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The Turning to/of Place

Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway.

—Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?

In T. H. White’s magnificent retelling of Malory, The Once and Future King, the character of Merlin has one especially peculiar characteristic: he lives his life backward, from future to past.¹ It has always seemed to me that a similarly backward trajectory is particularly suited to the reading of philosophers—at least those whose work is sustained by a significant unity of vision—and especially to the reading of a philosopher such as Heidegger (who himself tells us that in essential history the beginning comes last²). Much of my own reading of Heidegger (and not only Heidegger, but Davidson too) has thus taken the later works as the key to understanding the earlier, and as the basis on which a broader sense of his thinking as a whole should be developed.

The point at issue here may also be put topologically: if the work of a thinker is construed as the exploration of a certain region of thought—a region that is itself opened up by some sustaining insight—then the more that exploration proceeds, the more will the region itself come into view, and the more will the landscape that belongs to it be made evident. Indeed, the initial survey of a territory is likely to tell more about the character of the explorer than about the territory itself (and perhaps not so much even about the explorer), and this seems to be true of philosophical exploration no less than of the exploration of a physical terrain. It is only as the explorer’s own engagement with the territory proceeds that the territory itself comes to light; and so if it is the territory that interests us—in philosophical terms, if it is the problems themselves that are our focus—then we would perhaps do well to look to the explorer’s engagement as it is more fully developed, rather than in its early stages.

On these grounds (although they are not the only grounds), it seems sensible to be cautious in our reading of Heidegger’s early work as against his later. If what concerns us is indeed the broader direction and domain in which his thinking moves, then the later thinking may prove no less valuable than the earlier. Yet, in fact, the bulk of attention given to Heidegger’s writings has tended to focus on the early work rather than the later. Moreover, in comparison with the earlier, the later writings are often viewed as not only lacking the analytical insight of the earlier work, but as increasingly given over to a dubiously founded “history of being” and a mystical obscurantism. In this respect, the opinion voiced by Emmanuel Levinas in a late interview undoubtedly captures a widely shared view: “Being and Time is much more significant and profound than any of Heidegger’s later works.”³ This is not to say that the later thinking has been simply neglected or that it has been without influence. Some of the most important engagements with Heidegger’s thinking begin with the later thinking—certainly this is true of Gadamer, and arguably of Derrida (as well as for those whose engagement with Heidegger takes its point of departure from the work of these thinkers). Yet it remains the case that for many readers of Heidegger’s work, not only is Being and Time the place where one first enters into his thinking, but it is also a place that many never really leave.

There are obvious reasons for the concentration of so much attention onto the earlier work, not the least of which is the idiosyncratic voice, style, and mode of approach, to say nothing of the density of ideas, which characterizes the later thinking—Gadamer points to the increasing difficulties of language that the later thinking embodies and presents.⁴ Yet not only is it the case that the bulk of Heidegger’s writing, including some of his most important works—most notably, perhaps, those on Nietzsche and on Hölderlin—comes from the later period, but what is often forgotten, or at least overlooked, is that the later thinking arises out of what Heidegger viewed as a failure of the earlier thinking. This failure is most clearly evident in the fact that Being and Time remains, as we all know, an incomplete work, a work that Heidegger rushed into publication and then abandoned. That abandonment did not, as Heidegger reminds us at various places, constitute a disowning or disavowing—the path taken by Being and Time is still “a necessary one”⁵—but it was nevertheless grounded in problems intrinsic to the work, and was not the result merely of some arbitrary change of mind.

Although Being and Time remains an enormously important and philosophically rich work, we cannot come to any real understanding of the Heideggerian project, or of what Heidegger came to view as lying at the heart of that project, if we remain with the early thinking alone, or if we fail to attend to the path that moves from the earlier thinking to the later—a path to which Heidegger himself directs our attention on more than one occasion. To engage with Heidegger philosophically is thus to engage with the path of his thinking as it moves not only through Being and Time, but also beyond it—and that means coming to a clearer recognition of how the later thinking is indeed required by the path that Being and Time already opens up, and also of the nature and significance of the later thought. Attending to that path means attending to the shift in Heidegger’s thinking that occurs as he attempts to rethink Being and Time during the later 1920s and into the 1930s (a rethinking that is also, it should be noted, bound up with his political entanglement with Nazism, and his attempt to come to terms with that entanglement).⁶ In attending to the path at issue here, one is also forced to attend to the character of the so-called Turning (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought. The Turning is essentially a turning to place, as well as a Turning of (and in) place.⁷ In the Turning, and so in the shift from Heidegger’s early to his later thinking, the question of place comes clearly into view, not only as a question in its own right, but also as that around which the other elements in Heidegger’s thinking are brought together.

The Failure of Being and Time

In his 1962 letter to William Richardson, Heidegger emphasizes that although Being and Time is a problematic work, it is a work that nevertheless has to be worked through.⁸ The working through of Being and Time is necessary for Heidegger’s own path of thinking, but one might also argue that it represents, at least as Heidegger sees it, a necessary stage on the path of thought as such. One of the reasons for this is that Being and Time is a central element in the engagement with Kant, and so also with certain elements that are foundational to the German idealist tradition, that characterized much of Heidegger’s work in the ten years from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s—more or less coming to a conclusion with the publication of What Is a Thing? in 1935. It also represents an attempt to engage in a certain sort of systematic thinking (itself exemplified in Kant’s own work) directed at the analysis of that structure that underpins, and is constitutive of, human engagement in the world, and that also may be said to underpin the structure of world as such.⁹

One of the central difficulties in Being and Time, however, is the lack of the conceptual resources in the work needed to enable it adequately to take up that task. Most importantly, Being and Time lacks an adequate grasp of the distinction between space as it appears in Cartesian thought and place. Directly connected with this is the fact that Being and Time nevertheless implicitly construes temporality in topological terms at the same time as it also claims to eschew the spatial and the topological in favor of the temporal. The problem can be summarized, in condensed form, as follows: on the one hand, Being and Time aims to provide an account of the proper unity of Dasein, and so also of world, that reflects the unity of the “Da,” the “there/here” as founded in the unity of temporality; on the other hand, Being and Time also demonstrates that the unity of temporality, which is not itself temporal, can only be topological in character, and so cannot found the unity of the “there/here,” but is already given in it (although this latter conclusion is not one that appears in the pages of Being and Time itself).

The problems that surround the topological character of Being and Time come to a particular focus, as I read matters, around Heidegger’s attempts to derive the structure of existential spatiality from originary temporality—an attempt that Heidegger soon came to recognize was “untenable” (as he put it in 1962).¹⁰ The difficulty here is connected to a general problem concerning the argumentative methodology of Being and Time. Heidegger’s analysis begins with Dasein—understood in Being and Time as identical with the essence of human being (although the nature of this identity is somewhat equivocal). The taking of such a starting point is already questionable, since it suggests that the inquiry Heidegger undertakes is one already disposed toward a certain privileging of what might otherwise be understood as subjectivity.¹¹ The key focus for Heidegger, however, is not on Dasein understood in some general way, or even on Dasein as subject, but rather on Dasein in its unity. The unity at issue here cannot be external to Dasein, but must belong essentially to it,¹² and yet at the same time, that unity is not simply given in the everyday structure of Dasein—it is instead a unity that must be uncovered. Heidegger thus attempts to peel back the structures of Dasein, through successive layers, as it were, to reveal the core of Dasein’s unity as given in the unitary structure of originary temporality. What this means, however, is that the layers that are successively peeled back are taken to be, in some sense, derivative of, or secondary to, the layers that are thereby revealed. Yet in that case, the unity of each of the derivative layers belongs not to that layer as such, but rather to the layer that underlies it—in the case of existential spatiality, for instance, one might say that what this means is that the unity that belongs to it is not a unity that belongs to existential spatiality as such, but is rather the unity imparted to it by temporality. This is why, as I say, the aim of Being and Time is to show that the unity of the “there/here” is to be found in the unity of originary temporality.

Even if we leave aside the question concerning the nature of the unity that belongs to temporality itself, a significant problem nevertheless emerges here. By attempting to derive the unity of the entire structure of Dasein from the unity of temporality alone a tension arises that threatens the irreducible plurality of that structure—everything threatens to collapse into temporality alone. Moreover, because the unity of temporality is a unity from which the unity of other structures is supposed to be derived, so it becomes questionable as to whether the unity that allegedly belongs to those other structures can properly be said to belong to them, and in that case, their unity turns out to be itself a secondary form of unity—a unity “imposed upon” rather than “belonging to.”¹³ Indeed, one might argue that the unity of Dasein, and perhaps also the unity of world, is itself a secondary, derivative unity of this sort.

When we move from the position that is set out in Being and Time to that which is apparent in Heidegger’s later thinking, a very different picture emerges. In the later thought there remains a preoccupation with the problem of unity—a problem that gradually comes to be more clearly focused on the unity of topos—but this is no longer articulated in terms of the successive uncovering of more originary layers or structures. Instead it is worked out though the identification of a set of elements whose differentiated unity encompasses the entirety of the structure of world, and whose overall unity is articulated through the essential belonging together of the elements themselves. There is then no underlying structure or principle that alone unifies, but only a single structure that is unified in and through the mutual belonging together of its components.

Place and the Problem of World

The appearing of topos as a more explicit theme in Heidegger’s work is directly connected to Heidegger’s rethinking of the concept of world and the problem that it presents. The problem of world is already present in Being and Time—a large part of the work is devoted to an elucidation of the worldhood of the world—but in the years immediately after Being and Time the problem of world is also the focus for Heidegger’s rethinking of the framework developed in his earlier work. This is particularly evident in the lecture course from 1929 to 1930 that has been published in English as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.¹⁴ In these lectures, “world,” understood as the “manifestness of beings as such as a whole,”¹⁵ is the main focus of Heidegger’s discussion, but Heidegger is also at pains to emphasize the limitations of his characterization of world in Being and Time. The focus of the analysis of world in the earlier work was on the structure of equipmentality (Zeug). World thus appears as given in the teleological structure of the useful, the instrumental, the ready-to-hand. Yet, according to Heidegger, this cannot constitute the final word on the matter—such analyses can only be preliminary, and must be moved beyond.¹⁶ As a result, much later, he will say that although the analysis of the worldhood of the world (and so the analysis of equipmentality) in Being and Time is “an essential step,” still it remains “of subordinate significance.”¹⁷ Heidegger understands “world” to refer to no mere assemblage of things, nor even to their instrumental ordering, but to the unity of their belonging together in which any and everything is encompassed—a meaning that elsewhere he claims to be present in the original Greek sense of kosmos.¹⁸ This means that the problem of world is also the problem of the unity of the world. The question is: what is the nature of that unity? The question of unity is also at issue in the question of being—as Heidegger tells us: “The impetus for my whole way of thinking goes back to an Aristotelian proposition which states that being is said in many ways. This proposition was originally the lightning bolt that triggered the question, What then is the unity of these various meanings of being?”¹⁹ Consequently, the question of unity that emerges with respect to world and the question of unity with respect to being may well turn out to be the same.

Heidegger’s focus on world as a problem is clearest in the period immediately after Being and Time. This is for at least two reasons (aside from the independent centrality of the issue): first, because the treatment of the problem of world in the earlier work is indeed so preliminary (and yet was, and still is, often read in ways that ignore this fact); and, second, because the problem of world is connected, in the early work, to the problem of Dasein’s own capacity for “transcendence” (the “passing over” of thought toward its object,²⁰ and in the direction of world), understood as essentially determined by its existentiality—its projecting of its own possibilities (Dasein, as understood in the framework of Being and Time, is essentially constituted by its capacity for transcendence). Part of what occurs in the years following Being and Time is a gradual rethinking of world that is also accompanied by a rethinking, and finally abandonment, of the idea of transcendence (as such, it leads away from the focus on world as constituted within an essentially “projected” structure—even if one determined by modes of practical comportment).²¹

The problem of transcendence can itself be seen to arise out of the attempt to address the unity of world, or of Dasein as being-in-the-world (transcendence describes a relation that brings together Dasein and world by grounding the latter in what is essentially a capacity of the former). Heidegger’s later thinking undertakes a rethinking of world that can also be understood as directed toward a rethinking of the problem of unity that itself lies at the heart of Being and Time. Yet whereas Being and Time largely overstepped that problem as it relates to world as such, moving instead to the unity of being as given in and through temporality (so that, as I noted earlier, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in Being and Time, the unity of world is actually a secondary unity), the later thinking takes up the problem of world in a way that is not only more direct but also retains the focus on world as such.

The problem of world, which is the problem of the unity of world, is thus central to understanding the shift in Heidegger’s thinking from early to late. Indeed, in what is perhaps the key essay from the transitional period of Heidegger’s thinking during the 1930s—“The Origin of the Work of Art”—the problem of world, together with that of truth, lies at the very center of Heidegger’s inquiry. In that essay, originally delivered as a lecture three times over the period from 1935 to 1936, Heidegger provides an account of the “worlding of world” as it occurs through the strife between world and earth. In this strife, world and earth can be understood as two aspects of the one structure that is the concealing–revealing of truth. Within this structure, not only are individual entities able to appear as the entities they are through appearing in a certain way (entities thus appear under a certain aspect or “look”), but earth and world are themselves brought to appearance so that earth comes to be as earth and world comes to be as world (although, once again, this appearance always takes on a particular form). The happening that is at issue here, the “worlding of world” that is also the “setting to work of truth,” is what Heidegger refers to in the Contributions, which he begins writing in 1936, as the Ereignis, the “Event.”

The Event plays a similar role, in Heidegger’s later thinking, to that played by originary temporality in Being and Time. But whereas the structure of originary temporality was that which underlay the other structures of Dasein, including the structure of spatiality and perhaps also of world, and from which those structures were somehow “derived,” the Event does not underlie nor is it that from which any sort of “derivation” is possible. Instead, the Event encompasses earth and world, as well as mortals and gods, even as they come to appearance in the Event. At the same time, the dynamic interrelatedness of earth and world (what Heidegger refers to in “The Origin of the Work of Art” in terms of strife) is itself constitutive of the Event as such.

The structure that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and that also seems present in the Contributions might be thought to be an early version of what appears later, in essays such as “Building Dwelling Thinking,” as the Fourfold (Das Geviert). There is undoubtedly a lineage here, but the former structure is built around what is properly a “Twofold” rather than a Fourfold, since it is constituted around one key axis, that between earth and world. There can be no doubt, however, that the structure at issue is very different from that which is set out in Being and Time. Whereas the earlier structure is indeed one that moves through a succession of ever more fundamental layers, the later structure is one of mutually related elements that are together constitutive of the overall structure at issue—that being the “there/here” that is surely best understood as topos—in which no one element takes absolute precedence over any other.

Nevertheless, the way in which Heidegger presents this structure in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (which was given in its final version in the same year, 1936, as Contributions was begun) still seems to suffer from a shortcoming similar to that which Heidegger also saw as a problem in Being and Time: it fails adequately to think the relation between the happening of world, the “setting to work” of truth, and human being. Thus, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger gives a founding role to the poet and even to the statesman in a way that has led some, most notably Jacques Taminieux, to argue that the essay is “decisionistic” in its fundamental orientation.²² In his 1956 “Appendix” to the essay, however, Heidegger puts the problem in terms of an ambiguity in the talk of truth being “set to work” since it remains unclear “who or what” does this setting and in what manner.²³ The possibility is that the setting of truth to work is somehow an achievement of human being.²⁴ The problem with Being and Time is not merely that it seeks to derive the structure of Dasein from the structure of originary temporality, or to do so in a way that neglects the topology that is at issue there, but that it attempts to do this in a way that threatens to found the structure of Dasein as a whole in Dasein’s own capacity for transcendence, which is to say, in Dasein’s own projecting of possibilities.

This projection of possibilities, in the language of Being and Time, lies at the heart of the notions of existence and existentiality, and appears within the structure of temporality in terms of the prioritization given to futurity (Zukommen—“coming toward”). Such projection seems to be a possibility within the structure set out in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” One might argue that the difficulty of language of the Contributions arises, in part, from Heidegger’s concentrated attempt to overcome the tendency to give priority to such projection, and so to articulate a mode of thinking that is more adequate in its thinking of being, and does not, even if inadvertently, attempt to found being in the human or in some capacity of the human. It is thus notable that, in the Contributions, we find Heidegger using the term Dasein in a way that is no longer focused on the essence of human being as given in projection. Instead it designates what might be understood simply as the “there/here of being”—a “there/here” that can still be said to be the essence of the human, but only inasmuch as the being of the human is itself to be found in the place of being that is also the being of place.

The rethinking of world that Heidegger undertakes in the period following Being and Time is thus directly connected with his attempt to clarify the problem of world in a way that does not take world as somehow a projection of human activity, and yet nevertheless also recognizes the essential entanglement of the world with the human—the essential entanglement of being with human being. By the late 1940s, the twofold structure that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and in Contributions has given way to the fully developed notion of the Fourfold that is familiar from a number of Heidegger’s postwar essays, including “The Thing” and “Building Dwelling Thinking.” The structure of the Fourfold is analogous to that found in Contributions and in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” but whereas the earlier structure had a central earth–world axis, the later structure is built around two axes, earth–sky and gods–mortals, while “world” now designates not one element within the structure, but rather the dynamic unity of the structure as a whole—a unity that is also designated in terms of the Event, and that is, as I read it, essentially topological in character.

Here we have a level of analysis that looks to understand both world and place (for in his late work it is quite clear that Heidegger understands the two as standing in an essential relation to one another) through a set of encompassing and schematic terms—earth, sky, gods, mortals—that themselves stand in a relation of reciprocal dependence to one another, and together form two equal axes of a single unitary world. The four terms that make up these axes do not designate some set of principles that lie “behind” the things of the world or that are more originary in the sense of being that from which all else is derived. The language of “derivation” has entirely disappeared from the later thinking—it had already disappeared by 1936—and although the notions of “origin” and the “originary” remain, they do not designate something that comes before or lies beneath. The elements of the Fourfold are “originary” in the sense that they are the fundamental and essential elements of world—that out of which world comes—even while they themselves only come to be inasmuch as they are gathered into the happening of world as such (the happening that is also the happening of the Event).

The Fourfold and the concept of the Event, as well as the notions of topos and world, lie at the very heart of Heidegger’s later thinking. Yet these ideas, especially the idea of the Fourfold, seem often to have been misunderstood, and their nature and significance have not been fully appreciated in much of the Heideggerian literature to date. The Fourfold represents a radically different mode of analysis from that which is evident in Being and Time. In spite of the attempt of Being and Time to maintain a focus on the unity of Dasein and to refrain from any dissolution of that unity into some simple underlying ground or principle (the later commitment expressed in the idea of Gleichursprünglichkeit—“equiprimordiality”), the way in which Heidegger gives priority to temporality inevitably leads to a situation in which the unity of Dasein, and so also the unity of being, is understood as a unity given in and through temporality alone—which is why one might say of Being and Time that it leads us to a position that understands being as time. Such an idea appears completely out of place in the later thinking not only because there time is conjoined with space as timespace (Zeitraum), but also because that thinking is so clearly focused on a unity that is irreducibly plural, and in which each of the key elements that articulate that unity stand in necessary and reciprocal relations to one another.

This is not to say, however, that there is no difference in the way in which the individual elements of the Fourfold are related or that those relations are so simple and schematic that they require no comment—that there is no possibility of finding an analytical structure in the later thinking. Since part of the problem with Being and Time is the very mode of analysis that it attempts—a mode of analysis that looks to uncover a systematic structure through the uncovering of levels of ontological dependency and that is evident in the style of Heidegger’s thinking and writing in the earlier work—so the later thinking is characterized by an abandonment of that mode of analysis and a very different manner of approach. It is an approach in which one can find Heidegger exploring, across many essays and lectures, a single complex structure of relations that nevertheless bears comparison with the structure evident in Being and Time²⁵—in the case of the Fourfold, for instance, the relation between earth and sky draws upon a set of primarily spatial elements that also sets up an important connection to language, while the relation between gods and mortals is fundamentally temporal in its orientation in a way that invokes notions of fatefulness and history—notions that, it should be emphasized, do not fall outside of or stand in opposition to the project of Heideggerian topology.

Place and the History of Being

The history of being in Heidegger is not so much a descriptive account of the stages in the development of philosophical thought, but is rather closely tied to Heidegger’s attempt to think the character of the happening of world, as well as of philosophy’s own relation to that happening. Heidegger’s thinking on the history of being revolves around two “events,” or perhaps better, two topoi. The first is the beginning of philosophy among the Greeks and the thinking of being that is evident in the pre-Socratic philosophers. It is often assumed that Heidegger has a conception of pre-Socratic thinking as standing in some privileged relation to the question of being such that, for the pre-Socratics, being was somehow directly evident to them in a way that is now lost. It seems to me, in fact, that what Heidegger finds among the pre-Socratics, or at least among certain of them, is a sense of the unity and complexity of being that has not yet succumbed to the tendency to explain that unitary complexity through the posting of some ground or principle that stands apart from it.

That there is a question about the unity of being is evident to the pre-Socratics; that it is a question to be answered by looking to a unity that underlies or is apart from beings is not a possibility to which they succumb. Here, then, is the beginning of philosophy: in the recognition of the fundamental questionability of things. This recognition of questionability can itself be understood as given in the recognition of the ontological difference, since the recognition of that difference is just the recognition of the possibility of a question about beings that is not addressed by looking to beings alone. Yet the recognition of the ontological difference also opens up the possibility of an answer that will look to being as something other than and apart from beings as their underlying ground and principle, and that will, in treating being in this way, inevitably reduce being to something other than it is, and, in so doing, will also lose sight of the questionability that is essential to being and to thought as such.²⁶ In the beginning of philosophy we thus see that which impels us to philosophize and is the proper ground of philosophy, and that nevertheless also moves philosophy on a path that will bring the second of the two topoi at issue here into view—that which is the end of philosophy.

Neither philosophy’s beginning nor its end are properly to be understood merely as temporal “stages” in some intellectual chronology of being—they are instead topoi for the happening of being. Heidegger’s own comments on the “end” of philosophy make this quite clear: “The old meaning of the word ‘end’ means the same as place: ‘from one end to the other’ means: from one place to the other. The end of philosophy is the place, that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility. End as completion means this gathering.”²⁷ The place that is the end of philosophy is not in sight because philosophy appears now to be coming to a stop, but because the possibilities that were already evident in its beginning have now drawn together in their most extreme realization—one consequence is that philosophy has exhausted a proper sense of the questionability of things that has sustained it, and, in losing that sense of questionability, has also lost a sense of its own historicity. In this respect, Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim about the “end of history” may have proved to be premature so far as world history is concerned (especially in the light of the contemporary rise of new forms of competing fundamentalist and nationalist ideologies, to say nothing of the possibility of the sort of economic collapse that we have witnessed more recently). However, that prediction was, in a sense, correct, if belated, with regard to philosophy, and so also with regard to the understanding of the world that philosophy sustains and expresses. As used here, not only does “end” carry a particular meaning, but so too does “philosophy.” The latter term (which, like many other key words, operates equivocally in Heidegger’s thinking²⁸) here names something that is inextricable from the particular form of technological modernity that is dominant across the earth—and remains dominant in spite of those movements that claim to be opposed to it. The end of philosophy is thus to be seen in that mode of ordering of the world as well as the mode of thinking that accompanies it, that understands itself no longer as a stage in human history, but as instead a transformation in the historical (the modern thus understands itself as radically disjoint from its own past), that sees the only questions as essentially technical or “rational” in character. This is why Heidegger claims that the present age is the age of nihilism—it is the nihilism that comes from the collapse of questionability, the end of history, and the closing off of the openness of the future.

One might suppose that Heidegger’s concern with the history of being—which is clearest, it should be noted, in the writings from the later 1930s and early 1940s—represents a continuation of the concern with temporality that characterized Being and Time. Yet the understanding of the history of being, though historical, is not thereby exclusively temporal. The happening of place and of world is, in every instance, a happening that both allows things to come to presence as the very things they are and yet does so in a way that also allows them to come to presence in a distinctive fashion. Indeed, things never come to presence in their generality, but always in a way that is singular and distinctive—and that happening of presence is not random or ad hoc, but is rather determined by the particular historical determination of the place as such. The historical is thus not opposed to the topological, but encompassed by it. The history of being is itself a history of place, both in the sense that the philosophical history of place correlates with key movements in the history of philosophical thought as such,²⁹ and in the sense that the history of being is a history of the successive formations of place—a history of successive topoi (of which its beginning and its end are only the most salient)—in which the ending of history is to be found in the nihilism of the almost complete forgetting of being that is also a forgetting of place.

Heidegger’s critique of technology, which is strongest in his postwar writings (although already adumbrated even in Being and Time), represents a drawing together of the history of being into the explicitly topological frame of the later thinking. Technological modernity is thus understood not only as the culmination of the metaphysical tendency toward nihilism, but also in terms of a specific modification of time and space that reduces the thing to mere resource and place to simple location. Yet in its essence—which Heidegger calls Gestell, the “Enframing” or “Framework”—technological modernity remains a mode of the happening of place, albeit one that refuses to recognize its own character in this regard. This means that technological modernity, while it gives to things the look of mere resource, nevertheless continues to allow things to appear, and so also allows (if “inadvertently”) for the possibility that they might appear in ways that disrupt their character as resource.³⁰ It is the tension between the appearing of things as things, even in their appearing as resource, the appearing of place as place, even in its apparent reduction to simple location or “site,” that constitutes both the “saving power” of technology as well as its danger.

Place and the Turning

The character of Heidegger’s later thinking as attending to things in their multiple unity—and so also, I would say, in their essential and abiding questionability—can be seen as the articulation of a mode of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the character of the thinking that is associated with technological modernity. Technological modernity understands things as unified through their reducibility to a single ordering from which nothing is excluded. Although Being and Time was intended to overcome the forgetting of being that is instantiated in technological modernity, one of the lessons of Heidegger’s own path of thinking is that the tendency that drives us toward such forgetting, of which technological modernity represents the most extreme form, is one that is evident even in Being and Time’s own desire to understand the happening of world in terms of the pure unity of temporality. Being and Time (like philosophy and metaphysics more generally) thus points in two directions: on to the later thinking as well as back to the thinking that it aims, unsuccessfully, to overcome.³¹

The transition from Heidegger’s early to his later thinking turns on Heidegger’s thinking and rethinking of place and its relation to being. That Turning is already underway in the early thinking, and in Being and Time. The turn to place is thus not something that occurs only following the failure of the early work, but is instead a turning within the turning that was already underway. A large part of the radicality of Heidegger’s philosophy, right from the start, lay in his attempt to engage with the fundamentally situated, placed, character of being and existence. But place, as Aristotle famously observed in a passage Heidegger repeats, is “something overwhelming and hard to grasp.”³² It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Heidegger’s own turning to place remains often unstable and uncertain. Although one might say that this is especially true of his early thinking, the inevitability of such instability and uncertainty to any thoughtful engagement is surely itself part of what is at issue in Heidegger’s thematization of the turning that belongs to thinking as such, as well as to Heidegger’s own thinking, and together with this, his emphasis on the centrality of questioning to thinking.

Although the Turning is a turning back to place, it is also more immediately understood in the Heideggerian context as a turning back (in the sense of a returning or reorienting) to being. Being is presence (on this point Heidegger remains insistent³³), and so the turning back to being is also a turning back to presence. Yet the presence at issue here is merely not the determinate appearing of things in the present, though this is one aspect of presence. More properly, it is the appearing of things in a sameness and multiplicity that always goes beyond any single determination—a constant unfolding of things as things. This is why being and questionability belong together, and why the question of being is one with the being of the question, since for something to be present is for it to appear as questionable, as standing within a free play (Spielraum) of possibility that can never be exhausted. Yet this inexhaustibility of appearance, this dynamic indeterminacy of presence, though it always remains, is nevertheless also constantly solidifying into the simple unity of a determinate aspect. For this reason, thinking, as a turning back to presence, is also an overcoming of the forgetfulness that takes presence to be nothing other than that simple determinate unity as it already stands before. It is thus that we return once again to Heidegger’s characterization of thinking as a remembering or recollection, and also, since he takes remembrance to be a form of thanking (as it is an attending to and recognition of what is already given), as a form of giving thanks.³⁴

The turning back to being, to presence, to the thing, that is at issue in the Turning is also, of course, a turning in relation to place. The very understanding of being as presence already indicates the topological orientation that is at issue here and that underpins all of Heidegger’s thinking whether explicitly or implicitly. Certainly the understanding of being as presence carries with it a specifically temporal connotation, and it is this connotation that comes to the fore in Heidegger’s early thinking, but presence is better understood as encompassing both a sense of the temporal and the spatial that is only properly expressed in terms of the notion of place or topos (and place can never be simply identified with the spatial alone). Presence always calls upon place—presence is a being-here/ being-there—just as place also calls upon presence. Thinking is then a turning back into the place in which we already find ourselves and to which we are given over; thinking is a putting in question of our own place as we turn back to it. The turn to place in Heidegger’s thought, which is itself a turning in and of place, is also indicative of the way in which all of Heidegger’s thinking itself turns around the single question of place, and in which, in this place, all of the other elements in his thinking are brought together. The question of place may thus be said to be all that Heidegger’s thought addresses—not in the sense that this is only what is at issue, but in the sense that this question encompasses every other question, and is that to which every other question must be brought back. In this respect, it is especially significant that the foundational role given to the work of art in “The Origin of the Work of Art” has disappeared from his later writings—the thing gathers the elements of world in a single place, but no one thing does this in an epochal or unique fashion. The gathering of place that is the happening of presence and of world is a constant and multiple occurrence rather than a single founding or positing, whether by any human act or in any single preeminent element or thing.³⁵

Topos as Surface and Structure

The style and approach of Heidegger’s later thinking, especially the language it employs, presents itself as much less analytical, perhaps less rigorous than that of the earlier, and is often more declamatory in its presentation. It is thus that his later thinking is frequently characterized as “poetic” (or even “mystical”—the latter characterization being one of which Heidegger seems to have been particularly dismissive). It may be, however, that the stylistic and methodological shift that occurs between his early and later thinking (and properly there is not one shift, but a number) is best understood as Heidegger’s response to the need to find a way of thinking, and especially of writing, that is attentive to the complex unity of the presencing of things—the worlding of world, the happening of truth—and that does not dissolve that complexity into something that is other than it. One might say that in this regard, the “poetic” character of Heidegger’s later thinking—if we are to use this characterization at all—refers us to the way in which Heidegger aims at a certain attentiveness to “surface,” and so to just appearing or presencing as such. It is worth noting that this focus on “surface” allows us to glimpse another way in which Heidegger’s approach is properly characterized as topological, since “surface” is one sense that might be attached to the notion of topos (a sense evident in Aristotle’s use of the term,³⁶ as well as its use within the early history of geography and in modern mathematical topology).

What may also be indicated here is an important difference between the sense in which Heidegger’s early thinking was “phenomenological” and the sense in which this term might be used in relation to his later thinking. In Being and Time, phenomenology is directed toward uncovering those structures or conditions, obscured by everydayness, that make possible the appearing of things.³⁷ The aim is, in one sense, to “see into” things, to the true “phenomena” that are obscured or disguised by our usual modes of engagement. But in his later thinking, it is not so much a matter of seeing into things in this way—a mode of seeing that, against Heidegger’s own admonitions, can easily be read as a seeing through or beyond—but rather a seeing that remains with, allowing things to shine in their very presencing, and in that shining to light up the structure of the world that shelters and sustains them. Rather than “seeing through” a disguise, it is a matter of the proper placing of things. If this is phenomenology, it is a different sort of phenomenology than is evident in the early work, so much so that, like Heidegger, we may chose not to call it “phenomenology” at all—alternatively, we may well be led to rethink what phenomenology itself might be.³⁸

Not only does Heidegger abandon talk of his later thinking as “phenomenology,” but the notion of the transcendental disappears from his later thinking as well, both terms having a close connection to one another. The abandonment of the language of the transcendental is a direct consequence of the problems that he takes to surround the notion of transcendence (the transcendental being viewed by Heidegger as that which enables transcendence).³⁹ What we can see here, however, is the way in which the focus on the transcendental in terms of a focus on “conditions of possibility” can be construed as also potentially problematic precisely through the way in which it separates the conditions from what is conditioned, through the way in which it requires a form of “looking through” rather than “remaining with.”⁴⁰

The fact that there is no single work that stands as the counterpart in Heidegger’s later thinking to Being and Time in the earlier is itself an indication of the shift that has occurred. Yet across the many essays and lectures in which the later thinking is set out and developed we can see a philosophical vision and an analytical structure that is no less complex nor less differentiated than that in Being and Time—and it is, of course, a vision and structure that is continuous with that of Being and Time even while diverging from it. It seems to me that the key to understanding the structure that stands at the heart of Heidegger’s later thinking is to understand that Heidegger is indeed attempting a “topology of being,” and that means that we have to understand structures like the structure of the Fourfold or of the Event as themselves essentially topological in character—the Fourfold is the structure of topos and the Event is the happening of place.

I have talked frequently of “structure” in the account offered here, and topology itself might be thought to appear as a sort of “structural” analysis. In discussing one of my earlier works, Ed Casey takes issue with such talk in relation to the later Heidegger (as does Ingrid Stefanovic elsewhere).⁴¹ Yet when Heidegger sets out the interplay of earth, sky, gods and mortals as constitutive of the Fourfold, what else is he doing but setting out and elaborating a structure? It is certainly a different structure from that to be found in Being and Time, but it is a structure nonetheless. The question is not whether there is a structure, but what kind of structure it is. If what Heidegger does in his later thinking is to think being through place, and if the structure that is set out in essays like “Building Dwelling Thinking” is the structure of place, then this seems to me to force us to recognize the way in which what is given here is indeed a structure that is constituted through the mutual interplay of multiple elements, a structure that encompasses the entities and elements that appear within it rather than underlying them, a structure to which belongs a unity that is given only in and through the mutual relatedness of the elements that make it up. This place is not one that is to be grounded in the human alone, since only in such a place can the human even appear, and yet it is a place that cannot appear apart from the human—just as it cannot appear apart from the divine, apart from that which is of the earth and of the sky.⁴²

In understanding the structure at issue here as topological, we must understand that the structure of place, and the unity that belongs to that structure, is not something apart from the place itself. If we were to use the language of the ontological difference, this means that the unity of the place, although different from it, is not something apart from the place. This is where the notion of the ontological difference can itself mislead—it may be taken to suggest that being is something apart and aside from beings. But being and beings belong together, and it is the increasing recognition of this that leads Heidegger not only to rethink the issue of unity as such, but also to regard the ontological difference itself as suspect. Thus in a later comment on his earlier writings he notes that “Da-sein belongs to beyng itself as the simple onefold of beings and being,” and this emphasis appears in a number of places in the later writings.⁴³ It is this “onefold” that is also articulated through the unity of topos—a unity that encompasses the unity of time and space, as well as of existentiality and facticity, of thing and world, of concealing and revealing.

Conclusion: The Significance of Heidegger’s Later Thinking

There can be no doubt that there is a way of approaching Heidegger’s thinking that focuses on Being and Time as the central work in that thinking. Yet if Heidegger’s own dissatisfaction with Being and Time was well founded, then there will always be certain insuperable difficulties in the attempt to fully articulate what is at issue in that work. That is not to say that the task of such articulation and exploration should not continue to be attempted, but that we need to keep in mind the fact that such an attempt, if it is concerned with the philosophical problems themselves rather than with issues of historical scholarship alone, must inevitably lead us beyond Being and Time, and on to Heidegger’s later thinking. Unfortunately, the power of the earlier work, both the intrinsic power of its concepts and of its philosophical influence, as well as the fact that it remains within a much more traditional philosophical framework, has meant that the earlier work rather than the later has dominated philosophical discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy. Yet the later Heidegger does not fade away into mysticism or poetry—indeed, in one important sense, a move away from mysticism is achieved precisely through the more explicit thematization of topos.⁴⁴ The development of the later thinking is directly tied to the problems evident in the earlier, and so an adequate engagement with the earlier thinking must require an engagement with the later thinking also—and such an engagement demands a respect for the later thinking as well as an appreciation of the way in which it both breaks with and nevertheless also continues the project of which Being and Time is merely a part.