendell, “Topoi on Topos,” esp. pp. 208-210; H. R. King, “Aristotle’s Theory of Topos,” Classical Quarterly 44 (1950), 76-96, esp. 87-88; and J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 93. It is notable that in the Aristotelian discussions no clear distinction emerges between topos and chora.
22. See Physics, 208a30.
23. See Mendel, “Topoi on Topos.”
24. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 69 (GA 40:70).
25. Ibid., p. 70 (GA 40:71).
26. Being and Time (GA 2), H54.
27. I have avoided the use of “subjective” to refer to “existential” spatiality in contrast with “objective” spatiality. There is, however, an ambiguity in Heidegger’s treatment of existential spatiality that does seem to tend in this direction. See the discussion of existential spatiality in sec. 3.3, as well as the discussion of objective and “bodily” spatiality in sec. 3.6.
28. Being and Time (GA 2), H55.
29. Ibid.
30. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 72 (GA 56/57:86). Heidegger adds “Analogue to the time-phenomenon.”
31. Being and Time (GA 2), H54. Notice the way in which corporeality is, in this passage, deemphasized.
32. Ibid., H368. This passage goes on “In existing, it has already made room for its own leeway. It determines its own location in such a manner that it comes back from the space it has made room for to the ‘place’ which it has reserved” (Existierend hat es sich je schon einen Spielraum eingeräumt. Es bestimmt je seinen eigenen Ort so, daß es aus dem eingeräumten Raum auf den “Platz” zurrückkommt, den es belegt hat). Here we find “Raum,” “Platz,” and “Ort,” as well as “Spielraum” (translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “leeway”) and “einräumen” closely packed together. Although the passage also seems to imply a distinction between space and place, between “Raum” and “Platz/Ort,” it nevertheless appears to treat “Platz/Ort” still in terms of simple location.
33. See chapter 5, sec. 5.3 below.
34. Being and Time (GA 2), H54. The original German reads: “‘in’ stammt von innan-, wohnen, habitare, sich aufhalten; ‘an’ bedeutet: ich bin gewohnt, vertraut mit, ich pflege etwas; es hat die Bedeutung von colo im Sinne von habito und diligo. Dieses Seiende, dem das In-Sein in dieser Bedeutung zugehört, kennzeichneten wir als das Seiende, das ich je selbst bin. Der Ausdruck ‘bin’ hängt zusammen mit ‘bei’; ‘ich bin’ besagt wiederum: ich wohne, halte mich auf bei . . . der Welt, als dem so und so Vertrauten. Sein als Infinitiv des ‘ich bin,’ d. h. als Existenzial verstanden, bedeutet wohnen bei . . . , vertraut sein mit. . . . In-Sein ist demnach der formale existenziale Ausdruck des Seins des Daseins, das die wesenhafte Verfassung des In-derWelt-seins hat.” Macquarrie and Robinson note that this passage has its source in Grimm’s Kleinere Schriften vol. 7, pp. 247ff. They also point out that it is unclear whether the reference to “an” in this passage is to “the preposition ‘an’ (which corresponds in some of its usages to the English ‘at,’ and which he [Heidegger] has just used in remarking that the water and the glass are both at a location), or rather ...the preterite ‘an’ of innan,” Being and Time (GA 2), p. 80n2.
35. Being and Time (GA 2), H172-173. It is worth noting the slight oddity or tension suggested by talk of a mode of being-there in which being-there “is everywhere and nowhere” (an oddity that may well be obscured in English by the retention of the German “Dasein”).
36. See Kettering, Nähe: Das Denken Martin Heideggers, in which “nearness” is taken as a central concept through which to approach Heidegger’s thinking.
37. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 43.
38. Ibid., p. 45.
39. Ibid., p. 42.
40. Ibid., p. 128.
41. Notice that this ought to be seen as leaving open the possibility that objective space may still have a role to play as part of the structure of existential spatiality— what is ruled out is the idea of objective spatiality as itself sufficient as the basis for an understanding of place or situatedness. One of the problems with Heidegger’s account would seem to be a tendency, at least in his early thinking, to simply oppose objective space to the “space” of situatedness as if each stood completely outside of and apart from the other. My claim, developed in Place and Experience, as well as in the discussion in sec. 3.6, is that objective space turns out already to be present in the very structure of place. Place thus turns out to include within it a rich and complex spatial structure.
42. Being and Time (GA 2), H66.
43. Ibid., H56.
44. Ibid., H101.
45. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 129.
46. Of course, as soon as one rejects the idea that one can completely separate objective from existential spatiality, then the dilemma dissolves. That has been more or less my own strategy. Thus although I do distinguish, in Place and Experience, between different senses of spatiality, including what I there called “objective” and “subjective” spatiality, I also insist that these senses cannot be construed as independent of one another nor as independent of the concept of place as such. I develop much the same approach here in sec. 3.6.
47. The distinction between “spatiality” and “space” might be thought to provide an obvious way to resolve the difficulty here. Heidegger, we might say, is talking about different modes of spatiality, not different spaces—there can be only one space, but spatiality can indeed be multiple. But then the question arises as to how we are to understand the space that is at issue here?
48. Being and Time (GA 2), H66.
49. Ibid., H56.
50. Ibid., H62.
51. Although the analysis of equipmentality is first set out in secs. 15ff., that this analysis is directly related to the account of existential spatiality is clearly indicated by the fact that the discussion that is headed “Space and Dasein’s Spatiality” (sec. 24—H110ff.) begins with the analysis of the spatiality associated with equipmentality.
52. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 163-164 (GA 24:233).
53. Being and Time (GA 2), H103-104.
54. See Being and Time (GA 2), H68-70—“toward which” is “Wozu,” in the German and “in-order-to,” “Um-zu.”
55. The fact that the same configuration of characters (for instance “gift”) may figure in more than one language with possibly different meanings in those languages (in English “gift” means “something given”; in German it means “poison”) does not undermine the point at issue here. The identity of a word depends, not merely on the characters of which it is composed, but the language to which it belongs (so the English “gift” is a different word from the German “Gift”).
56. See Being and Time (GA 2), division 1, chapter 4, H113ff.
57. Being and Time (GA 2), H117-118.
58. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, p. 239 (GA 20:329).
59. The connection between sociality and spatiality, and, more importantly, between sociality and a notion of spatiality that goes beyond the spatiality of the individual, is an important issue in exploring the role of objective spatiality; see sec. 3.6 below.
60. On this point, see also my “Space and Sociality,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (1997), pp. 53-79.
61. See especially Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
62. What is inauthentic, of course, is only that mode of “understanding” that construes being-there purely or primarily in terms of its “public” mode of being—inasmuch as being-there has being-with-others as part of its own being, so being-there is “authentically” social.
63. Being and Time (GA 2), H126.
64. See Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, pp. x-xi. Logically, it would seem that the best pairing of terms may be “dis-tance” (referring to the separation of a thing from out of an encompassing background) and directionality (referring to the grasp of the equipmental structure in which something belongs). The drawback of using “orientation” to refer to the second of these is only that “orientation” could easily be taken to cover both “dis-tance” and “directionality,” whereas it seems important to understand that Heidegger sees two complementary components at work here. I have, however, chosen to remain with Dreyfus’s terminology for the sake of simplicity.
65. Being and Time (GA 2), H111.
66. Ibid.
67. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, p. 129.
68. Ibid., p. 132.
69. Ibid., pp. 131-136.
70. See Arisaka, “Heidegger’s Theory of Space: A Critique of Dreyfus.” Unfortunately Arisaka’s account offers little in the way of an illumination of the issues at stake here. She emphasizes that “the key to understanding Heidegger’s theory of space is his attempt to redescribe spatial experience without presupposing objective space” (“Heidegger’s Theory of Space,” p. 464), but this is really only to characterize the problem as it arises within the Heideggerian framework rather than offer an indication of its manner of resolution—it also seems not to include any recognition of the problematic character of such an attempt. In fact, Arisaka’s main aim here seems less to explore the problem of spatiality as such than to make use of that problem as a means to advance Frederick Olafson’s existential reading of Being and Time against that of Dreyfus’s.
71. This seems to me an important point in general (it is a point frequently overlooked), but especially important in discussion of Heidegger since his own understanding of the question of being as one that always involves the being of questionability, and so of the one who questions, means that some notion of the “subject” (though invariably understood in terms other than those of “subjectivity” as such) is always an element in Heidegger’s understanding of being. However, the fact that some notion of “subjectivity,” or of human being, may be taken to be involved here does not, of itself, gives rise to any subjectivism—whether it does or not depends on just what role such “subjectivity” is seen to play here. Subjectivism implies a grounding in the subject, rather than in any other structure, and that means that an account that takes the grounding structure to be one that encompasses the “subject,” along with other mutually determined elements, is not, as such, subjective.
72. William Blattner sees Heidegger’s analysis of temporality as itself comprising a similar sequence of dependence relations: “originary time . . . explains ordinary time. ...[this] explanatory dependence is in fact a chain of dependencies: ordinary time (the ticking away of purely quantitative moments) depends on world-time (the succession of qualitatively determinate Nows), whose core phenomenon is in turn the pragmatic Now (the Now that aims us into the purposive future by relying on the given past), which finally in turn depends on originary temporality”—Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 28.
73. Being and Time (GA 2), H367.
74. Ibid., H132-133.
75. Ibid., H220. Note the use of the term “equiprimordial” (gleichursprünglich)—a term I discuss in more detail in sec. 3.5.
76. See Being and Time (GA 2), H219.
77. Ibid., H160—“The fundamental existentialia which constitute the Being-there of the ‘there,’ the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world, are states of mind [affectedness] and understanding.”
78. See Being and Time (GA 2), H145.
79. Thus “Dasein is an entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that being. In saying this, we are calling attention to the formal concept of existence” (Being and Time, H52-53).
80. Affectedness actually comes first in Heidegger’s explication of the structure at issue here. But this reflects no ontological priority and is merely a consequence of the fact that such a thing as “mood” is “ontically the most familiar and everyday sort of thing” (Being and Time [GA 2], H134).
81. Being and Time [GA 2], H161.
82. Ibid.: “The way in which discourse gets expressed is language.” Heidegger also tells us that “the existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse” (ibid., H160-161). The exact relation between language and discourse is not at all clear— see, for instance, Charles Guignon’s discussion of the place of language in Being and Time in Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), sec. 9.
83. Heidegger first characterizes “falling” as one of the fundamental ontological characteristics of being-there at Being and Time (GA 2), H191—“The fundamental ontological characteristics of [being-in-the-world] are existentiality, facticity and Being-fallen [Verfallensein]”—but he sometimes leaves falling out of this list of fundamental characteristics altogether (as in the passage quoted above from H220), and sometimes it seems as if falling merely designates an inauthentic mode of understanding. Clearly, however, if being-there is indeed inevitably prone to falling in the way Heidegger claims (see the discussion in sec. 38), then falling must be an ontologically primitive characteristic of the being of being-there. Indeed, this seems to be the import of the discussion of falling at H179-180 in which Heidegger considers that falling might count as evidence against the existentiality of being-there, arguing that it rather constitutes evidence in favor of such existentiality and concluding that “Falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself” (Being and Time [GA 2], H179).
84. See Being and Time (GA 2), H193.
85. Ibid., H12, H191.
86. Ibid., H12.
87. Ibid., H191-192.
88. Ibid., H192.
89. Ibid.
90. There is an important issue as to whether the originary temporality that is at stake here is to be identified with “authentic” temporality, but it is not something that directly affects my argument, and so I have left it to one side. In the discussion below, however, I do draw on the work of William Blattner, who argues for an understanding of originary temporality as distinct from authentic temporality—see Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 98-102. In fact, I think the balance of evidence supports Blattner’s reading here.
91. Being and Time (GA 2), H264.
92. Ibid., H299: “The Situation is the ‘there’ which is disclosed in resoluteness—the ‘there’ at which the entity is.”
93. See Being and Time (GA 2), H325—note the translators’ note in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation at p. 372n3.
94. Heidegger distinguishes “pastness,” or the character of having “gone by” (Vergangenheit), from “having been” (Gewesenheit), largely, it seems, to avoid the sense of sequentiality that may be connoted by having “gone by.” Heidegger thus uses “pastness” (Vergangenheit) to refer only to the past in this sense of “bygone” and “having been” (Gewesenheit) to refer to the past as it belongs to originary temporality.
95. Being and Time (GA 2), H326.
96. Ibid. The entire structure is summarized by Heidegger as follows: “The ‘aheadof-itself’ is grounded in the future. In the ‘Being-already-in . . .’ the character of ‘having been’ is made known. ‘Being-alongside . . .’ becomes possible in making present”—Being and Time (GA 2), H327.
97. Ibid., H346: “Just as understanding is made possible by the future, and moods are made possible by having been, the third constitutive item in the structure of care—namely, falling—has its existential meaning in the present”; see also H328.
98. Ibid., H328.
99. Ibid., H350.
100. Ibid., H327.
101. Ibid., H329-331. This is a point that William Blattner also stresses in relation to temporality’s nonsuccessive character: “Originary temporality is finite simply insofar as it is not successive”—Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, p. 121; see also pp. 89ff.
102. Being and Time (GA 2), H379.
103. Parmenides, pp. 140-141 (GA 54:209-210); see also (from 1941) Basic Concepts, ´Πος, to the place where each respective being belongs.”
104. Heidegger distinguishes, in fact, between a number of different temporal structures: originary time (which is itself unified in the temporalizing of time in and through the temporal ecstases); “world time” (Weltzeit), which occupies a position analogous to that of the structure of spatiality as given in existential and equipmental space; and ordinary time, which is the leveled-out time that can be followed according to the clock—the time that is closest to objective spatiality. Indeed, just as ordinary time is a sequence of identical “nows,” so one might think of objective space as a simultaneity of identical “heres.”
105. The various features of ordinary temporality that Heidegger identifies as datability, spannedness, significance, and publicness (see Being and Time [GA 2], H406-411) are each explained on the basis of this leveled-down structure. This is, of course, a very summary presentation of a much more complex argument, but to go into the details of Heidegger’s analysis would take us rather too far from the main focus of the discussion here. For a detailed analysis, see Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, chapter 3, esp. pp. 164-178.
106. The entire chapter is titled “Temporality and Within-Time-Ness as the Source of the Ordinary Conception of Temporality,” although the last two sections, secs. 82-83, are more general, with sec. 82 being a comparison with Hegel’s account of temporality.
107. Being and Time (GA 2), H367.
108. Ibid.
109. See pp. 56-63 above.
110. Being and Time (GA 2), H367.
111. Ibid., sec. 70, H368-369. Note the appearance of “equiprimordiality” to describe the relation between “directional awaiting of a region” and “bringingclose.”
112. This means that my own abilities will be relevant here just as much as the character of the tools and the workshop as such—if I lack the capacities to use some tool, then the way in which I will relate to the region in which that tool is located, and so the associated spatiality, will differ from the way in which someone with that capacity will so relate, and from the spatiality that emerges for them.
113. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, pp. 46, 48.
114. See Place and Experience, pp. 165-173.
115. See Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 152-158.
116. As I indicated in n. 4, p. 336 above, I therefore disagree with what seems to be the implication of Yoko Arisaka’s account that there is a distinction between “derivation” and “foundation” that can clearly be discerned in Being and Time, although there is a distinction, not obviously made by Heidegger, that can be made between those notions, but which is nonetheless somewhat different from that made by Arisaka.
117. See Being and Time (GA 2), H367-369.
118. Ibid., H329, H337, H340; see also the discussion of equiprimordiality below.
119. See Being and Time (GA 2), H331, where Heidegger describes “infinite time” as “derived” (abgeleitete) and Being and Time (GA 2), H329, where he talks of “derived ‘time’” (abkünftigen “Zeit”).
120. Although this does not mean that Yoko Arisaka’s claim, see n. 116 above, that the argument for the temporal character of spatiality is a matter of foundation rather than derivation is after all vindicated—see the discussion below.
121. Hegel’s account of the structure of self-consciousness, particularly as exemplified in the master-slave dialectic as set out in the Phenomenology of Mind (sec. 178ff.), provides another instance of a form of mutual dependence (although not one that I will pursue here)—see especially Paul Redding’s useful discussion of this as part of the structure of “recognition” in Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
122. Yoko Arisaka contrasts the notion of equiprimordiality with that of “foundation” (using these notions in ways that more or less correspond to my distinction between mutual and hierarchical dependence), arguing that Heidegger misconstrues the relation between existential spatiality and originary temporality (as well as between originary temporality and care) as one of foundation when the two are actually equiprimordial. See Arisaka, “Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time,” pp. 36-37.
123. Hildegard Feick, new edition by Susanne Ziegler, Index zu Heideggers “Sein und Zeit”, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1980), p. 42.
124. Being and Time (GA 2), H131. The idea of equiprimordiality has received relatively little attention in discussions of Heidegger, although the notion is clearly a crucial one. Dieter Henrich discusses the passage from Being and Time cited here in “On the Unity of Subjectivity,” in Henrich, The Unity of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 49ff.; originally published as “Über die Einheit der Subjektivität,” Philosophische Rundschau 3 (1955), 28-69. I am grateful to Prof. Henrich for allowing me to discuss this issue with him in some detail during the summer of 2004, and the comments that follow derive from that conversation. Henrich emphasizes, as I have here, that what is at issue in the idea of equiprimordiality is the notion of unity in multiplicity, however, he also treats the notion as having its origins in Husserl, and as playing a key role in a critique of Husserl that can be seen to underpin much of Heidegger’s account in Being and Time. The critique in question would run as follows: if the elements of temporality are, as Husserl seems o assume, equiprimordial, that is, “gleichursprünglich,” then what is the nature of the “equi-,” the “gleich-”—what is the basis for the unity of that equiprimordial structure? Thus Henrich sees the idea of equiprimordiality itself driving Heidegger’s analysis in the direction of originary temporality, and, we might say, the ecstatic unity of temporality, in order to account for the unity of the equiprimordial elements that make up the structure of being-there. I think that Henrich’s account is accurate as an account of Being and Time, but I also think that the difficulties Heidegger encounters in trying to work through this analysis lead him to rethink the notion of equiprimordiality so that the unity of the structure is given, not through a move back to some more primordial unity, but rather as given only through the interrelatedness of all of the elements as such—the shift from originary temporality as the ground for the unity of being-there to the way in which the unity of the “there” (the unity of the “fourfold,” or of “place”) is understood as occurring in and through the Ereignis, the “event” (for this is the shift that does indeed seem to occur in the move from early to late Heidegger), is a shift of just this sort. Unlike temporality, whose structure is explicated in terms of its own elements, the “event” of place is not explicated other than through the elements that already make it up— if we use the language of the fourfold, that means that the “event” just is the happening of belonging of earth and sky, mortals and gods. For more on this see chapter 5.
125. Being and Time (GA 2), H13.
126. Ibid., H110.
127. Ibid., H114.
128. This is a point that seems to be omitted from Yoko Arisaka’s discussion of the distinction between equiprimordiality and what she refers to as “foundation,” in her “Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time”— see esp. p. 36.
129. Being and Time (GA 2), H329, H337, H340—the first of these occurrences is quoted in the main text following.
130. Ibid., H329; see also H337, H340.
131. Notice that this means that Arisaka’s contrast between “foundation” and “equiprimordiality” (mutual dependence) does not fit my use of these terms. Arisaka’s distinction is closer to what I would treat as a distinction between hierarchical and mutual dependence, the former being characteristic of derivation, but the latter being consistent with a form of foundation or grounding. Arisaka characterizes foundation in terms of supervenience (“If X supervenes on Y, then X is founded on Y”), content (if the content of X is “supplied by” Y, then X is founded on Y), and conditionality (“If Y founds X, then Y is the condition for X”)—see “Spatiality, Temporality, and the Problem of Foundation in Being and Time,” p. 36. She presents these notions as interconnected, and so she takes dreams as “supervening” or being founded on perception inasmuch as perception supplies the content, and so is the condition, for dreams. The conditionality at issue here would seem to be a form of asymmetrical conditionality—without perception there could not be dreams, but the reverse need not hold. Arisaka’s use of supervenience to describe the dependence relation is, however, a little out of keeping with the way the former notion is usually understood. Supervenience is, essentially, a form of identity relation. If X supervenes on Y, then there can be no difference in X that is not also accompanied by a difference in Y. Although supervenience itself allows of stronger and weaker versions, a minimal characterization of supervenience, expressed in terms of conditionality, would be that if X supervenes on Y, then, if there is a difference in X, it will also be necessary that there be a difference in Y (but a difference in Y need not be sufficient for a difference in X). It is not the case, however, that the supervenience relation can be described in terms of content in the way Arisaka puts it. The supervenience relation may thus hold, for instance, where the notion of content has no direct application (between states characterized, for instance, in mental and in physical terms), while the example Arisaka cites of the relation between perception and dreams is not an obvious case of supervenience at all (though one might argue that there cannot be a distinction that appears in dreams that does not also appear in perception, but this seems not to be what Arisaka has in mind).
132. Being and Time (GA 2), H323-325.
133. Ibid., H324.
134. Ibid., H151.
135. Ibid., H12.
136. See, for instance, Being and Time (GA 2), H143-144.
137. Ibid., H180.
138. See Heidegger, “My Way to Phenomenology,” in On Time and Being, p. 74 (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 81).
139. Being and Time (GA 2), H369.
140. Ibid., H334.
141. See Metaphysics, 1016b. Thus Aristotle’s account of substance centers on living beings, taking the primary sense of substance to be that which unifies such beings in their being.
142. See “The Transcendental Circle,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1997), 1-20; see also “From the Transcendental to the ‘Topological’: Heidegger on Ground, Unity and Limit.”
143. See Körner, “The Impossibility of Transcendental Deduction,” Monist 51 (1967), 317-331. I discuss this problem, with specific reference to Körner, in “Transcendental Arguments and Conceptual Schemes: A Reconsideration of Körner’s Uniqueness Argument,” Kant-Studien 81 (1990), 232-251. Unfortunately, at the time this piece was written, I had not articulated the distinction between mutual and hierarchical dependence, nor did I bring Heidegger into the discussion. The discussion focuses instead on Körner’s criticism of Kant, as well as a reply to that criticism by Eva Schaper, and a comparison of Kantian transcendental argument, as explicated by Schaper, and a form of “transcendental argument” in the work of Donald Davidson.
144. See Käufer, “Systematicity and Temporality,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 33 (2002), 167-187.
145. See “Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, p. 51 (GA 12:142).
146. Being and Time (GA 2), H108.
147. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 166 (GA 26:212). See also Einleitung in die Philosophie (winter semester 1928-29), Gesamtausgabe 27 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), p. 328.
148. Being and Time (GA 2), sec. 70, H368.
149. Ibid., sec. 70, H368. See also the discussion of res cogitans versus res corporea at sec. 19 H89-92 and the passage from sec. 12, H53 already quoted earlier.
150. See Søren Overgaard, “Heidegger on Embodiment,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35 (2004), 116-131; see also David R. Cerbone, “Heidegger and Dasein’s Bodily Nature: What Is the Hidden Problematic?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8 (2000), 209-230.
151. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, pp. 212-213.
152. See Overgaard, “Heidegger on Embodiment,” esp. p. 124.
153. Kant, “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” (1786) in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 238.
154. See his explicit discussion of Kant on orientation, Being and Time (GA 2), H109-110—the specific passage in Kant to which Heidegger refers here appears in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” p. 239.
155. Being and Time (GA 2), H109.
156. Ibid.
157. Being and Time (GA 2), p. 137.
158. “Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions of Space,” in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, trans. and ed. David Walford with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 367-368. One could try to avoid the conclusion that space is somehow basic here by insisting that the body is itself part of the equipmental structure, but this would seem to involve a thoroughly problematic understanding of the body.
159. See, for instance, What Is a Thing?, p. 16 (GA 41:13). See also the account in Place and Experience, esp. chapter 7.
160. Being and Time (GA 2), H368.
161. See Place and Experience, pp. 44ff.
162. “Seminar in Le Thor 1968,” p. 32 (GA 15:322). See also Zollikon Seminars (May 11, 1965), pp. 86-87 (Zollikoner Seminare, pp. 113-114) in which Heidegger discusses the difference between the limits of the corporeal thing (Körper) and the limits of the body (Leib). The Zollikon Seminars contain an extensive discussion of what is referred to here as “bodily spatiality”—see Zollikon Seminars, pp. 80-89 (Zollikoner Seminare, pp. 105-115).
163. There is, in fact, a relation of mutual dependence here since spatiality is itself necessary, so I would claim, to the possibility of being as temporal—see Place and Experience, pp. 42, 105, 164. This need not prevent some sense of priority pertaining to temporality, but it will rule out any hierarchical dependence of the sort that characterizes the analysis of Being and Time.
164. In Place and Experience, I used the term “subjective” space in contrast to “objective” space, while elsewhere in the literature the term “egocentric” space is commonly employed. My own use of “subjective” space was governed by the particular manner in which the argument of Place and Experience proceeds since part of what is at issue in the latter work is an interrogation of the notion of subjectivity as such as it stands in relation to, and is in a certain sense, determined by, spatiality—see Place and Experience, esp. pp. 50-91. One way of understanding a large part of the argument of Place and Experience, however, is as showing that subjective space, and so also “egocentric” space, is always bodily space.
165. Being-in-the-World, p. 129.
166. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (eds.), Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 176.
167. Ibid., p. 182.
168. For an excellent discussion of the way in which existential or lived space is tied to bodily space, see David Morris, The Shape of Space (New York: SUNY Press, 2004). Morris also emphasizes the interconnection of bodily spatiality with the objective and intersubjective.
169. See the discussion of this point in Place and Experience, pp. 52-60. There is an interesting case as to how this point might apply in the case of fictional maps, but here I would say the same point applies, except that the way the map functions in this way must be with respect to the imagined spaces and bodies within whose context the map is itself embedded. A fictional “map” presented without any context of fictional “involvement” is no map at all.
170. An allocentric space is a space that possesses a directionality of its own, but one not based on the body; see the discussion of mappable and allocentric space in Place and Experience, pp. 58-59.
171. Being and Time (GA 2), H361-362; see also H112.
172. The most developed and sophisticated version of this idea is to be found, of course, in the work of Hubert Dreyfus—see especially his Being-in-the-World.
173. Being and Time (GA 2), H409.
174. Rouse, Knowledge and Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 76.
175. Dreyfus cites examples of just this sort in support of his own more general position—see, for instance, “Heidegger’s Critique of the Husserl/Searle Account of Intentionality,” Social Research 60 (1993), 28-29. One of the difficulties here, of course, is that much depends on what we take the phenomenology to be in such cases. There is, moreover, no doubt that there is an important sense in which all skillful or “practically oriented” activity does involve an element of “unconscious” “immersion.” But I think it is a mistake to take our experience of such “immersion” as given in certain forms of skillful or “practically oriented” activity as somehow giving us access to the fundamental mode in which we find ourselves “in” the world. A form of “immersion” is actually a feature of all activity, whether “thinking” or “unthinking,” and the immersion that sometimes is experienced in practical engagement is, as I note above, never independent of the wider context of activity that includes both “theoretical” and “practical,” both the “detached” and the “engaged.”
176. For an account of the relation between the ready-to-hand and the presentat-hand, and so of the relation between the theoretical and practical, that, in its general outline, is more congenial to my position here, see Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power, chapter 4, pp. 69-126.
177. Thomas Nagel, for instance, characterizes objectivity in general such that “[a] view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.” Objectivity supposedly arises, on Nagel’s account, through “a process of gradual detachment. . . . An objective standpoint is achieved by leaving a more subjective, individual or even just human perspective behind.” See Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 7.
178. For more on the interconnection of objective and “engaged” spatiality, see the discussion in Place and Experience, chap. 5.
179. See Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, esp. pp. 181-184, although the argument set out here depends on the analysis that precedes it.
180. Ordinary temporality is supposed to be generated out of originary temporality through the notion of succession or sequentiality—succession thus underpins the main elements of ordinary temporality in terms of its datability, its spannedness, its significance, and its publicness. See Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 164ff., esp. 173-178.
181. As should already be clear, objectivity only emerges in relation to an embodied space. This is, of course, a point that can be seen to be consistent with the account of Being and Time. However, I would also claim that bodily space itself emerges only in relation to objective space. It seems to me that this is true quite generally—any creature that is capable of movement must have some capacity to situate itself in relation to what is not itself, and here is the germ of the idea of the distinction between the bodily and the objective. In the case of beings such as ourselves, however, this distinction arises in a much more complex and sophisticated form.
182. See Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 277-310.
1. Pathmarks, p. 283 (GA 9:373). There is a marginal comment included in the fifth edition, 1949 (inserted after “thought accordingly, as a place”) that reads: “Inadequately said: the locality dwelt in by mortals, the mortal region of the locality.” I do not see this as impugning the topological emphasis here, but rather as indicating Heidegger’s concern to dispel the ambiguity in the identification of being-there with the place of the truth of being that might lead one to suppose that place was therefore something that emerges on the basis of being-there. In this respect, the marginal comment focuses on precisely the point at issue in the discussion of transcendence and subjectivity in sec. 4.2.
2. See Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 213 (GA 40:208).
3. Indeed, the thinking of the “political” is an important element in Heidegger’s “re-thinking” after 1933—see James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk, and also Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias. While this aspect of the turning is not one to which I can do justice here, it remains an important, if implicit, element in the development of the topological themes that are at the center of my discussion.
4. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, 5th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 164 (GA 3:233).
5. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 169.
6. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Michael Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 298.
7. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” pp. 249-250 (GA 9:327-328).
8. Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 50.
9. In a marginal note appended to the “Letter” in the 1949 edition, Heidegger comments that the “Letter” itself follows a path of thinking that begins in 1936; see “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 239a (GA 9:319a). William Richardson, however, who first introduces the periodization between “early” and “late” Heidegger—see Richardson, Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought [The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1963], in which Richardson talks of “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II”—takes the turning in Heidegger’s thought to begin in 1930 with “On the Essence of Truth,” but to have been completed in 1935 with the lectures later published as Introduction to Metaphysics: “With EM [Einführung in die Metaphysik] Heidegger II has taken full possession”—Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought, p. 296. Introduction to Metaphysics nevertheless seems still to be marked as a highly transitional work in which Heidegger is not yet in full command of the elements that characterize his later thinking.
10. See Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, esp. pp. 215-218. Crowell suggests a periodization of Heidegger’s thinking that divides it into four stages: from 1912-1917, during which time Heidegger is largely concerned with matters of logic and the question of the “meaning of meaning”; from 1917-1927 (and extending in some respects up until 1930), which sees Heidegger involved in reworking Husserlian, Diltheyan, and Aristotelian themes around the question of “the meaning of being”; 1930-1946 (although a shift is already evident in 1929), during which Heidegger attempts to disentangle himself from “metaphysics” and to reconfigure his thought around the question of the “truth of being”; from 1945 onward, which sees Heidegger’s articulation of a mode of thinking that aims at the “overcoming” of metaphysics through the focus on the primordial “event” (Ereignis) of being (this, of course, is that in which, following Heidegger’s own late comments, I have suggested the question of the place, topos, of being comes to the fore). A similar four-part periodization is also suggested by Young: “Heidegger himself identifies a ‘turn’ in his philosophy as having begun in 1930. Since he also says, however, that it was not completed until the transition to ‘Ereignis-thinking’ in 1936-1938 (see Seminare, GA 15, p. 344 and p. 366), he himself invites us to contemplate three (of course related) thinkers: an early (pre-1930) Heidegger, a middle or transitional thinker (1930-1938), and a late Heidegger (post-1938). . . . I shall argue for the recognition of yet another ‘turn’ as occurring in about 1946. So in addition to Heidegger’s three, I shall identify a fourth . . . a ‘post-war’ Heidegger”— Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 3.
11. See Sheehan, “Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics,” in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 3-16.
12. Ibid., p. 3.
13. Heidegger, “Vorwort” to William J. Richardson, Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought, p. xix.
14. One might also argue, of course, for the need to be wary of Heidegger’s own self-interpretations. Certainly there is a revisionist tendency in Heidegger’s commentaries on his own life and work—a tendency that is perhaps most apparent in his various reconstructions of his political involvements of the 1930s, and, sometimes, in his projection of elements of his later thinking back into his earlier. Recognition of such a tendency does not imply, however, that Heidegger’s self-interpretations are never to be trusted, but only that, as with all selfinterpretations, they cannot provide the sole basis for the understanding of his thought and must be read in conjunction with the actual work itself. Moreover, my own reading of Heidegger’s thought is one that does indeed take it to exhibit an essential consistency and unity that is itself consistent with much (though not all) of what Heidegger himself tells us about the nature of his thinking.
15. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 204.
16. See the discussion of the Event in chapter 5.
17. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” pp. 40-41 (GA 15:334-335).
18. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, p. 55 (GA 5:74).
19. See “List of Sources,” in Off the Beaten Track, p. 285.
20. In order to see exactly how it remains, see the further discussion in chapter 5.
21. Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 208 (GA 65:295).
22. “European Nihilism,” in Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, vol. 4, Nihilism (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979-1987), p. 141 (GA 6.2:172-173).
23. See Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, p. 310.
24. Ibid., p. xv.
25. Ibid., p. 310.
26. Being and Time (GA 2), H212.
27. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 256 (GA 9:336). I have replaced “so long” with “as long” to keep the translation consistent with that from Being and Time.
28. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 295-296.
29. Ibid., pp. 295-296n29.
30. Such would seem to be the implication of Blattner’s argument against defining being in terms of intelligibility on the grounds that such a move would be purely stipulative, effectively assuming what Being and Time aims to demonstrate—see Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 3-6, 242.
31. “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, in Pathmarks, p. 154 (GA 9:202). Heidegger refers to the position set out in “On the Essence of Truth,” writing that “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).” See also “Preface,” in Richardson, From Phenomenology to Thought, p. xviii.
32. “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks, p. 371n66 (GA 9:162n59).
33. Being and Time (GA 2), H208.
34. Blattner seems to suggest that such mysticism may provide the basis for some of Heidegger’s later antisubjectivism, but denies that such “mysticism” can explain Heidegger’s dissatisfaction with Being and Time as that arose in the late 1920s; see Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, pp. 309-310.
35. Since Heidegger’s position stands aside from both subjectivism and objectivism (the two being tied together, as I note below), it can be misleading to characterize it as “antisubjectivist,” hence my talk of “nonsubjectivist.” It is a position that stands outside of the usual oppositions here. For this reason too, I would hesitate to call it a “realism,” although there are strong temptations to do so. Elsewhere, however, I have been less hesitant, referring to Heidegger, along with Davidson, as a “realist,” on the grounds of the way in which his thinking, as well as Davidson’s, remains based in the original and prior involvement of ourselves in the world—see Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 274-277, see also my discussion in “Holism, Realism and Truth: How to Be an Anti-Relativist and Not Give Up on Heidegger (or Davidson)—a Debate with Christopher Norris,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12 (2004), pp. 339-356. Nevertheless, it has to be acknowledged that “realism” remains, especially within the Heideggerian context—a term that brings its own problematic set of oppositions with it.
36. If subjectivism is characteristic of modernity, it is so because of the way in which modernity also seizes upon, and thematizes, the objective. This is a clear lesson to be learned from Cartesianism, in which we find the attempt at a purely “objective” understanding of the world (the prioritization of physical science) that nevertheless also gives rise to a form of subjectivism (in the prioritization of the “cogito”).
37. It is notable that spatiality occasionally reappears in the discussion of transcendence in ways that mirror its appearance in Being and Time. See, for instance, “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 108 (GA 9:137): “Transcendence . . . means something that properly pertains to human Dasein . . . as the fundamental constitution of this being, one that occurs prior to all comportment. Certainly, human Dasein as existing ‘spatially’ has the possibility, among others, of spatially ‘surpassing’ a spatial boundary or gap. Transcendence, however, is that surpassing that makes possible such a thing as existence in general, thereby also making it possible to move ‘oneself’ in space.”
38. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 371n66 (GA 9:162n59). Heidegger is presumably referring here to sec. 69c, “The Temporal Problem of the Transcendence of the World.”
39. See Being and Time (GA 2), sec. 1, H3.
40. Ibid., H38.
41. Ibid., sec. 69c, H364-366.
42. Ibid., H366.
43. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 109 (GA 9:139). The comment could be seen to be partly intended as a rebuff to the charge of subjectivism, but all it actually does is to raise the problem of the unity of transcendence in a different way—as a problem about what such “co-constitution” could possibly mean. Leaving such “coconstitution” to one side, however, one of the problems that becomes increasingly evident in Heidegger’s discussion of transcendence and is in fact already implicit in Being and Time concerns an unstable ambiguity in the notion of transcendence itself inasmuch as it seems to refer both to the essential structure of being-there and to that which encompasses both being-there and world. It seems inevitable that such an ambiguity will tend to resolve itself by grounding the unity of being-there and world in one or another of the two poles of the relation, and most likely in being-there.
44. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 108 (GA 9:137-138).
45. Ibid., pp. 121-122 (GA 9:156-158).
46. Ibid., pp. 108-109 (GA 9:137-139).
47. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, pp. 160 and 165-166 (GA 26:204, 211-213).
48. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 109 (GA 9:139).
49. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 78 (GA 10:115).
50. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 106 (GA 9:135).
51. The Principle of Reason, p. 78 (GA 10:115).
52. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 109 (GA 9:139-140), translation modified.
53. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 50-53 (GA 3:70-75).
54. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 111 (GA 9:141).
55. Ibid., p. 111 (GA 9:142).
56. “Summary of a Seminar,” in On Time and Being, p. 27 (Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 29-30).
57. The engagement with Kant is a feature of Heidegger’s work over much of the period from the late-1920s until the mid-1930s—not only does Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics appear in 1929, but Kant also figures prominently in a lecture course in 1926 (“History of Philosophy from Thomas of Aquinas to Kant” [GA 23]), two lecture courses in 1927 (“The Basic Problems of Phenomenology” [GA 24] and “Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” [GA 25]), and another lecture given in 1935 (“The Question Concerning the Thing: Kant’s Teaching Concerning the Fundamental Transcendental Principle” [GA 41]). With the exception of the 1926 lecture, these lectures appear in English as: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Indiana University Press, 1997); and What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967).
58. “Preface to the Fourth Edition,” in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. xvii (GA 3:xiii).
59. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 112ff. (GA 3:160ff.).
60. One might suppose that this is already assumed in the idea of the transcendental itself, but as I briefly indicated in chapter 3 (sec. 3.5), there is at least the possibility of understanding the transcendental, and so-called transcendental argument, in a way that need not involve such dependence, but instead takes it as proceeding through exhibiting the integration of an otherwise differentiated unity through the mutual relatedness of the elements that make it up.
61. Joseph Fell summarizes the deficiencies in Being and Time in terms that also emphasize the tendency to treat the unitary structure at issue in ways that threaten the unity of that structure, while also posing a problem for the reestablishing of that unity: “First, his early thinking . . . tends to exempt itself from historical conditioning, judging Dasein’s inevitable historicity from a transcendental-metaphysical standpoint that nevertheless attempts to isolate permanent defining characteristics (existentialia) of Dasein. . . . Second . . . a residual metaphysical permanence is assigned both to Dasein and to ‘Nature,’ and the two can be interpreted as irreducible relata. . . . Third . . . the construing of the ontological difference in terms of the metaphysical distinction between meaning and entity can be interpreted as in effect a split of dualism between the source of meaning and the receptacle of meaning. . . . Fourth, once these latent metaphysical distinctions have been brought to Dasein’s explicit attention, Dasein must will their recombination through a “decision” that runs the risk of arbitrariness.”—Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, pp. 166-167.
62. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 123 (GA 9:159).
63. Contributions to Philosophy, p. 226 (GA 65:322).
64. “On the Essence of Ground,” marginal note, p. 123a (GA 9:159a). Note that here “beyng” (the translator’s rendition of Heidegger’s use of the archaic form “Seyn”) seems to refer to this simple onefold as such, and so to be distinct from being.
65. See the reference to the “becoming one” of “the twofold of what is present and of presence” in “Cézanne,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Hermann Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 13 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), p. 223.
66. See “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” pp. 60-61 (GA 15:366); see also Heidegger’s comments in Joan Stambaugh, “Introduction,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. xii-xiii. See also Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 154.
67. The Principle of Reason, p. 51 (GA 10:76).
68. “Insofar as Being ‘comes to presence’ as ground, it itself has no ground. It is so, not because it grounds itself, but because any grounding—not excluding, but, indeed, rather including its own grounding—remains inadequate to being as ground. . . . Being as being remains groundless. Ground—namely as ground which grounds being—stays away from being. Being is an abyss.”—The Principle of Reason, p. 111 (GA 10:166).
69. “Die Ros’ ist ohne Warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet,/Sie ach’t nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet,” Angelus Silesius (1624-1677), Cherubinischer Wandersmann (Bremen: Carl Schünemann, n.d.), p. 37 (I, 289).
70. Parmenides, p. 28n1 (GA 54:42n2).
71. Being and Time, p. 17. See also “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 261 (GA 9:343): “It is everywhere supposed that the attempt in Being and Time ended in a blind alley. Let us not comment any further upon that opinion. The thinking that hazards a few steps in Being and Time has even today not advanced beyond that publication.”
72. Although it is important to recognize that the latter is not so much a replacement for the former as an elucidation of it. Thus Heidegger says in the “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” that “‘Meaning of Being’ and ‘truth of Being’ say the same” (Pathmarks, p. 286 [GA 9:377]).
73. The Principle of Reason, p. 86 (GA 10:128).
74. Ibid.
75. Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 28.
76. “The Way in the Turn,” Heidegger’s Ways (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 129-130.
77. This is the line that appears at the head of this chapter above; it is taken from “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” p. 283 (GA 9:373). As I indicate in the original note above (p. 336n1), Heidegger draws attention to the need to clarify this comment so as to avoid any problematic identification of being-there with the place of the truth of being.
78. Contributions, p. 208 (GA 65:294). See also Heidegger’s discussion of “the ones to come,” Contributions, pp. 277-281 (GA 65:395-401).
79. See, for instance, Contributions, pp. 120-132 (GA 65:171-188) and Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 131ff. (GA 45:151ff.). See also the discussion in Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, pp. 244-267. Fell notes Heidegger’s emphasis on the “other” beginning as not a second beginning, but rather as identical with “the one first and only beginning that is the clearing of aletheia”—Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 464n1.
80. A hyphenation that appears only occasionally in the German editions of Sein und Zeit (as Macquarrie and Robinson note in their translation in order “to show its etymological construction”—Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, p. 27n1), but which Joan Stambaugh, on Heidegger’s own authority, employs throughout her translation of Being and Time—Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit” (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. xiv—something that perhaps reflects an element of the later Heidegger’s reconceptualization of his own earlier thought.
81. Contributions, p. 219 (GA 65:311-312).
82. Ibid., p. 19 (GA 65:26)—I have used “propriative” and “propriative event” rather than Emad and Maly’s “enowned” and “enowning.” See sec. 5.2, for a discussion of the difficulties presented by the translation of “Ereignis” and its cognates.
83. Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 180 (GA 45:212). See also the discussion in Heidegger’s very last seminar, “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” in Four Seminars, pp. 73-75 (GA 15:386-390).
84. Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 181 (GA 45:215).
85. “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” p. 73 (GA 15:386-387).
86. Françoise Dastur emphasizes the way in which, from 1927 to 1935, the concept of world is “deeply transformed”—“Heidegger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin of the Work of Art,” in James Risser (ed.), Heidegger Toward the Turn (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 128-131, esp. p. 129—in its shift away from world as the equipmental context of daily activity toward world as “holy,” as the dimension of historical decision and as the setting forth of earth. Dastur also presents the concept of world as it appears in 1935-1936, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” as transitional between the world of equipmental contextuality in Being and Time and the world of the gathering of the fourfold in “The Thing.”
87. Being and Time, p. 490, I.3, n.i; (H72). Kisiel points out the error in the dating here: the critical period is the War Emergency Semester of 1919—see Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” p. 16.
88. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 165 (GA 24:234). Heidegger adds “You will think that that is a bold and presumptuous assertion. . . . How can it be that the world has not hitherto been seen in philosophy?”
89. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 333 (GA 29/30:483).
90. Ibid., p. 333 (GA 29/30:483).
91. Ibid., p. 177 (GA 29/30:262-263).
92. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 181 (GA 26:233).
93. “The Essence of Ground,” p. 370n59 (GA 9:155n55).
94. “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” p. 64 (GA 15:373).
95. See The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, esp. pp. 176-178 (GA 29/30: 261-264).
96. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, p. 171 (GA 26:219-220). Heidegger adds that “this basic meaning of κóσυος—in principle first suggested by Karl Reinhardt (Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, 1916, p. 174f. and p. 216, note)—appears in several fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers.” Heidegger then refers to Fragment 7 from Melissos, Fragment 4 from Parmenides, Fragment 8 from Anaxagoras, and Fragment 89 from Heraklitus.
97. See The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, pp. 170-181 (GA 26:219-233).
98. See Being and Time (GA 2), H214. The Macquarrie and Robinson translation uses “likening” for “adequaetio”—see Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, p. 257n2.
99. Being and Time (GA 2), H214.
100. This is an important point that is sometimes overlooked. It is particularly important in relation to Ernst Tugendhat’s famous criticism of the Heideggerian account to the effect that there is no room in the understanding of truth as “uncoveredness” or “unhiddenness” (“Entborgenheit”—the term that Heidegger uses elsewhere to characterize the conception of truth in Being and Time, though not itself used in that work) to make sense of the contrast between the true and the false— there is no room for falsity as such (see “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth,” in Christopher Macann [ed.], Critical Heidegger [London: Routledge, 1996], pp. 232-233, as well as the more detailed discussion of Heidegger’s account in Tugendhat, Die Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger, 2nd ed. [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972]). This is, however, to miss the way in which Heidegger still maintains a sense of truth as pertaining to assertions that does indeed retain the contrast between truth and falsity, namely, the notion of truth as “correctness” (the false is that which is “incorrect”). For more on the criticism by Tugendhat, see Mark Wrathall, “Heidegger and Truth as Correspondence,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999), 69-88, and also Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 419ff.
101. See Being and Time (GA 2), H218. This way of thinking of truth is, in fact, already an important thread throughout much of Heidegger’s early thinking. For an account of the development of Heidegger’s thinking of truth up to and including Being and Time, see Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth.
102. Being and Time (GA 2), H220-221.
103. Ibid., H212-213, H219-220.
104. Ibid., H225-226.
105. Ibid., H226.
106. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 106 (GA 9:135).
107. Ibid., p. 135 (GA 9:175).
108. “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 147 (GA 9:192).
109. Ibid., marginal note in the first edition of 1943, p. 148a (GA 9:193a).
110. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Gesamtausgabe 39 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980).
111. Thus, when Heidegger says that being-there is “equiprimordially” in the truth and in untruth (Being and Time [GA 2], H222), this does not mean that disclosedness is always also a concealing, but that being-there is essentially given over to falling, to fleeing, and to forgetting.
112. In “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” p. 64 (GA 15:372), we are told that: “The analysis of the worldhood of the world is indeed an essential step. . . . Yet this analysis ‘remains of subordinate significance.’”
113. As Dreyfus puts it, “moods provide the background for intentionality, i.e., for the specific ways things and possibilities show up as mattering.” Dreyfus, Being-inthe-World, p. 174.
114. Being and Time (GA 2), H343.
115. Ibid., H344: “In . . . [anxiety], Dasein is taken back to its naked uncanniness, and becomes fascinated by it. This fascination, however, not only takes Dasein back from its ‘worldly’ possibilities, but at the same time gives it the possibility of an authentic potentiality-for-Being.”
116. See The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 5 (GA 29/30:7); the citation from Novalis is given as Novalis, Schriften, ed. J. Minor (Jena, 1923), II, p. 179, Fr 21.
117. The term “Bodenständigkeit” is often construed in ways that suggest a problematic emphasis on “rootedness” in one’s native “soil” or ground (Boden). It is not clear that it has to be interpreted that way, however, and there seem ample indications that Heidegger does not intend it in the manner of the usual talk, which he often derides in the period after 1933-1934, of “Blut und Boden” (blood and soil).
118. A term Heidegger employs, as William McNeill points out, in direct relation to “solitude” in his 1933 essay “Why Do We Remain in the Province?” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe 13, pp. 11-12; McNeill, “Heimat: Heidegger on the Threshold,” in James Risser (ed.), Heidegger: Toward the Turn, p. 329.
119. “What Is Metaphysics?,” p. 96 (GA 9:122).
120. See Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 3 (GA 40:5).
121. “What Is Metaphysics?,” pp. 95-96 (GA 9:121).
122. See especially the famous reference to nature as not merely “present-at-hand,” at Being and Time, H65.
123. “On the Essence of Ground,” p. 370n59 (GA 9:155n55).
124. See Joseph Fell, “The Familiar and the Strange: On the Limits of Praxis in the Early Heidegger,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (eds.), Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 75.
125. Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 119 (GA 45:137); see also Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 107 (GA 40:109).
126. “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 153 (GA 9:201).
127. Only thus is it possible for the happening at issue here to be in any way grasped as a revealing and concealing, as a coming-forth and withdrawal, and so for concealing/withdrawal to itself be, in a certain way, evident in revealing/coming-forth. There is at least one mode of concealing-revealing, however, that does block off its character as a mode of concealing-revealing, thereby obscuring its own character in relation to ground and also obscuring the character of what is revealed in its multiplicity or “excess.” This is just what occurs in the particular mode of concealing-revealing that is the essence of technology—see sec. 5.6.
128. “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 148 (GA 9:193); see also “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 38 (GA 15:331).
129. Basic Questions of Philosophy, pp. 18-19 (GA 45:19).
130. From the lines appended to the first page of Off the Beaten Track, and to Holzwege. In colloquial German a Holzweg is a path through the woods that leads nowhere, and the 1962 translation of Holzwege into French by Wolfgang Brockmeier is thus titled “Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part”—literally “Paths that Lead Nowhere”—a title that Heidegger himself reportedly approved. “Off the Beaten Track” captures something of what is at issue here in colloquial English.
131. See Gadamer, “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Library of Living Philosophers 24 (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), p. 47.
132. See Casey, The Fate of Place, p. 268.
133. See Gadamer, “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” p. 47. 134. Heidegger and Sartre, p. 197.
135. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” pp. 20-21 (GA 5:27-29).
136. Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale, 1962), pp. 2, 3. Julian Young also cites Scully in reference to Heidegger’s account—see Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 62.
137. See Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, “La Terre et les étoiles dans la cosmologie de Xénophane,” in André Laks and Claire Louguet (eds.), Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie Présocratique? Cahiers de Philologie 20 (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002), pp. 332ff.
138. The Fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals, which appears to be a development out of this original “twofold” (see the discussion in sec. 5.2), is presented by Heidegger most clearly in “Hölderlin’s Heaven and Earth,” as mediated through Hölderlin, but as nevertheless capturing something Greek—indeed, the poem that is the focus for Heidegger’s discussion in “Hölderlin’s Heaven and Earth” is Hölderlin’s “Greece,” and Heidegger describes Hölderlin as having knowledge “of the authentic essence of the Greeks”—see “Hölderlin’s Heaven and Earth,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, pp. 184-185 (GA 4:00). On Heidegger’s use of figures from Greek thought and poetry, see also the account developed by Vincent Vycinas (an account that draws heavily on the work of Walter Otto) in Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1961), pp. 121ff.
139. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 55-56 (GA 5:73-74).
140. Jacques Taminiaux has explored the shifts that occur between the different version of the lectures with specific reference to the way in which will and decision are involved. Taminiaux sees earlier versions of the lecture as having a much more “violent” character—see Poetics, Speculation, and Judgement: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 153-169. See also Clare Pearson Geiman’s discussion of the more general issue of the shift in Heidegger’s thinking concerning violence and force in relation to the happening of truth in “Heidegger’s Antigones,” in Polt and Fried, A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics,” pp. 161-182.
141. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 256 (GA 9:337).
142. Being and Time (GA 2), H38.
143. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 256-257 (GA 9:337).
144. Ibid., p. 257 (GA 9:337).
145. “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” p. 289 (GA 9:380-381).
146. See The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, pp. 189-190 (GA 26:244).
147. “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 154 (GA 9:201-202).
148. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 51 (GA 15:350-351). See also “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 271 (GA 9:357): “‘Ontology’ itself . . . whether transcendental or precritical, is subject to critique, not because it thinks the being of beings and in so doing reduces being to a concept, but because it does not think the truth of being and so fails to recognize that there is a thinking more rigorous than conceptual thinking. In the poverty of its first breakthrough, the thinking that tries to advance thought into the truth of being brings only a small part of that wholly other dimension to language. This language even falsifies itself, for it does not yet succeed in retaining the essential help of phenomenological seeing while dispensing with the inappropriate concern with ‘science’ and ‘research.’ But in order to make the attempt at thinking recognizable and at the same time understandable for existing philosophy, it could at first be expressed only within the horizon of that existing philosophy and the use of its current terms. In the meantime I have learned to see that these very terms were bound to lead immediately and inevitably into error.”
149. “On the Question of Being,” p. 306 (GA 9:405).
150. As he writes in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 271 (GA 9:357) referring to his use of the terms and concepts of “existing philosophy”: “For the terms and the conceptual language corresponding to them were not rethought by readers from the matter particularly to be thought; rather, the matter was conceived according to the established terminology in its customary meaning.”
151. See “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 239 (GA 9:313).
152. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” pp. 45-46 (GA 5:61-62).
153. “Martin Heidegger—75 Years,” in Heidegger’s Ways, p. 17.
154. Heidegger’s use of etymology—his exploration of the connections between words and the “stories” that appear to belong to them—can be seen as “mythical” in a similar fashion. There too, the aim is to enable a complex structure of meaning to become evident through the evocative power of the image or the (reconceptualized) word. As Heidegger says in Being and Time, while we must avoid “uninhibited word-mysticism,” it is nevertheless the case that “the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself”—Being and Time (GA 2), H220.
155. Although not properly evident here, the way in which “ethos” is implicated with “mythos,” as well as “logos,” is important in understanding the nature of community and its relation to disclosure and concealment, particularly in terms of the gathering of the fourfold—see the discussion in sec. 5.4 below.
156. Parmenides, p. 70 (GA 54:104). Compare also Walter Otto’s comment that mythos as it relates to logos “Is not merely an older expression but also stands for the older form of the essence of ‘word’; it is the ‘word’ as the ultimate witnessing of that which was, is, and will be, as the revelation of being itself in the ancient venerable understanding which does not distinguish word and being”—Walter Otto, Die Gestalt und das Sein (Düsseldorf-Köln: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1955), p. 71.
157. Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Gesamtausgabe 39, p. 88. The reference Heidegger provides at the end of this passage is to Hölderlin’s Sämtliche Werke, 2nd ed. Norbert von Hellingrath, Friedrich Seebass, and Ludwig von Pigenot (Berlin: Propylaen, 1923)—it is the location for the notion of “poetic dwelling” which Heidegger finds originally in Hölderlin.
158. See Elden, “Hölderlin and the Importance of Place,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (1999), 263; see also Elden, Mapping the Present, p. 36. Of course, the simple contrast between space and place that is implied here is not without its own problems (especially given the interconnection between place and space) and can be seen, not only as a continuation of the problematic tendency to think of space primarily in Cartesian terms that was evident in Being and Time (and is noted by Elden), but as an ongoing difficulty in Heidegger’s thinking (for more on this, see especially sec. 5.5).
159. See Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 107.
160. “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, p. 112 (GA 16:678).
161. See James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk; also de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, esp. pp. 87-113.
162. Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 109 (GA 45:125).
163. Ibid., pp. 109-110 (GA 45:126).
164. Ibid., pp. 110-111 (GA 45:126-127).
165. “Postscript to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” trans. William McNeill, in Pathmarks, p. 237 (GA 9:312).
1. Letter (1802), in 39 Hymns and Fragments, trans. R. Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); the larger passage of which this is a part is discussed by Heidegger in “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” pp. 175-207 (GA 4:152-181).
2. See “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 41 (GA 15:335) and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, p. 69 (Zur Sachen des Denkens, pp. 77-78)—this issue is also briefly discussed below, sec. 5.2.
3. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 239, n.a. (145).
4. Ibid., p. 241, n.a. (148). I have omitted the English gloss on “Ereignis” as “event of appropriation” that is used in the English translation of the “Letter.”
5. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 221.
6. Henri Birault, Heidegger et l’experience de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 41.
7. Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” pp. 196-197.
8. See their comments in the “Translators’ Foreword,” in Contributions, pp. xix-xxii.
9. Emad and Maly seem to ignore this point, saying only that “We found a good approximation to Ereignis in the word enowning” (ibid., p. xx).
10. The strategy that Emad and Maly employ with respect to “Ereignis” is followed throughout their translation of Contributions (indeed, one of their reasons for employing the translation of “Ereignis” as “enowning” is that it enables them to translate other terms in a similar fashion and thereby, they claim, better capture the wordplay and associations on which Heidegger draws. The result, however, not unsurprisingly, is a text that often reads as hardly “English” at all. In this respect, the English edition of Contributions does exactly what I aim not to do here: rather than opening Heidegger’s thought up to an English-speaking audience, it serves to close it off within a isolated and rarified academic readership. From another perspective, it has also confirmed the widespread impression that Heidegger’s thought, especially his late thought, is a dense thicket of obscure and impenetrable “mysticism” verging on the nonsensical—see, for instance, Simon Blackburn’s review of the Emad and Maly translation of Contributions, “Enquivering,” New Republic, October 30, 2000.
11. See Hofstadter, “Introduction,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. xviii-xxi.
12. Ibid., p. xxi. Various uses of “Ereignis” in the essays in Pathmarks are rendered by both “event of appropriation” and “event” (compare, for instance, the marginal note on 240[a] and that at 374[a]).
13. See Off the Beaten Track, for example, p. 86.
14. See On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. ix-x, 19.
15. A point noted by Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. xxii.
16. In this respect, Emad and Maly seem to me to make the crucial mistake of trying to translate Contributions in such a way that the translation will itself be sufficient to enable the carrying across of Heidegger’s poetic speaking (that the Contributions is indeed an attempt to think “more poetically” seems to me to be part of what is implied by Heidegger’s own characterization of Contributions as an attempt to speak in a “simple manner” as well as the self-evidently idiosyncratic character of the writing as such).
17. Identity and Difference, p. 36.
18. Indeed, “happening of belonging” seems to me a much more felicitous phrase than Emad and Maly’s “enowning,” while capturing much the same meaning (although, admittedly, it does not allow for the same wordplay that Emad and Maly value so highly).
19. See Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, p. 52—the embedded phrase is one Young takes from Heidegger, Contributions, p. 48 (GA 65:70). Emad and Maly render it as “removal-unto and charming-moving-unto.”
20. See Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 107. Young argues that Contributions “is actually less fundamental than the later Hölderlin texts. Though it precedes them in the order of writing, their content . . . precedes it in the order of thinking”— Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 107n20.
21. This is not to say that the Event, which emerges dramatically in the pages of Contributions, is not central to this late thinking, but that the way in which Heidegger’s thinking of the Event is developed and articulated, and more specifically, the topological character of that thinking, owes perhaps more (and certainly no less) to the thinking that is undertaken in the Hölderlin lectures than in Contributions.
22. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 63 (GA 56/57:75).
23. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 41 (GA 15:335); see also pp. 46-48 (GA 15:344-345).
24. See, for instance, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 243 (GA 9:318).
25. See “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (first published in French in 1964) p. 69 (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 76): “Insofar as truth is understood in the traditional ‘natural’ sense as the correspondence of knowledge with beings demonstrated in beings, but also insofar as truth is interpreted as the certainty of the knowledge of Being, aletheia, unconcealment in the sense of the opening may not be equated with truth. Rather, aletheia, unconcealment thought as opening, first grants the possibility of truth.”
26. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” pp. 20-21 (GA 5:27-29).
27. Contributions to Philosophy, p. 218 (GA 65:310).
28. The term is also used, in German, to refer to the square formed by the arrangement of walls, outbuildings, and house that makes up the characteristic farmyard.
29. “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 173 (GA 7:175).
30. Ibid., p. 173 (GA 7:175).
31. Ibid., p. 179 (GA 7:180).
32. Françoise Dastur suggests that the structure that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” already contains all the elements present in the fourfold that appears in “The Thing.” Dastur writes: “All the dimensions of the Fourfold are already present in 1935 except the sky. But we can perhaps consider that what is called in 1935 ‘earth’ and which is understood as ‘the whole’ (das Ganze) and linked to the Greek Physis, i.e., to the emerging and coming into light of everything, possesses a lighted side that will later be called sky”—“Heidegger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Risser (ed.), Heidegger: Towards the Turning, p. 141n21. The suggestion is not without interest, but it seems completely to neglect the way in which world seems to be understood in 1935-1936 as the lighted realm in contrast with earth (a point that also seems confirmed by the analysis of the way earth emerges as an issue in relation to world out of the considerations that preoccupy Heidegger in the late 1920s. Earth itself stands in an essential relation to the lighted realm, and is indeed to be understood in relation to nature as physis, but it seems mistaken to argue that earth already includes sky within it.
33. “The Thing,” p. 166 (GA 7:167-168).
34. Ibid., p. 166 (GA 7:168).
35. Ibid., p. 180 (GA 7:181).
36. Ibid., p. 181 (GA 7:182).
37. Ibid., p. 180 (GA 7:181-182).
38. See, for instance, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 72 (GA 63:94-95).
39. John van Buren, however, sees a major contrast between Heidegger’s early and later thinking precisely in terms of the way the ordinary and the everyday figures here—see John van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 314. I would suggest that it is not that the later thinking emphasizes the extraordinary experience, while the early thinking emphasizes the ordinary, but that the early directs attention to the ordinariness of the extraordinary happening of world, while the later thinking aims to bring out the extraordinariness of the happening of world even in the most ordinary. This is a point to which I shall return in chapter 6.
40. “The Thing,” p. 166 (GA 7:168).
41. Ibid., p. 168 (GA 7:170).
42. It is worth noting the contrast between Heidegger’s talk of containment here and that present in sec. 12 of Being and Time. Here the containing that is part of the essence of the jug is closely tied to the character of the jug as giving what is within to that which is without. The way in which the inner/outer distinction figures here suggests that the distinction cannot be construed simply in terms of a distinction that belongs only to “objective” spatiality.
43. “The Thing,” pp. 172-173 (GA 7:174-175).
44. Ibid., p. 174 (GA 7:175). Hofstadter has “a single time-space, a single stay.”
45. Ibid.
46. Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, p. 24 (GA 63:29). Translation modified.
47. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” pp. 152-153 (GA 7:154-155).
48. Ibid., p. 152 (GA 7:154-155). Thus, although Heidegger may have a particular bridge in mind for some of his discussion (“If all of us now think, from where we are right here, of the old bridge in Heidelberg . . .”), his account is clearly not restricted to any instance or type of bridge.
49. “Der Feldweg,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe 13, p. 88.
50. Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 204.
51. Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” p. 206.
52. In his discussion of Trakl’s poem, “A Winter Evening,” in the essay “Language,” Heidegger also talks of the prevailing of the fourfold in the “golden-blossoming tree” that figures in Trakl’s poem—see “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 201 (GA 12:21). Although it belongs to a period in which the idea of the Fourfold has still to be properly developed, Heidegger’s discussion, in his 1934-1935 lectures on Hölderlin’s “Germania” and “The Rhine,” of the way the river founds a dwelling place may be thought to provide a further example of the way a natural being may gather: “The river now founds in the land a characterized space and a delimited place [Ort] of settlement, of communication, for the people a cultivable land that guarantees their immediate being-there. The river is not a watercourse which passes by the place of men, it is its streaming, as making a land, which founds the possibility of establishing the dwelling of men”—Hölderlin’s “Germania” and “Der Rhein,” Gesamtausgabe 39, p. 264.
53. Our forgetting of the dependence on the “natural” even of such a made material as plastic can be seen to be one reason for our profligate use of such a material.
54. This sense of nature as already underlying manufacture could be taken to be implied by Heidegger’s account of the four causes in “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he presents the efficient cause as that which operates always in relation to the other causes. See “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 6-11 (GA 7:9-13).
55. See Being and Time (GA 2), H226-227: “‘There is’ truth only insofar as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is.”
56. The implication of the gods with nature should not be taken immediately to imply that natural science must somehow be connected with theology. If nature cannot be understood independently of the gods, just as it cannot be understood independently of the human, this is not because the divinities must somehow be included in scientific discourse and practice—as if we would have to make room for divine intervention, miracles, and accounts of the nature of angelic substance in our physical theory. Indeed, one of the ways in which the gods may be said to be implicated here is through the way in which scientific study of nature may actually require the setting aside of the gods, just as it will also require the setting aside of aspects of the human. Such a setting aside may be viewed as an essential part of scientific practice. At the same time, however, the gods will have a role in the structure that underpins scientific practice, as it underpins all being in the world, and in the same way that the human has such a role, that is, through being an element in the happening of world within which even the scientist is placed. This leaves open the question as to exactly how the role of the gods within the fourfold should be understood (for more on this see sec. 5.3), but it should already be quite clear that the role they play is not that of entities who enter into the natural role to intervene or act within it. Instead, as I note above, the gods belong to the same “axis” within the fourfold as the mortals, the gods are the “immortals,” and as such they embody the character of the world as it can be seen in terms of certain unified aspects, and as it has a meaningfulness that goes beyond any individual mortal life.
57. The thing can be said to have a location, but only once we step back from the way in which the thing functions in gathering a world, that is, from the way it “things,” and instead see the thing simply as something located with respect to other similarly located things within a larger order of such locations. When we do this, we may well find that the analysis Heidegger gives of equipmentality in Being and Time will be applicable, where it is the thing as ready-to-hand tool that is at issue, as may be the analysis that would follow from the application of a purely “spatial” understanding in which the thing is construed as a present-at-hand “object.” Understood in its character as a thing that “things,” however, and so gathers the fourfold, the thing is a place—as Heidegger makes clear in “Building Dwelling Thinking” (see sec. 5.4).
58. See “The Thing,” p. 180 (GA 7:182); also “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” pp. 196-199 (GA 4:172-174).
59. See Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1992), pp. 101-134; German edition, Wahrheit und Methode, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965), pp. 97-127.
60. “The Thing,” p. 179 (GA 7:180-181). In Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, esp. p. 7, I employ a similar image to describe the holistic interrelation of attitudes, and of attitudes and behavior, as these emerge within the structure of interpretation. The image is a particularly useful one as it captures the key element in such holism, namely, the way in which a properly holistic structure is one that is purely relational—as such, the elements related cannot be construed as existing independently of the relations between them.
61. Such a shift is characteristic of what occurs when holism is taken as a feature merely of the epistemology of some domain. Understanding the structure of the domain may thus require the articulation of a set of relations between elements, but that holistic mode of proceeding finally resolves into an understanding of the elements that can then be taken in themselves.
62. “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” pp. 65-66 (Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 72-73).
63. See Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 159 (GA 45:184-185).
64. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 38 (GA 15:331).
65. See Basic Questions of Philosophy, pp. 147-148 (GA 45:170-171).
66. One may be tempted to talk of what is at issue here in terms of “transcendence.” I have avoided the use of this particular term here simply because it could all too easily be confused with the sense of “transcendence” that was the focus for much of my discussion in chapter 4—the sense of “transcendence” that is tied, in Heidegger’s thinking, to the idea of the transcendental and that he abandons in the early to mid-1930s.
67. “The Thing,” p. 165 (GA 7:167).
68. Parmenides, p. 156 (54:232-233). In a letter from 1963, Heidegger seems to confirm the possible connection suggested here between space and the open, writing of the way in which “I regard space and spatiality as very important—because from here the phenomenon of the world can be elucidated in connection with openness [Offenheit]”—Letter to Medard Boss, March 20, 1963, in Zollikon Seminars, pp. 260-261 (Zollikoner Seminare, p. 326). In one of the seminars with Boss, he asks “Are space and clearing identical, or does one presuppose the other? . . . Now, that cannot be decided yet”—Zollikon Seminars (July 6, 1964), p. 14 (Zollikoner Seminare, p. 17).
69. Parmenides, p. 149 (GA 54:221).
70. Ibid. (GA 54:222).
71. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 155 (GA 7:157-158). Hofstadter’s translation, as I indicated in an earlier note, has “Ort” as “location” and “Platz” as place. This seems to me to be exactly the reverse of what it should be (“place” being the richer and more basic term in English when compared to “location”) and, consequently, I have rendered “Ort” as “place” and “Platz” as “location.” I have followed this same practice in all those passages from Heidegger’s work that involve these terms, and, where those passages are taken from existing translations, have adjusted the translation accordingly.
72. “Art and Space,” p. 6 (GA 13:208).
73. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 154 (GA 7:156).
74. Basic Concepts, p. 41 (GA 51:47).
75. Ibid. (GA 51:48).
76. It is notable that as soon as one attempts to articulate the structure of the sort of “orientational field” that characterizes active spatiality, one immediately draws upon orientational features that are themselves tied to the differentiation of earth from sky. If any sort of concreteness is to be attached to the basic structures of up and down, left and right, front and back, periphery and center (and they are otherwise nothing but abstract constructs), one will inevitably find that that those structures are constituted in terms of earth and sky or some analogue thereof—they will also, of course, be constituted topologically.
77. “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 220 (GA 7:198-199). See also the comment in “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 254 (164): “in the determination of the humanity of the human being as ek-sistence what is essential is not the human being but being—as the dimension of the ek-stasis. However, the dimension is not something spatial in the familiar sense. Rather, everything spatial and all time-space occur essentially in the dimensionality that being itself is.”
78. Zollikon Seminars, p. 8 (Zollikoner Seminare, p. 9).
79. “Art and Space,” p. 5 (GA 13:206-207).
80. Heidegger describes the seminar in which the discussion figures as “rather a failure,” Zollikon Seminars, p. 17 (Zollikoner Seminare, p. 20).
81. See Zollikon Seminars, “July 6, 1964,” pp. 8-17 (Zollikoner Seminare, pp. 10-20).
82. Zollikon Seminars, p. 14 (Zollikoner Seminare, p. 16).
83. Heidegger, “Art and Space,” p. 4 (GA 13:208).
84. See What is a Thing? pp. 16-17 (GA 41:16-17); see also “Time and Being,” pp. 14ff. (Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 14ff.).
85. This point has to be treated with some care, however, since there is also a sense in which exactly the opposite also holds—space gathers what time separates. To some extent, it is the latter that is the focus for the Proustian “experiment” of A la recherche du temps perdu. In that work, as Georges Poulet argues, it is the loss of self in time that Proust aims to overcome through the bringing of things together in space—see Poulet, Proustian Space (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)—although I would suggest that it is not strictly space that unifies here, but rather place. In this respect, what Proust attempts is the overcoming of the separation of time and space (itself a characteristic feature of the experience of modernity) through their “reuniting” (which is also a reuniting of Proust’s narrator with himself) in place. I go some way toward setting out this reading of Proust and the reinterpretation of the relation between time and space as they relate to place in chapters 6 and 7 of Place and Experience, pp. 157ff.
86. The argument to this conclusion can be seen as at the core of the “Refutation of Idealism” in the B Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, but the idea also appears elsewhere in Kant’s writings. On the general point at issue here, see Place and Experience, chap. 5, and esp. pp. 114-117.
87. See Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Macmillan, 1959), esp. chap. 2.
88. See, for instance, the essays in Naomi Eilan, Rosaleen McCarthy, and Bill Brewer (eds.), Spatial Representation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
89. Parmenides, p. 117 (GA 54:174).
90. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 276 (GA 9:364).
91. Ibid., pp. 248-249 (GA 9:326); see also Heidegger’s discussion in “The Nature of Language” and “On the Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language (GA 12).
92. “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 202-203, 210 (GA 12:22-23, 30).
93. “Why Poets?” in Off the Beaten Track, p. 232-233 (GA 5:310-311).
94. In The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Mark Johnson argues that spatial and bodily images are indeed fundamental to thought. I would prefer to say that all thinking involves what might be termed “spatialization” inasmuch as spatiality is that which enables differentiation, although such spatialization also makes essential reference to the temporal—differentiation is always a differ-ing, and is hence something worked out dynamically, while it is also a unifying.
95. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 272 (GA 9:358).
96. Thus Heidegger expresses the hope that “one day we will, by thinking the essence of being in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what ‘house’ and ‘dwelling’ are”—“Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 272 (GA 9:358).
97. Heidegger, “Hebel—Friend of the House,” trans. Bruce V. Foltz and Michael Heim, in Contemporary German Philosophy 3 (1983), 100-101 (GA 13:150).
98. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads contains a series of “Poems on the Naming of Places”—see Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), pp. 186-208, which includes one of his most famous poems, “Michael.”
99. Since Heidegger is not advancing a philosophy of language, his emphasis on the word should not be taken to imply any prioritization, in the context of semantics, of the singular term over the statement (moreover, “Wort” in German can mean “word,” “phrase,” or “saying”). Indeed, Heidegger does not think of the word as an isolated linguistic component but only as something that speaks—in this respect, his focus on the word as it operates in such a “gathering” might be taken to imply a focus on the word as it figures in “statements” were it not for the fact that this would put much too much of a “semantic” gloss on what is actually at issue here.
100. See Basic Concepts, p. 41 (GA 51:47), in which Heidegger talks of the way we have “our domain of residence” in the distinction between being and beings.
101. Why should the “unhomely” in the sense of the “unheimlich” be “uncanny”? From the point of view of language, the original idea of the “uncanny” is precisely that which lies outside of our “ken”—that is, outside of that which is familiar to us. One might also say that the uncanny is that which lies outside of our knowledge, especially since there is also a sense of “knowledge” as that “locality” in which we are at home—a usage that I have elsewhere noted as appearing in the work of John Clare, see Place and Experience, p. 189-190.
102. ”Building Dwelling Thinking,” pp. 146-147 (GA 7:148-149). It is worth emphasizing again, as I did in chapter 1, that the sorts of etymological considerations Heidegger brings forth here are not to be construed as providing arguments for the analyses he proposes. Rather those considerations are intended to reveal connections we might otherwise not have seen—to function as reminders of what lies hidden in the original experience of language, of world, and of dwelling as such.
103. Ibid., pp. 148-149 (GA 7:150).
104. Ibid., pp. 156-157 (GA 7:158-160).
105. Being and Time (GA 2), H54—see the discussion in sec. 3.2 above.
106. “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 144 (GA 9:188).
107. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 149 (GA 7:151)—Hofstadter’s “sparing and preserving” is his translation of what appears in Heidegger’s German as “schonen,” which carries both of these senses of sparing and preserving.
108. Ibid., p. 151 (GA 7:153).
109. Being and Time, H54—here “dwelling” as “looking after” seems to refer us to the notion of “care” (Sorge) that appears later in the analysis of Being and Time.
110. “On the Essence of Truth,” p. 144 (GA 9:188). That “letting be” does not mean “disengagement from” is also an important idea in the notion of “Gelassenheit” (releasement) that Heidegger proposes as the proper mode of comportment toward technology—see sec. 5.5.
111. See, for instance, “On the Question of Being,” pp. 318-319 (GA 9:249-250).
112. See Basic Questions of Philosophy, pp. 135ff. (GA 45:155ff.)—Heidegger refers here, and throughout his discussion, to “thaumazein,” the verb form, rather than the noun, “thauma.”
113. See Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, pp. 63ff.
114. See “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 159 (GA 7:161); see also “The Question Concerning Technology,” in “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 12-14 (GA 13:13-15).
115. See “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 159 (GA 7:162).
116. Ibid., p. 160 (GA 7:162).
117. “The Thing,” pp. 178-179 (GA 7:180).
118. Fell, “Heidegger’s Mortals and Gods,” p. 32.
119. Parmenides, p. 111 (GA 54:164).
120. Otto, The Homeric Gods, trans. Moses Hadas (London: Thames and Hudson, 1954); originally published in German as Die Götter Griechenlands; das Bild des Göttlichen im Spiegel des griechischen Geistes (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929).
121. Otto, The Homeric Gods, p. 161.
122. See “The Thing,” p. 178 (GA 7:180): “The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead”—see also Julian Young’s discussion in Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, pp. 94-98.
123. See “As When on a Holiday . . . ,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, p. 85 (GA 4:63).
124. “Remembrance,” pp. 126-128 (GA 4:103-105).
125. “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 40-42.
126. For more on the character and role of the holiday, see Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, pp. 55-62; it also receives attention in Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk, pp. 165-166.
127. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 269 (GA 9:354-355).
128. See “ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,” pp. 222-227 (GA 7:201-206).
129. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” pp. 158-159 (GA 7:161).
130. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 271 (GA 9:356).
131. Ibid., p. 271 (GA 9:357).
132. See Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (1949-1957), ed. Petra Jaeger, Gesamtausgabe 79 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994).
133. The latter two are both included in “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays. Heidegger’s thinking on technology is spread across many works, but in addition to “The Thing,” “The Question Concerning Technology,” and “The Turning,” the latter two both included in “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays, the most important are perhaps “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), and “Why Poets?” (1946), both of which are included in Off the Beaten Track, and also “On the Question of Being” (1955), included in Pathmarks.
134. “The Thing,” p. 165 (GA 7:167). It is useful to compare this passage with what Heidegger says about much the same phenomenon in Being and Time (GA 2), H105: “In Dasein there lies an essential tendency to closeness. All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to do today, push us on towards the conquest of remoteness. With the ‘radio,’ for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance [Entfernung] of the ‘world’—a de-severance [Entfernung] which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized.”
135. “The Thing,” p. 166 (GA 7:167-168).
136. Jerzy Kosinski, Being There (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 5. In many respects, this story, and the Peter Sellers film based on it, can be read as a fable concerning the character of modern technology.
137. “The Thing,” p. 181 (GA 7:183).
138. The phrase “a desolate time” is used by Heidegger in “Why Poets?” in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 200ff. (5:269ff.), and is taken from Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine,” providing the guiding question for the essay as a whole: “and why poets in a desolate time?”
139. “On the Question of Being,” pp. 306ff. (GA 9:405ff.).
140. Ibid., p. 319 (GA 9:422).
141. Ibid., p. 313 (GA 9:414).
142. In “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 265 (GA 9:349), Heidegger writes that “precisely through the characterization of something as ‘a value’ what is so valued is robbed of its worth.” See also the discussion in Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 213-214 (GA 40:207-208).
143. Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 13 (GA 45:13).
144. Julian Young characterizes the destitution of the contemporary world in terms of the loss of the gods (which also means loss of community), inability to “own” death, and the “violence” of modern technology (these latter two, Young says, are both aspects of the loss of being at home in the world)—see Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, pp. 32-34. I take the loss of the gods and the inability to own death as both aspects of “homelessness” and as underlaid by the dominance of that “violent” mode of disclosedness that is evident in technology, which is itself, of course, tied to metaphysical nihilism.
145. “The Question Concerning Technology.”
146. Many of these features have been seen, of course, as hallmarks of the various forms of neo-liberalism that have been so dominant within both the public and private sectors over the last two decades. Yet it is not neo-liberal thinking that is at issue here, but rather a mode of revealing that, while it may be expressed in political ideology, is no mere “ideology” as such. Indeed, many of these features are no longer seen as being associated with any particular political orientation, but have become part of the way in which the contemporary world understands itself. Indeed, why would one oppose such obvious commonsense notions as the need for greater “rationality” in decision making or improved efficiency in organizations? Heidegger’s answer is not that one should not be concerned about such things, but that one should be concerned in a way that also understands the way in which such concerns are themselves grounded, and so the limits within which those concerns are properly set. The dominance of the technological consists, in large part, in the inability for the question of such a grounding, or of the question of boundedness that comes with it, to appear as a question.
147. “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 17 (GA 7:17).
148. “Why Poets?,” p. 219 (GA 5:292).
149. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 18 (GA 7:18). Heidegger also emphasizes that the technological is “no merely human doing” (“The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 19 [GA 7:20]).
150. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 61 (GA 15:367-368). Translation modified.
151. Clauss, “Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination,” p. 73, taken from Clauss, Die nordische Seele, pp. 30-32.
152. Clauss, “Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination,” p. 73; Clauss, Die nordische Seele, p. 30.
153. Clauss, “Racial Soul, Landscape, and World Domination,” p. 75; Clauss, Die nordische Seele, p. 32.
154. For Clauss, the early Greeks seem to represent a “southern” variety of Nordic man (the Greek is thus subsidiary to the “Nordic”); for Heidegger, German culture, on the other hand, as well as European or Western culture as such, is fundamentally Greek.
155. See, for instance, Heidegger’s comments in the 1946 essay “Why Poets?,” p. 218 (GA 5:291). Heidegger’s anti-Americanism is undoubtedly strongest during the 1930s and 1940s—Kisiel provides a list of anti-American references in Heidegger’s work, noting that “the abuse intensifies with America’s entry into the war and ebbs when Heidegger meets native Americans fluent in German and in his philosophy such as Glenn Gray” (“Heidegger’s Philosophical Geopolitics in the Third Reich,” in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001], pp. 326-327n31). Such anti-Americanism is commonly noted as one of those objectionable elements in Heidegger’s writing that reflects his provincialism, “Germano-centrism,” or else “Euro-centrism.” There can be no doubt of the objectionable character of much of Heidegger’s anti-Americanism—it often shows quite clearly the way in which Heidegger was apparently unable to think beyond his own German loyalties. At the same time, however, the political, military, economic, and cultural dominance of the United States in the contemporary world (and it is significant that “America” does not mean the American continent as such, but rather a particular part of the political configuration of that continent), as well as the manner in which that dominance seems to be accompanied by an inability on the part of many of the United States’ leaders and citizens to distinguish between the interests of the United States and the interests of the rest of the world, is indicative of the problematic position of the United States in the contemporary world today—albeit, perhaps, something more evident to those outside the United States than within it. Not all forms of antiAmericanism, then, should be viewed as based in mere prejudice alone.
156. As Julian Young points out, Heidegger’s critique of technology picks up on elements more broadly present as part of what has been called the “conservative revolution” in German thought and that is evident in the work of Jünger and Ludwig Klages, as well as Heidegger, prior to the 1940s. Young cites Michael Grossheim’s Ökologie oder Technokratie? (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1995) as providing an excellent account of this development, while Jeffery Herf’s Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) is also relevant. Other figures who contributed to the prewar focus on technology include Ernst Cassirer, “Form und Technik” (1930), in Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Technik, Sprache (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985) and Friedrich Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik (Bonn: Cohen, 1927). The idea of a “philosophy of technology” appears much earlier, however, in the work of Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1877). Heidegger’s critique of technology also has analogues, of course, in Weber (particularly the concept of “rationalization”) and Adorno.
157. Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 213 (GA 40:208).
158. See Heidegger, “Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, p. 65 (GA 16:402—note that the English has Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures extending up to 1945, not 1943 as in the German).
159. Jeffrey Herf, for example, has famously argued for a view of Nazism as itself a form of modernism in Reactionary Modernism, while Michael Allen Thad presents an account of the melding of ideological commitment with modern organizational techniques within the SS in The Business of Genocide: the SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). There is, of course, an influential line of argument stemming from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) that sees Nazism as itself a product of the Enlightenment, and so as “modernist” in a different sense to that employed by Herf or Thad.
160. The passage (which includes the further line: “the same as the starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs”) comes from the text of “The Question Concerning Technology” that was delivered as a lecture in December 1949, but which was later revised to the form that was actually published (retaining only the claim that “agriculture is now a motorized food-industry”). The passage is cited in many places, but first appeared in Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), p. 25.
161. One of the lessons of the Holocaust, however, is surely that human evil persists even in the face of technological progress, and that such progress may itself amplify the capacity to do evil. Moreover, our own confidence in such progress, our own confidence in technology, may serve to obscure such persistence and may also enable the appearance of evil in ways we had not previously envisaged or encountered. In this latter respect, the way in which technology can serve to “distance” us from our engagement in the world, and so from the persons and things with whom we engage, plays a particularly important role.
162. It seems to me that there is a sense in which Heidegger’s reading of Nazism in this way, particularly his reading in the postwar period, was a consequence of his own attempt to come to terms with what had happened in the 1930s and 1940s, both in terms of his personal involvement and the involvement of Germany as a whole. I am not suggesting that this was Heidegger’s attempt to excuse himself or Germany from blame by demonstrating that what was at issue here was a movement of “world-history” rather than merely of German history or of personal biography, but that Heidegger may well have been incapable of making sense of what occurred in the 1930s and 1940s in any other way. Here what becomes evident, I would suggest, is the way in which even great thinkers can be hampered and blinded by the personal and historical situatedness that also enables their thought. There are, however, many commentators who take a very different view of the matter.
163. Indeed, Joseph Fell argues that the relation between Heidegger and Nietzsche can be understood in terms of the relation between the Framework (Gestell) and the fourfold (Geviert): “There is an important sense in which the Nietzsche/Heidegger relation can be read as representing the Ge-stell/Geviert relation. As the Fourfold is disclosed by a converting or re-tuning (Um-stimmung) of the Com-position (Ge-stell), so the thinking of Heidegger comes to pass from a retrieve by Heidegger of the relation of mortals to gods in the thought of Nietzsche”—Joseph Fell, “Heidegger’s Mortals and Gods,” p. 36. Fell thus gives a central role to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God as that which requires a retrieval of the holy.
164. See “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God Is Dead,’” in Off the Beaten Track, p. 178 (GA 5:239); also pp. 169-193.
165. Ibid., pp. 192-193 (GA 5:258).
166. Ibid., p. 196 (GA 5:263).
167. Ibid., p. 191 (GA 5:256).
168. “On the Question of Being,” p. 321 (GA 9:424)—Heidegger adds “This is no war, but the Πóλεµος that first lets gods and humans, freemen and slaves, appear in their respective essence and leads to a critical encounter of being. Compared to this encounter, world wars remain superficial. They are less and less capable of deciding anything the more technological their armaments.” See also “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God Is Dead,’” p. 191 (GA 5:256).
169. See “On the Question of Being,” p. 299 (GA 9:396). In his response to Ernst Jünger in this essay, Heidegger quotes from a note he wrote during 1939-1940: “Jünger’s text The Worker is important because, in a different way from Spengler, it achieves what all Nietzsche literature thus far has been unable to achieve, namely, to impart an experience of beings and the way in which they are, in the light of Nietzsche’s projection of beings as will to power.” And a few lines after this quotation, Heidegger says of “The Question Concerning Technology” that it “owes a lasting debt to the descriptions in The Worker”—“On the Question of Being,” p. 295 (GA 9:391).
170. Much of Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche depends on his use of this work—a work then taken to be a legitimate part of Nietzsche’s corpus, but actually a volume constructed by Nietzsche’s sister from fragments and unpublished writings in a heavily edited form.
171. Basic Concepts, pp. 32-33 (GA 51:36-37).
172. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 259 (GA 9:340).
173. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 159 (GA 7:161). Heidegger also emphasizes here the character of building as always a “letting dwell.”
174. See Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, pp. 47-48. While it is certainly true that work is essential to human being, it is important to recognize the possibility of different “modes” of work within which human being may be taken up.
175. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), pp. 126-127.
176. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 125.
177. Martin Jacques, “The Death of Intimacy,” Guardian, Saturday, September 18, 2004, p. 17. Jacques’s analysis argues that the rise of “self” as the “dominant interest,” “the relentless spread of the market into every part of society,” and the rise of communication technologies are eroding the “very idea of what it means to be human.” Jacques sees the erosion at issue here as evident in a wide range of phenomena from the loss of intimacy in relationships to a loss of any real encounter with death. Jacques’s analysis thus picks out many of the features to which Heidegger’s critique of technological modernity also draws attention.
178. The line of argument developed here is something explored further in my “The Dualities of Work: Self-Creation and Self-Consumption,” Philosophy Today 49 (2005), 256-263.
179. “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 33 (GA 7:34)—here, as elsewhere, I have translated “Bestand” as “resource” rather than Lovitt’s “standing reserve.”
180. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” p. 152 (GA 7:155).
181. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 60 (GA 15:366).
182. “Summary of a Seminar,” in On Time and Being, p. 53 (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 57). Translation modified. See also “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 60 (GA 15:366) and “The Way to Language,” pp. 131-132 (GA 12:251-252).
183. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 22 (GA 7:23), Heidegger writes: “All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last. Nevertheless, it remains, with respect to its holding sway, that which precedes all: the earliest. The Greek thinkers already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier with regard to the arising that holds sway becomes manifest to us men only later. That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men.” Here Heidegger is concerned to point out the way the character of any mode of revealing becomes evident only very late in its unfolding. Thus the essence of technology in ordering things as pure resource only comes to light in the extreme manifestation of technology that we see emerging in the contemporary world. This is a slightly different sense in which modes of revealing conceal themselves than the one at issue in my discussion above—my concern is with the way modes of revealing conceal themselves as modes of revealing by “blocking” access to other such modes.
184. The same point could be made using other modes of revealing, for instance, that of the Classical Greeks, of pre-European Maori or indigenous Australian culture, of medieval Islam, or of Classical China. Of course, modern technological revealing has its own origins in Greek culture, and yet, at least from Heidegger’s perspective, it is distinct from it. At the time of Classical Greek culture, the essence of technology had not yet been realized, nor had the technological yet emerged as the dominant mode of revealing across the entire world.
185. This is a crucial point since if it really were the case that technology simply did away with place (as many people entranced by the power of modern telecommunications and transportation often seem to think it has), then there would be no basis on which to develop the sort of topological critique of the technological that is to be found in Heidegger. It is precisely because place (and places) remains, in spite of its obscuring by technology, that technological revealing is so problematic. This is a point for which I have argued, though from a rather different perspective, in “Acting at a Distance and Knowing from Afar: Agency and Knowledge on the World Wide Web,” in Ken Goldberg (ed.), The Robot in the Garden (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 108-125. The problematic nature of place within technological modernity is indicated by the character of locations such as the shopping mall and the airport—referred to by Marc Augé as “non-places” (see Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe [London: Verso, 1995])—both of which seem to be paradigmatic of the “placeless places” that characterize so much of the contemporary world.
186. One might argue that there are limits that have become apparent within physics, notably in respect of the very large (events on a cosmological scale) and the very small (events on the quantum scale), but the extent to which this constitutes the same sort of “unfathomability” and “mystery” that is associated with the revealing given in the world as “holy” is a matter for debate.
187. Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 158 (GA 45:183).
188. Ibid., p. 13 (GA 45:13).
189. “The Turning,” pp. 46-48; see also Parmenides, pp. 79-87 (GA 54:117-130).
190. See “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 63 (GA 15:370).
191. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre, p. 204.
192. Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1957).
193. See Bergson, Time and Freewill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen, 1910).
194. See “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 21-22 (GA 7:25-26).
195. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 62 (GA 15:368-369).
196. The connection, via “stellen,” between “vorstellen” and “Gestell” should not be overlooked here. See also “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, pp. 66-69 (GA 5:88-92), for more on the idea of “representation.”
197. Meyrovich, “Medium Theory,” in David Crowley and David Mitchell (eds.), Communication Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 67. What Meyrovich seems to miss, however, is the way in which the changes wrought by the technological do not affect the basic tie between place and human being, but only the manner in which that appears—and, of course, in the technological world, part of that appearance is such as to hide the connection with place itself.
198. In this respect, Tom Rockmore’s objection to the Heideggerian analysis to the effect that Heidegger is mistaken in attributing an “essence” to technology since technology has no essence or, as Rockmore puts it, “There is no technology in general; there are only instantiations of forms of technology” (see Rockmore—On Heidegger’s Philosophy and Nazism, pp. 236-237 [see more generally pp. 232-238]— misses a crucial element in Heidegger’s analysis [which is not to say that one might not be able to argue against Heidegger on this matter, but that one will need to engage with Heidegger at a more detailed level of argument]).
199. Thus the employment of concepts of “efficiency” and “effectiveness” that are so often taken as “neutral” measures of success turn out to be notions that are themselves completely dependent on the particular technologies with respect to which they operate. There is no “neutrality” to these notions, and what counts as efficiency within one setting may not count as efficiency in another. Indeed, increases in efficiency have often, though not always, as much to do with shifts in what counts as a measure of efficiency—this is all the more so when the systems whose efficiency is at issue are those that rely heavily on human engagement and interaction, for instance, in education and in most office and service-based activities.
200. For such a total ordering to be realized would also be for the image of the world as pure spatialized, measurable, extendedness to be realized—such a realization would entail, not merely the obscuring, but the obliteration, of all sense of place, and so too the complete blocking off of the Event in its self-disclosive character.
201. On the general issue of failure and the technological, see Jeff Malpas and Gary Wickham, “Governance and the World: From Joe DiMaggio to Michel Foucault,” The UTS Review 3 (1997), 91-108.
202. Albert Camus, “Helen’s Exile,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Vintage, n.p., n.d.), pp. 148-149 and 153.
203. In Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 69.
204. Identity and Difference, p. 33.
205. “The Turning,” in “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays, pp. 39-40 (Die Technik und die Kehre [Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1962], p. 39).
206. The theme of release from the domination of technology and technological devices has, somewhat ironically, become a familiar and recurrent theme in contemporary popular culture. Thus Keanu Reeves battles against the domination of the “machines” in The Matrix, Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as a machine who is first an enemy and then a defender against a more sophisticated version of his kind, in the Terminator movies, and in I, Robot, Will Smith fights against a rebellion of the robotic slaves on whom human society has come to rely. Drawing on an older set of ideas and images, The Lord of the Rings portrays a battle against what is essentially a mode of technological domination in which the use of a certain all-encompassing technology (the “One Ring”) is foresworn precisely of its dominating and transforming power. What is ironic about all of this, of course, is that the theme of the struggle against technological dominance (against “the rule of the machines”) becomes a commodity produced and marketed by the very movie industry, and its increasingly diverse offshoots, that is itself a manifestation of the technological ordering of the contemporary world.
207. See “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 25-26 (GA 7:26).
208. “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 54 (“Gelassenheit,” GA 16:527).
209. In this respect, Heidegger’s own “turning” is a turning away from the intoxication with the power of a certain form of “technology”—that which appeared in the form of the National Socialist “Revolution” in 1933. On the shift in Heidegger’s thinking in this respect and especially his attempt to articulate an alternative to the violence of technological revealing, see Clare Pearson Geiman, “Heidegger’s Antigones,” in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds.), Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 161-182.
210. Although, some caution needs to be exercised here since “democracy” is by no means a clear or unambiguous term—see Jeff Malpas and Gary Wickham, “Democracy and Instrumentalism,” Australian Journal of Political Science 33 (1998), pp. 345-362. Indeed, the emphasis on democratic politics as tied to power and as always contested, limited, dispersed, inevitable, and failing itself tends toward a conception of the democratic that will not allow it to be fixed in any particular political formation or ideological structure.
211. See Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), for an account of both Camus and Arendt as converging on a “rebellious politics”—a politics of resistance that rejects any form of violence or ideology and instead speaks in favor of the limited and always negotiatory character of political life.
212. It should be noted, in fairness to Heidegger (though some might think even countenancing such a reading to be overly charitable), that one possible interpretation of the skepticism toward democracy expressed in the Der Spiegel interview is to treat it in terms of a skepticism about democracy as a particular ideology—as a determinate and already understood form of political organization and practice (this would be to attribute to Heidegger a position that is sensitive to at least some of the considerations alluded to in n. 209, although arriving at a different conclusion). Of course, the argument implicit in my approach has been that democracy is itself founded on a recognition of questionability and limit, and, understood in this way, democracy seems in accord with a Heideggerian “topology.” Yet it might be thought that one of the important questions at issue here is precisely whether the term “democracy” is indeed adequate to the conception of the political that emerges out of such a “topology.” My own view, which I take to be the view also, for instance, of Camus and Arendt, is that it is adequate, but perhaps Heidegger would have answered that it is not, or, at least, that he was not convinced of its adequacy in this regard.
1. “Who Is Nietszche’s Zarathustra?” trans B. Magnus, Review of Metaphysics 20 (1967), 412 (GA 7:102).
2. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” p. 253 (GA 9:333).
3. Parmenides, p. 149 (GA 54:222).
4. Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 314.
5. Van Buren seems to be misled, in part, by a failure to distinguish the everyday happening of disclosive gathering in the Event from the disclosure of that happening. The latter typically occurs only in the poetic and the meditative, whereas the former occurs irrespective of the manner of our comportment toward it. That there is indeed an issue concerning the disclosure of the disclosive gathering of the Event, while not absent from early Heidegger, is something that is much clearer and more developed in the later thinking.
6. Thus Crowell writes that “even the later Heidegger does nothing more than seek a way ‘back to the things themselves’ (Husserl’s phenomenological slogan), and, in letting them speak, remains committed to the possibility of phenomenology”— Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, p. 221.
7. “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” pp. 257-258 (GA 9:337-339).
8. Basic Concepts, p. 75 (GA 51:89).
9. “The Nature of Language,” p. 93 (GA 12:188).
10. Derrida writes of Heidegger that “the solicitation of the Site and the Land is in no way, it must be emphasized, a passionate attachment to territory or locality, is in no way a provincialism or particularism. . . . The thinking of being is not a pagan cult of the Site, because the Site is never a given proximity but a promised one”— Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 145. What I think Derrida nevertheless misses here is the way in which what he calls the “Site” is never some abstract “locality,” but always the site of our own concrete being. The task, however, is to see that the manner of our “proximity” to that “site” is not such that the site is simply given, but only appears inasmuch as it comes into question, inasmuch as it opens up into questionability, differentiation, multiplicity . . . and into unity.
11. See Heidegger’s discussion of this in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” esp. p. 142 (GA 53:178): “The poetizing of the locality is the provenance of journeying from the foreign.”
12. “The Question of Being,” pp. 308-309 (GA 9:408-409).
13. See Young Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 154.
14. “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” pp. 60-61 (GA 15:366).
15. “Summary of a Seminar,” p. 43 (Zur Sachen des Denkens, p. 46). Translation modified.
16. See especially “On the Question of Being.”
17. Heidegger, “Cézanne,” GA 13, p. 223.
18. A version of which (unfortunately all too far removed from the original) appears on the dust-jacket to Place and Experience.
19. Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition, Auckland City Art Gallery, March-April 1972, p. 19. In many ways McCahon’s work can be seen as attempting to uncover the structure of the New Zealand landscape—perhaps, one might say, to find the “fourfold” proper to it. As McCahon said: “I saw something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land but not yet to its people. Not yet understood or communicated, not yet even really invented. My work has largely been to communicate this vision, and to invent the way to see it,” McCahon, “Beginnings,” Landfall 20 (1966), 360. For an introduction to the role of place and landscape in McCahon’s work (as well as in that of the Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne), see Rosalie Gascoigne—Colin McCahon: Sense of Place (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1990).
20. James K. Baxter, Collected Poems (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 34.