Heidegger and the Thinking of Place

Topological Thinking

The Topos of Thinking

We may venture the step back out of philosophy into the thinking of Being as soon as we have grown familiar with the provenance of thinking.

—Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought

If Heidegger’s thinking is, as he himself says, a “topology of being” (Topologie des Seyns)¹—a saying of the place of being—then what is the place that appears here? What is the place of being, and in what place does this thinking take place? These questions direct our attention not only to the role of topos or place as that which is the object of Heidegger’s thinking, and so as that toward which it is directed, but to the very topos or place within which Heidegger’s thinking emerges, and the character of that thinking as itself determined by topos, as emerging out of it, and as returning to it.² As such, these questions move us within the domain of a form of “metaphilosophy” that looks to uncover the essential framework within which Heidegger’s thinking takes place.

Understood as topological, Heidegger’s thinking can be said to be concerned with place in at least three ways: (i) with place as the proper focus of thinking, and so as that which it is concerned to think and to speak, to address and to articulate; (ii) as that which is the proper horizon of thinking, that holds thinking within it, that bounds it, and that thereby allows thinking to appear as thinking; and (iii) as that which is the proper origin of thinking, out of which thinking emerges, and from which it gains its direction as well as its sustenance.³ In exploring these three ways in which topos appears in Heidegger’s thinking, it is important to note that they are not sharply distinct from one another, but instead reflect different aspects of what is a single, unitary topos—a place that encompasses focus, horizon, and origin, and that always appears as containing within it an essential indeterminacy and multiplicity.

It is only appropriate that the exploration of the place of thinking should begin where thinking itself begins, and so take as its starting point the placed origin of thinking. Here origin is itself to be understood not as some temporal starting point, but rather as that out of which something comes to appearance. Origin is thus already topological—to begin is to begin in and from out of place. In Heidegger, this focus on the placed origin of thinking appears very early. It is present in Heidegger’s emphasis on the need to turn back to “life” as the proper context for philosophy, in the emphasis on the idea of hermeneutical situatedness, and in the focus on Dasein—that mode of being that is constituted in terms of the “there/here”—as the proper site for the opening up of the question of being as such. No matter the changes in Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, a key point around which his thinking constantly turns is the idea that thinking arises, and can only arise, out of our original encounter with the world—an encounter that is always singular and situated, in which we encounter ourselves as well the world, and in which what first appears is not something abstract or fragmented, but rather the things themselves, as things, in their concrete unity. Philosophy begins, then, in that same place that is the place for the emergence of world—and so for the appearance of things, the engagement with others, and the recognition of self. This place is one that is constantly before us, in which we are always situated, and yet from which we often seem estranged.

Although there are occasions when Heidegger appears to present this original and originary place of encounter in terms that are suggestive of the unique and the epochal (for instance, in “The Origin of the Work of Art”⁴), for the most part, it is the place of the ordinary and the everyday in and through which what is extraordinary shines forth. In Heidegger’s early writing this appears in terms of the continual use of everyday examples for phenomenological interrogation—it is in the engagement with such ordinary things that the world itself comes into view. In his later essays, the happening of the Fourfold—the unitary gathering of earth, sky, mortals, and gods—is presented as occurring not through the work of any individual, not even the poet or artist, and certainly not the statesman or leader, but rather through those ordinary things around which human life and activity is configured and given shape, and in the light of which human existence itself takes on its character as human. What is extraordinary about these ordinary things is the manner in which they provide the focus for the opening of world, which includes, of course, their own opening as things, their own appearing and coming to presence. It is in the encounter with such presencing that we are given over to wonder—a wonder that is not provoked by anything other than the simple happening of being, a happening in which we are ourselves always implicated.⁵ Philosophy thus begins in no special place, but rather has its origin in any and every place, and yet also in a place that is everywhere the “same”— the place or happening of place that is the happening of being, that is the opening of world, that is the original and originary presencing of things.

The inquiry into the place of thinking that Heidegger undertakes in Being and Time, in particular, and that is couched in terms of the question of the meaning of being, takes the being of Dasein as its essential starting-point.⁶ Being and Time thus makes quite explicit that the place of thinking is itself identical with the place of Dasein’s own being—with the place of existence. The fact of such an identification, and thus the fact that Being and Time should find its own orientation to the question of the meaning of being in and through the being of Dasein, is not a result of any merely “epistemic” consideration—it is not that Dasein simply happens to be the only entry point to the question of being that is available to us. Instead, the focus on Dasein arises because of the particular way in which the very question of being already invokes the being of questionability as such, and the being of Dasein is that very mode of being whose being is always already given as questionable.⁷ Only in the being of the “there” can the possibility of any form of question or of questioning emerge, and so the being of the question is itself essentially grounded in the being of Dasein, while the mode of being of Dasein is the mode of being of questionability. That the place in which Being and Time opens up its own inquiry is the place of Dasein’s own being is thus a necessary consequence of the way in which the question of being can only be taken up in and through the being that belongs to questionability as such—a being that remains always obscure, always itself questionable.⁸ The turn toward place, and so toward questionability, is not a turn back into what is comfortable and secure, but quite the opposite. It is a turn into both the questionability of place and the place of questionability—even in its very placedness, thinking is characterized by its being always “on the way” (unterwegs).⁹

Our being in the world is the same as our “being there/here.” To find ourselves always already in the world is to find our existence always already given before us in the very encounter with ourselves, with others, and with things, as that occurs in the place in which we are. This “being placed” is identical with our existence; it is also that which provokes the most fundamental mode of questioning—the mode of questioning that is the very opening up of possibility that is the opening of world. The belonging together of questionability with placedness is clearly evident in the way Heidegger deploys the notion, developed further by Gadamer, of hermeneutic situatedness (a key theme in much of his early thinking), and in the related idea of truth as disclosedness or unconcealment—as aletheia.¹⁰

The happening of understanding that is the happening of truth is itself the happening of questionability—it is the opening up of that expansive but bounded locale in which our speaking and our acting is revealed as not only true or false, but as capable of being true or false, and so of being addressed as to the grounds of its truth. Moreover, the way in which place and questionability appear together here is indicative of the way in which the emergence of truth itself occurs only in the opening of a dimension that both allows certain elements to emerge as salient while at the same time others are withdrawn—“truth” names, in one sense, just this event of emergence and withdrawal. As an event, this happening of truth takes place as the opening of place into world as an opening-up, a clearing, that allows for the appearance of both truth and error as these attach to specific claims, statements, and beliefs. It is thus an opening that allows for the very possibility of philosophy even as a body of things said.¹¹

Heidegger was himself critical of Being and Time for its failure adequately to address the problem of subjectivism.¹² This may already be thought to be a problem in the way in which the work begins with a focus on Dasein understood as the essence of human being, and although this starting point should not be seen to entail any necessary subjectivism, the manner in which the being of Dasein is subsequently explicated—particularly the prioritization of existentiality and “projection” over other elements with the structure of Dasein, as well as the associated prioritization of originary temporality ¹³—suggests that there may indeed be a problem in the way in which Dasein is originally understood. In Heidegger’s later thinking, Dasein comes to be understood rather differently from the manner in which it is analyzed in the earlier thinking. The priority given to existentiality and temporality is largely abandoned as Heidegger’s thinking develops further, and although the focus on Dasein remains, as does the intimacy of the connection between Dasein and questionability, it is the topological character of Dasein that comes increasingly to the fore—its connecting of Sein with Da, of being with place. Dasein still encompasses the essence of the human, but it does so precisely because of the way in which the being of the human finds its essence in the being of place—in the belonging together of being and topos.

On this reconfigured understanding, questionability can be seen to reside not merely in the asking of questions, but in the essential iridescence—the indeterminacy and multiplicity—that attaches to place and to being as such (which is why it is also tied to listening). Moreover, both questionability and iridescence are bound to finitude. The happening of place is the happening of finitude—which is not merely the happening of that which is opposed to the infinite, but rather the very opening up of that bounded which is the domain of the presencing of things. Place is Dasein, the belonging together of the there/here with being, and as such it is essentially singular and bounded even though its boundedness can never be given any absolute determination. Questionability is tied to such finitude, since it is only in finitude that a domain of possibility can be opened up that reaches out to the world, and is itself open to it, and yet does not already determine the world. What happens over the course of Heidegger’s own thinking is thus also an increasing recognition of the way in which the finitude that is the focus for so much of his thinking is indeed a finitude that belongs to place as such (to Dasein as that in which human being is founded), rather than as belonging, in the first instance, to the human (as that whose essence Dasein is).¹⁴

The most serious problem presented by Heidegger’s thinking in Being and Time is arguably its ambiguous, sometimes inconsistent, treatment of place or topos. Not only does Being and Time lack any adequate thematization of place, but it also interprets the “there” in explicitly temporal terms. As a result, place as it appears in Being and Time is on the one hand downgraded, inasmuch as it is associated with spatiality and so with “falling,” and on the other hand, inasmuch as originary temporality itself appears as implicitly topological, so also is place given a certain centrality, but only as removed from the spatial.¹⁵ The attempted resolution of the ambiguity that is apparent here leads Heidegger toward a more direct concentration on place in his later thinking, and, simultaneously with this, a reconfiguration of the thinking of time and space as “timespace”—Zeitraum¹⁶ (whether the latter is a wholly satisfactory reconfiguration is another question ¹⁷). This attempted resolution also results in a change in the way in which Heidegger’s thinking of being and of place proceeds: there is a shift not only toward a more explicit understanding of place as the proper focus and origin of thinking, but also toward a mode of thinking that itself reflects the character of place as such.

The main line of thinking that is developed in Heidegger’s early thinking, and that culminates in his 1927 magnum opus, moves in one direction: toward exhibiting time as the horizon of being. Put in terms of the Heideggerian focus on Dasein, this means showing that the “there,” for all that it may carry spatial connotations, is fundamentally temporal (in fact, spatiality is itself founded in temporality).¹⁸ Although it is quite clear that this is not intended to imply any reduction of the spatiality or the topological to the temporal—of a multiplicity of elements to a single principle—the way in which Heidegger develops the priority of temporality, and of originary temporality, in Being and Time makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that a form of reduction nevertheless results.¹⁹ Heidegger’s employment of a notion of what I have elsewhere referred to as “hierarchical dependence”²⁰ involves him in what is essentially an attempt to found the unity of Dasein in temporality above all else, and so also to “derive” the structure of Dasein’s existential spatiality from originary temporality. The latter attempt is one that Heidegger later rejects as untenable,²¹ and his later thinking is also characterized by the abandonment of the sort of hierarchical analysis that appears in Being and Time. Instead, the approach that predominates in the later work is one directed at the elucidation of a form of unity that retains its irreducible complexity, but whose elements exhibit a reciprocal interdependence.²² This is perhaps best illustrated by the structure of the Fourfold in late essays such as “The Thing” and “Building Dwelling Thinking.”²³ Only within the unity of the Fourfold do earth and sky, mortals and gods come to appearance, and yet only through the gathering together of those elements is the Fourfold itself constituted.

The nature of the unity that appears here, and its importance as constituting a very different mode of philosophical analysis than that found in Being and Time, is something that I have discussed in detail elsewhere,²⁴ but some brief characterization is needed here. The multiple unity that the Fourfold exhibits is an exact mirror of the similarly multiple unity that can be seen in the unity of topos, of place, and that is evident as soon as one looks to understand the constitution even of those ordinary locales in which we find ourselves—a town, a stretch of landscape, a countryside. Places find their unity not in any single preexisting element in that place from which the unity of the whole derives, but rather in the way in which the multiple elements of the place are gathered together in their mutual relatedness to one another. Even those salient features within a landscape that may be seen to give focus to it are themselves given their own character through the elements of the landscape that come into focus around it. Thus, in Heidegger’s example in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” the bridge appears as a bridge not through the exercise of its own qualities in determining an otherwise featureless terrain, but through a coming to appearance in which bridge, river, and the entirety of the countryside around it are gathered together as one and as many, and are thereby determined, in their being, as bridge, as river, as countryside. It is this essential gathering of elements in a mutual belonging together in which they come to presence that Heidegger also describes as the Ereignis—an event that is to be understood not as purely temporal, but as the temporalizing of space and the spatializing of time in the single gatheredness of place.²⁵

The place that is evident here is the very same place in which not only Being and Time but all of Heidegger’s philosophy finds its origin and its ground. It is the very same place as that in which thinking itself arises, from which it is often estranged, and to which it must always return. Heidegger is himself quite explicit in his own understanding of thinking as always involved in such a “return” to place—as a homecoming.²⁶ The return at issue here is not, however, a return that is predicated on a genuine moving away from—if that were the case there could be no possibility of return at all. Instead, the return is a “turning back” to that in which we already find ourselves (a turning back, in one sense, to our very placedness). In this respect one might say that it is a turning back to that which is always presupposed by our more specific modes of being. It is like the movement in which, having been engrossed in some activity, we look up to see the place that has been around us all the time, and that has also enabled and supported the activity in which we have been engrossed, or like the analogous movement in which, engaged in conversation, we suddenly realize the way in which our speaking has been sustained and guided by what has remained always unspoken. What occurs in such instances is indeed a turning or a coming back to place, or to a place, in a way that also brings that place itself into view. It is an occurrence that is mirrored in Heidegger’s own image of the “clearing” (Lichtung) that allows the emergence of things into presence. Such a “clearing” is a place, a topos, but as a place, it withdraws at the same time as it allows appearance within it—a place is precisely that which opens up to allow room for what belongs within it. The return to place is thus the turning toward that which allows for, that which gives room, but also that which withdraws.

The movement back to place—back to that which otherwise remains unnoticed and unremarked (as place itself often remains in the background of our activities)—can also be understood as a movement of recollection, of remembering again, and Heidegger draws directly on this idea alongside that of return or homecoming. The conjunction of ideas of remembrance with that of the return home leads to the common charge that Heidegger’s thinking contains an essential nostalgia within it—a charge that is correct in its attribution of the nostalgic, but too often mistaken in its construal of what this means.²⁷ It is the character of thinking as a remembering that is itself invoked in Heidegger’s characterization of philosophy as marked by forgetting, and especially by the forgetting of being (Seinsvergessenheit)—a forgetting that must now be understood as also a forgetting, not only of finitude and questionability, but of place. Such forgetting is most evident in the denial of limit, in the claim to certainty, and in the assertion of the universal and the timeless—in the loss of any proper sense of the place in which thinking itself belongs.²⁸

As a constant turning back to the place in which it already is, a constant remembering of what is being forgotten, a constant bringing forward of what always withdraws, the thinking of place, and so also thinking as such, exhibits an essential circularity that is identical to that which appears elsewhere in both the hermeneutic circle and the circularity of the transcendental. The way in which circularity comes to the fore in these latter two cases—that of the hermeneutic and the transcendental—is indicative of the way in which each is implicated with the question of ground.²⁹ The hermeneutic circle exhibits the way in which understanding always finds its ground within a domain that it has already constituted for itself (hence the interdependence between parts, and between parts and whole, that is characteristic of the hermeneutical). Transcendental circularity, which often appears in critiques of the transcendental project as verificationist, ad hominem, or as implicitly presupposing what it aims to demonstrate (but is also present in Kant’s characterization of the transcendental as essentially tied to a form of self-constitution ³⁰), takes on the project of a philosophical grounding of the possibility of understanding or experience as such.³¹ In both cases, the hermeneutical and the transcendental, the preoccupation with the question of ground, as well as the movement of circularity, are indicative of the topological character of the projects that are at issue. As such, the hermeneutical and the transcendental move within the same domain that also is the focus in the inquiry into the place of thinking, and the topos that they invoke is the same topos within which Heidegger’s thought also moves. The circularity at issue here is thus, in each case, the same as that which appears in the thinking of place, and so in the thinking of the very place of thinking.

The idea that the topological encompasses the hermeneutic and the transcendental, and that the latter might themselves be understood as forms of the topological, is not itself clear in Heidegger’s own thinking on the matter. Indeed, while the hermeneutic and the transcendental are key terms in his early thinking (they play important roles in Being and Time), they largely disappear from the later writings.³² Yet although we can understand the reason for this within the framework in which Heidegger’s thinking develops, there is good reason to suppose that Heidegger’s abandonment of the hermeneutic and the transcendental itself obscures the essentially topological character of both these modes of thinking, and that the topos that emerges so clearly in later Heidegger is actually the same topos that was always, even if only implicitly, at stake in the thinking of the hermeneutic and the transcendental.³³

Circularity, mutuality and multiplicity of elements, rejection of any form of reductionism—these are all key features in any thinking, any form of questioning, that addresses and is attentive to its own placedness. The development in Heidegger’s thinking is one in which these elements become clearer as the focus on topos also becomes more explicit. The entanglement of place with questionability brings to the fore the finitude of thinking as this arises alongside an essential relatedness to world. Such finitude is not a temporal finitude alone (pace some readings of Heidegger’s early thought), but is essentially the finitude of placedness—a placedness that encompasses both the temporal and the spatial. The “being-placed” that is at issue here is the very origin, horizon, and focus of thinking, but it also marks its limit. Here, in the sheer givenness of being—which is the givenness of place as well as of world ³⁴—our thinking finds its proper “end” in that which is also its origin. Here thinking does not come to a stop, but in finding its proper limit or boundary, it thereby grasps its own character as thinking—thinking thus comes into its own, that is, it finds its place.³⁵ Retaining the focus on thinking as questioning, what becomes apparent here is the radical difference in the kind of questioning that belongs to that essential thinking that is philosophy: it is not a thinking that refers us from the questionability of one phenomenon to its answer in another, but instead directs our attention to that which supports and sustains all such questioning, to the very place of questionability as such—its horizon and ground, its origin and its end—a place that is also the place of our own being.