[R] Eds. Davis - Martin Heidegger - Key Concepts - 2010

5/21/2018 [R] Eds. Davis - Martin Heidegger - Key Concepts - 2010

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Martin Heidegger

Key Concepts


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Key Concepts

Published

Theodor Adorno: Key ConceptsEdited by Deborah Cook

Pierre Bourdieu: Key ConceptsEdited by Michael Grenfell

Gilles Deleuze: Key ConceptsEdited by Charles J. Stivale

Martin Heidegger: Key ConceptsEdited by Bret W. Davis

Merleau-Ponty: Key ConceptsEdited by Rosalyn Diprose andJack Reynolds

Forthcoming

Alain Badiou: Key ConceptsEdited by A. J. Bartlett andJustin Clemens

Michel Foucault: Key ConceptsEdited by Dianna Taylor

Jrgen Habermas: Key ConceptsEdited by Barbara Fultner

Immanuel Kant: Key ConceptsEdited by Will Dudley andKristina Engelhard

Jacques Ranciere: Key ConceptsEdited by Jean-Philippe Deranty

Wittgenstein: Key ConceptsEdited by Kelly Dean Jolley


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Martin Heidegger

Key Concepts

Edited by Bret W. Davis


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Editorial matter and selection, 2010 Bret W. Davis.Individual contributions, the contributors.

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.No reproduction without permission.All rights reserved.

First published in 2010 by Acumen

Acumen Publishing Limited

4 Saddler StreetDurhamDH1 3NPwww.acumenpublishing.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-84465-198-6 (hardcover)ISBN: 978-1-84465-199-3 (paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

Designed and typeset in Classical Garamond and Myriad.Printed and bound in the UK by Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge,Wiltshire


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Contents

Contributors vii Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: key concepts in Heideggersthinking of being 1

Bret W. Davis

1. Hermeneutics of facticity 17 Theodore Kisiel

2. Phenomenology: Heidegger after Husserl and the Greeks 33

Gnter Figal 3. Dasein as being-in-the-world 44 Timothy Stapleton

4. Care and authenticity 57 Charles E. Scott

5. Being and time 69

Richard Polt 6. The turn 82 Thomas Sheehan

7. Heidegger, National Socialism and the German People 102 Charles Bambach


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8. Truth asale theiaand the clearing of beyng 116 Daniel O. Dahlstrom

9. The work of art 128 Jonathan Dronsfield

10. Ereignis: the event of appropriation 140 Daniela Vallega-Neu

11. The history of being 155 Peter Warnek

12. Will and Gelassenheit 168 Bret W. Davis

13. Ge-stell: enframing as the essence of technology 183 Hans Ruin

14. Language and poetry 195 John T. Lysaker

15. The fourfold 208

Andrew J. Mitchell

16. Ontotheology and the question of god(s) 219 Ben Vedder

17. Heidegger on Christianity and divinity:a chronological compendium 231

Bret W. Davis

Chronology of Heideggers life 260 Bibliography 266 Index 281


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Contributors

Charles Bambachis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texasat Dallas. His books include Heideggers Roots: Nietzsche, NationalSocialism, and the Greeks (2003)andHeidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis

of Historicism(1995). He has also written variously on hermeneut-ics, phenomenology, ethics and the history of German philosophy.Bambachs current book project, Doing Justice to Poetry: Heidegger,Hlderlin, Celan, and the Greek Experience of dike, deals with thetragic aporia between ethics and justice in modern German philosophy,specifically Heideggers dialogue with the poetry of Friedrich Hlderlin(17701843) and Paul Celan (19201970).

Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Professor and Chair of the Department of Phil-

osophy, Boston University, is the author of Philosophical Legacies(2008),Heideggers Concept of Truth(2001) andDas logische Vorurteil:Untersuchungen zur Wahrheitstheorie des frhen Heidegger(1994). Heis the translator of Heideggers first Marburg lectures,Introduction toPhenomenological Research(2005). His recent articles on Heideggersthought include Transcendental Truth and the Truth that Prevailsin Transcendental Heidegger(2007) and Feenberg on Heidegger andMarcuse in Techne(2006).

Bret W. Davisis Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola UniversityMaryland. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters,he is the author ofHeidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit(2007), translator of Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations(2010), co-editor ofJapanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversa-tions with the Kyoto School(with Brian Schroeder and Jason Wirth,


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2010), and co-editor ofJapanese Philosophy in the World(with FujitaMasakatsu, 2005 [in Japanese]).

Jonathan Dronsfieldis Reader in Theory and Philosophy of Art at

the University of Reading and sits on the Executive Committee of theForum for European Philosophy, European Institute, London Schoolof Economics. He is currently writing a book,Derrida and the Visual,and has published mainly on art and ethics, including most recentlyBetween Heidegger and Deleuze There is Never any Difference, inFrench Interpretations of Heidegger(Raffoul & Pettigrew [eds], 2009);Philosophies of Art, in The Continuum Companion to ContinentalPhilosophy(Mullarkey & Lord [eds], 2009); and Nowhere is Aesthet-

ics contra Ethics: Rancire the Other Side of Lyotard inArt&Research(2008).

Gnter Figalis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg,Germany, where he holds the chair previously occupied by MartinHeidegger. His many books include The Heidegger Reader (2009),Verstehensfragen: Studien zur phnomenologisch-hermeneutischen Phi-losophie(2009),Zu Heidegger: Antworten und Fragen(2009), Gegen-stndlichkeit (currently being translated into English) (2006), For aPhilosophy of Freedom and Strife(1998),Der Sinn des Verstehens(1996),Heidegger zur Einfhrung(1992) andMartin Heidegger: Phnomenolo-gie der Freiheit(1988).

Theodore Kisielis Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Phil-osophy at Northern Illinois University. His books includeHeideggersWay of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Essays(2002), The Genesis ofHeideggers Being and Time(1993) andPhenomenology and the Natu-

ral Sciences(with Joseph Kockelmans, 1970). Editions includeBecomingHeidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 19101927(with Thomas Sheehan, 2007) andReading Heidegger from the Start:Essays in His Earliest Thought(with John van Buren, 1994). Translationsinclude Martin Heidegger,History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena(1985) and Werner Marx,Heidegger and the Tradition(1971).

John T. Lysaker is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, Geor-gia. He is the author ofEmerson and Self-Culture(2008) and You Must

Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense(2002), andthe co-author of Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self(2008). Currentinterests include the nature of the self, the social function of art and theintersections of phenomenology, pragmatism and social theory.

Andrew J. Mitchellis Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory Uni-versity, Georgia. He is the author ofHeidegger Among the Sculptors:


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Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling(forthcoming) as well as essays onHeidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, James Joyce and Rainer Werner Fass-binder. He is currently revising a manuscript exploring the conception

of things in Heideggers later period, entitled The Fourfold: Thing andWorld in Late Heidegger. He is co-editor (with Jason Winfree) of Com-munity and Communication: The Thought of Georges Bataille(2009),and co-translator (with Franois Raffoul) of HeideggersFour Seminars(2003).

Richard Poltis Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Ohio. Heis the author of The Emergency of Being: On Heideggers Contribu-tions to Philosophy(2006) andHeidegger: An Introduction(1999) and

editor ofHeideggers Being and Time: Critical Essays(2006). WithGregory Fried, he has translated HeideggersBeing and Truth(2010)andIntroduction to Metaphysics(2000) and editedA Companion toHeideggers Introduction to Metaphysics(2001).

Hans Ruinis Professor of Philosophy at Sdertrn University College,Sweden. He is the author ofInledning till Heideggers Varat och tiden(2006),Herakleitos Fragment(1997) andEnigmatic Origins: Tracing the

Theme of Historicity through Heideggers Works(1994). He is co-editorof The Pasts Presence(with M. S Cavalcante, 2006),Metaphysics, Fac-ticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries(with D.Zahavi and S. Heinmaa, 2003) andFenomenologiska Perspektiv(1997).He is co-founder of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology and co-editor of Nietzsches collected works in Swedish. He has also translatedworks by Derrida, Husserl and Heidegger into Swedish.

Charles E. Scottis Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt

University, Tennessee. His recent books includeLiving With Indifference(2007), The Lives of Things(2002) and The Time of Memory(1999).He also co-editedA Companion to Heideggers Contributions to Phil-osophy(2001).

Thomas Sheehanis Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford Univer-sity and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Loyola University Chi-cago. Among his books and editions are his edition and translation of

HeideggersLogic: The Question of Truth(2010);Becoming Heidegger:On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 19101927(with Theo-dore Kisiel, 2007);Edmund Husserl: Psychological and TranscendentalPhenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (19271931)(with Richard Palmer, 1997);Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Founda-tions (1987); and The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God BecameChristianity(1986).


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Timothy Stapleton is Associate Professor of Philosophy at LoyolaUniversity Maryland. He is the author ofHusserl and Heidegger: TheQuestion of a Phenomenological Beginning(1984) and editor of The

Question of Hermeneutics(1994).Daniela Vallega-Neuis Associate Professor of Philosophy at CaliforniaState University Stanislaus. She is the author of The Bodily Dimensionin Thinking (2005) andHeideggers Contributions to Philosophy: AnIntroduction (2003), and co-editor of A Companion to HeideggersContributions to Philosophy(2001).

Ben Vedderis Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion

at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He publishesespecially in the fields of hermeneutics, metaphysics and philosophy ofreligion. His works includeHeideggers Philosophy of Religion: FromGod to the Gods(2007) and Was ist Hermeneutik? Ein Weg von derTextdeutung zur Interpretation der Wirklichkeit(2000).

Peter Warnekis Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University ofOregon. He is the author of The Descent of Socrates: Self-knowledgeand Cryptic Nature in the Platonic Dialogues(2006), and co-translator

(with Walter Brogan) of Martin Heidegger,Artistotles Metaphysics,Theta 13: On the Essence and Actuality of Force(1995).


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Acknowledgements

Let me begin by thanking the contributors to this volume. While thereare a number of introductory level books on Heidegger (which run therisk of superficiality and even distortion), and while there is an abun-

dance of more scholarly level treatises (which run the risk of inaccess-ibility and even obfuscation), this volume was conceived with the intentof bridging the gap between these levels. The chapters are meant toexplicate the key concepts of Heideggers thought in a way that is bothrigorous and accessible. The only way this can done, in my mind, is ifsome of the very best scholars in the field, who have all published at thehighest level of scholarship, are willing to take a step back and attemptto clearly and concisely articulate, with ample and precise textual refer-ences, their understanding of the key concepts of their particular areasof expertise. I thank the contributors for their willingness to take onthis daunting balancing act, and for managing to find the middle waywith such care and acumen. Owing to their reservoirs of research andfacilities of elucidation, I believe that this book will be useful to studentslooking for a reliable, discerning and comprehensive introduction tothe conceptual contours of Heideggers thought, in all its phases, aswell as to scholars looking to focus their attention on, and deepen theirunderstanding of, this or that particular Heideggerian concept.

Heideggers thought has elicited a diverse array of responses, evenat the level of explication and interpretation. One advantage that a col-lection has over a monograph is that the reader is exposed to some ofthis variety. While certain conventions of citation and translation havebeen coordinated, and while I have requested of all authors that theyfocus on elucidationrather than development or critique of Heideggers


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concepts, I have not wanted to unduly restrict the individual approachesand styles of the chapters. In part owing to the concepts treated, stu-dents may find some chapters (such as 1, 6, 8 and 10) more challenging,

other chapters (such as 3, 4, 7, 14 and 16) more accessible, and the restsomewhere in between. While the book can be read from start to finishas a comprehensive and roughly chronological account of Heideggersthought, each of the chapters can also be read independently; and soeven the beginning student should feel free to pick and choose chaptersaccording to his or her interests.

Having thanked the contributors, I want also to express my gratitudeto Tristan Palmer and Kate Williams for the professionalism and skill

with which they have escorted the manuscript through its various stagesfrom planning to production. It has been a pleasure to work with themand their colleagues at Acumen on this project. I would also like touse this occasion to thank all those who have helped me find my wayinto and along Heideggers way of thought. These include, first andforemost, my former teachers at Vanderbilt University, Charles Scott,John Sallis and David Wood. Also included are teachers and colleaguesin Japan, at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy, and at confer-ences such as those of SPEP, CCPC and the Heidegger Circle. At LoyolaUniversity Maryland I would like to thank my colleagues, especiallythose participating in our Heidegger study group, and my students,especially those who took my seminars on Heideggers thought. I amgrateful to Loyola for a summer research grant that enabled me to spenda summer in Freiburg working on this project.

Let me end by thanking, as always, my family, starting with my wifeNaomi, my son Toshi and my daughter Koto, for making it all worth-while each and every day. Although I regret not being able to share thefruition of this project and so much more with my mother, BarbaraDavis (19382009), I am grateful that she lived long enough to share inthe many wanderings and homecomings of her sons, and to laugh andsing for a few years with her grandchildren. I would like to dedicatethis volume to my brothers, Peter, Chris and Sean. I am deeply grate-ful for their fraternal companionship (and WML) in times of sadness aswell as in times of joy.

Bret W. Davis


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Abbreviations

AS Art and Space (1973; written 1969) BC Basic Concepts(1993; written 1941) BCAP Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy(2008; written 1926)

BH Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early OccasionalWritings, 19101927(2007; written 191027) BPP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology(1982; written 1927) BQP Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected Problems of

Logic(1984; written 19378) BT Being and Time(1962; written 1927) BTS Being and Time(1996; written 1927) BW Basic Writings, 2nd edn (1993; written 192764) CP Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)(1999; writ-

ten 19368) CPC Country Path Conversations (2010; written 19445) CT The Concept of Time, inBH(written 1924) DT Discourse on Thinking(1966; written 194455) EGT Early Greek Thinking(1975; written 194354) EHD Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung, 6th edn (1996; writ-

ten 193669) EHF The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Phil-

osophy(2002; written 1930) EHP Elucidations of Hlderlins Poetry(2000; written 193669) EM Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, 5th edn (1987; written 1935) EP The End of Philosophy(1973; written 19416) ETP The Essence of Truth: On Platos Cave Allegory and Theaete-

tus (2002; written 19312)


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FCM The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,Solitude(1995; written 192930)

FS Four Seminars(2003; written 196673)

G Gelassenheit, 10th edn (1992; written 194455) GA Gesamtausgabe(1975 ) [cited by volume number; seeBibliography for details]

HBB Martin Heidegger/Elisabeth Blochmann Briefwechsel (1990) HC The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (1993) HCT History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena(1985; writ-

ten 1925) HHI Hlderlins Hymn The Ister(1996; written 1942)

HJB Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel 19201963(1990) HK Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denk-

ens (1983; written 1967) HPS Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit (1988); written 193031) ID Identitt und Differenz, 11th edn (1999; written 19567) IDS Identity and Difference(1969; written 19567) IHS Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aris-

totle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation, inBH(written 1922)

IM Introduction to Metaphysics(2000; written 1935) KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,4th enlarged edn

(1990; written 1929) LW Letters to His Wife: 19151970(2008) M Mindfulness(2006; written 19389) MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic(1984; written

1928)MHC Martin Heidegger in Conversation, inMHNS(written

1969)MHNS Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and

Answers (1990) MLS Mein liebes Seelchen!: Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine

Frau Elfride 19151970(2005) NI Nietzsche:Erster Band, 5th edn (1989; written 193646) NII Nietzsche:Zweiter Band, 5th edn (1989; written 193946) N1 Nietzsche: Vol. I, The Will to Power as Art(1979; written

19367) N2 Nietzsche: Vol. II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same

(1984; written 1937, 1953) N3 Nietzsche: Vol. III, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as

Metaphysics(1987; written 193940)


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N4 Nietzsche: Vol. IV, Nihilism(1982; written 194046) OBT Off the Beaten Track(2002; written 193546) OG Only a God can Save Us:Der Spiegels Interview with

Martin Heidegger, inHC(written 1966) OHF Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity(1999; written1923)

OWAF Of the Origin of the Work of Art (first elaboration)(2008; written 1935)

OWL On the Way to Language(1971; written 195059) PIA Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation

into Phenomenological Research (2001; written 19212)

PLT Poetry, Language, Thought(2001; written 193654) PM Pathmarks(1998; written 191961) PMH Preface by Martin Heidegger, in William J. Richardson,

Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought(2003;written 1962)

PR The Principle of Reason(1991; written 19556) PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life(2004; written 191821) PRM Parmenides (1992; written 19423) PT The Piety of Thinking(1976) QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays

(1977; written 193654) R Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitt: Das Rek-

torat 1933/34(1990; written 1933, 1945) RFT The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts, inMHNS

(written 1945) SA Schellings Abhandlung ber das Wesen der menschlichen

Freiheit (1809), 2nd edn (1995; written 1936, 19413) SG Der Satz vom Grund, 7th edn (1992; written 19556) SJG Sojourns: The Journey to Greece (2005; written 1962) ST Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom

(1985; written 1936, 19413) SU The Self-Assertion of the German University, inHC

(written 1933) SUP Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time

and Beyond (2002; written 191025) SZ Sein und Zeit, 17th edn (1993; written 1927); bothBTand

BTSinclude references to the pagination of SZ TB On Time and Being(1972; written 19624) TDP Towards the Definition of Philosophy(2000; written 1919) UKE Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerks: Erste Ausarbeitung (1989;

written 1935)


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UV Unbenutzte Vorarbeiten zur Vorlesung vom Wintersemes-ter 1929/1930:Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt,Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit(1991; written 192930)

VA Vortrge und Aufstze, 7th edn (1994; written 193653) WCT What is Called Thinking?(1968; written 19512) WhD Was heit Denken?, 4th edn (1984; written 19512) WP What is Philosophy?(bilingual edition) (1958; written

1955) WT What is a Thing?(1967; written 19356) Z Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle Zwiegesprche Briefe

(1987; written 195971)

ZS Zollikon Seminars: Protocols Conversations Letters(2001; written 195971) ZSD Zur Sache des Denkens, 3rd edn (1988; written 19624)

Citations of Heideggers texts will generally list both the English trans-lation and the corresponding original German source. In cases wherethe translation has been modified, this will be noted. In cases whereonly the German source is cited for a quotation, the translation is theauthors own.


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INTRODUCTION

Key concepts in Heideggers

thinking of beingBret W. Davis

Basic concepts or Ground-Concepts [Grundbegriffe]meansfor us here: grasping [begreifen] the ground [Grund] of beingsas a whole. When we have grasped something we also say

something has opened up to us. Thus to grasp [Be-greifen]the ground means above all that the essence of the groundembraces us into itself [ein-begriffen], and that it speaks to us inour knowing about it. (BC1819 =GA51: 21, trans. mod.)

Martin Heidegger (18891976) is widely considered to be the mostfamous, influential and controversial philosopher of the twentieth cen-tury. His writings are also among the most formidable. The fundamentalconcepts of his thought are for many the source of both fascination andfrustration. Yet any student of philosophy or of contemporary thoughtin general needs to become acquainted with Heideggers main ideas.This book is designed to facilitate this process. Each chapter introducesand explains a key concept or a cluster of closely related concepts inHeideggers thought. Together, the chapters cover the full range of hispath of thought in its early, middle and later periods.

What are the key concepts of Heideggers thought? A selection ofthe most important of these appear in the chapter titles of this book:the thinking of being; the hermeneutics of facticity; phenomenology;Dasein as being-in-the-world; care and authenticity; being and time; theturn; the German People; truth asaletheiaand the clearing of beyng; thework of art;Ereignis(the event of appropriation); the history of being;will and Gelassenheit (releasement); Ge-stell( enframing as the essenceof technology); language and poetry; the fourfold; and ontotheology


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(along with Heideggers conceptions of divinity). I shall let the chapterauthors, each an expert in the area of his or her chapter topic, explainthese key concepts in depth.

In this introductory chapter, I wish to orient the reader by addressingthe following questions: who is Heidegger and how is his personal liferelated to his thought? What is the question of being, Heideggerscentral issue of concern, and what are the distinguishing character-istics of Heideggers thinking of being? And, finally, what are basicconcepts according to Heidegger? I shall conclude with some briefreflections on the legacies of Heideggers thought.

Life, death and thought

Is a philosophers biography philosophically significant? Or is it thecase that, as Heidegger once claimed, when a thinkers work [is] available, the life of a philosopher is unimportant for the public. Wenever get to know what is essential in a philosophical life through bio-graphical descriptions anyhow (ST5 =SA5)? In his opening remarksto a lecture course on Aristotle, Heidegger once stated: The onlything of interest regarding the person of a philosopher is this: He wasborn on such and such a date, he worked, and he died (GA18: 5).1Heidegger may well have wished the same to be said about himself. Tobe sure, few philosophers have devoted their lives so single-mindedly tothe task of thinking. Nevertheless, there are several compellingHeideg-gerianreasons why it would not be entirely appropriate to simply sayof Heidegger that he was born, worked and then died.

The first reason why we should not isolate Heideggers thoughtfrom his life is that, from early on, his thought is specifically aboutreturning to the concreteness the facticity of human existence,and this return has to be a hermeneutical as well as a phenomenologicalendeavour given the historical embeddedness of human beings. Accord-ing to Heidegger, the philosopher must start with and return to theconcrete situation of his or her own historical life. The problem of theself-understanding of philosophy, Heidegger says in an early lecturecourse from 1920, has always been taken too lightly. If one grasps this

problem more radically, one finds that philosophy arises from facticallife experience. And within factical life experience philosophy returnsback into factical life experience (PRL67 =GA60: 8). As he argues inBeing and Time(1927), the life projects of an individual are embeddedin the historical and social context into which one is thrown. Onecan authentically choose to modify ones existential situation only


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by first awakening to it. This not only means that we should attend tothe situation in which we ourselves stand as we read Heidegger, but italso means that we should take into consideration the life context in

which he wrote.Hence it is not irrelevant for understanding Heideggers thought toknow that he was born in 1889 and died in 1976; that he was raised inMesskirch, a small conservative Catholic town in southwest Germany;that he intended to become a priest and studied theology before devot-ing himself fully to philosophy and leaving the Church; that he livedthrough both world wars, and notably through the Nazi era (more onthis below); that he was German and wrote in the German language;

that he lived and taught for most of his career in Freiburg; that he rarelytravelled, other than a few trips to other European countries (such asAustria, Italy, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Greece), andyet frequently conversed with visiting scholars from around the world,including seminal exchanges with visitors from China and Japan (seeMay 1996); that he spent much time at his beloved cabin in Todtnau-berg, a mountain village in the Black Forest; and that he lived in an ageof the rapid development and increasingly pervasive spread of moderntechnology.2

A major reason why we cannot ignore Heideggers personal (orexistentiell) history is his infamous official involvement with NationalSocialism in the first years of Hitlers regime. Indeed, this entanglementwith Nazism was not merely personal, in so far as Heidegger was, atthe time, convinced that it was his philosophical calling to take a lead-ing role in the formation of the movement. While his political role asrector of Freiburg University lasted only from 1933 to 1934, whilehis own version of what the movementshouldbe about his failedattempt to philosophically orient the movement, which he later claimswas dismissively referred to as his own private National Socialism(RFT23 =R30) was essentially untainted by biological racism, andwhile he increasingly became sharply (albeit often cryptically) criticalof Hitler and Nazism in his public lectures and private writings andcorrespondence, nevertheless his short-lived political involvement aswell as the more lasting political implications of his thought remain atroubling and fiercely debated topic to this day.

Finally, it would be inappropriate to abstract Heideggers thoughtfrom his historical situatedness in so far as, in his later period, he comesto hold that the historical existence of the individual is located withinan epoch of the history of being itself. Accordingly, in studying anyphilosopher we need to know when in which epoch of the history ofbeing he or she wrote. It is not enough, therefore, to say that a thinker


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was born on such and such a date, in so far as his or her thought arisesout of and helps determine a historical context of meaning. The greatphilosophers are thought to play crucial roles in the shifts between

epochs, and Heidegger saw his own thought as pivotally situated at theend of the history of philosophy as metaphysics and at the beginning ofwhat he called the task of thinking (seeBW431ff. =ZSD61ff.).

For Heidegger, it would also be insufficient to simply say that athinker died, at least in so far as this would imply that death is merelya biological event that happens at the end of ones life. As Heideggerexplains inBeing and Time, human existence (which he calls Dasein)is essentially determined as being-toward-death from the moment of

its birth (BTS228 =SZ245). Our being is always confronted with itsimpending non-being, even though we for the most part inauthentic-ally flee from this most certain truth. Authentically anticipating thisinevitable non-being, however, is not simply a gloomy looking aheadto the annihilation of life and meaningful existence; rather, facing upto our mortality allows us to properly take on the responsibility ofembracing this or that possibility of existence, which is in turn whatmakes life meaningful. Later, Heidegger will say that death is theshrine of the nothing (PLT176 =VA171), and that the nothing, asother than beings, is the veil of being (PM238 =GA9: 312), implyingthat authentically facing up to our mortality is also what opens us upto an attentive correspondence with being, which, in its ontologicaldifference from beings, must be approached as itself no-thing (seePM233 =GA9: 306;PM290 =GA9: 382). Thus, far from being aphilosophically irrelevant biographical or biological event, death, orthe being-toward-death of mortal human existence, would be a funda-mental experience that opens and sustains Heideggers philosophy asa thinking of being.

A final objection to summing up Heideggers life by saying that hewas born, worked, and then died is that, strictly speaking, he did notunderstand his efforts at thinking in terms of working or his writ-ings in terms of works. There are two reasons for this. One is thatHeidegger considered his thought to be essentially on the way. Hismotto for his Collected Edition(Gesamtausgabe) was ways, not works(Wege, nicht Werke), and he tell us that his books, essays and lecturesshould be read as pathmarks (Wegmarken) rather than as completedworks. Another reason is that Heidegger contrasted the work done inthe sciences with the thinking done in philosophy. While the formeraims at progress, the latter aims at re-gress, that is to say, at takinga radical step back. Science does not think (WCT 8 =WhD4),Heidegger was fond of provocatively stating. What he meant by this


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shocking statement is that science for the most part does not radi-cally question its presuppositions, but rather carries out the work ofresearch within certain given parameters. Heidegger is interested in

how those parameters are given in the first place. (In Thomas Kuhnsterms, Heidegger would be more interested in revolutionary science,which brings about paradigm shifts, than in normal science, whichworks within established paradigms [seeBTS78 =SZ9;BW271305;Kuhn 1970].) Thinking, Heidegger says, is not a matter of work andachievement within given horizons of intelligibility, but rather a kindof thanking and attentiveness through which such horizons are firstdelimited within the open-region of being (see GA77: 99100). In

contrast to the work of the sciences, with its measurable achievementsand technological effectiveness, the meditative thinking of philosophyis the immediately useless, though sovereign, knowledge of the essenceof things (BQP5 =GA45: 5).

The question of being

Heideggers chief concern is not with how this particular thingXrelatesto that particular thing Y, but rather how it is that the meaning ofXsand Ys and their possible relations gets determined in the first place.What does it mean for such things to be; what does it mean to say thattheyare? This question of ontology (the study of being), rather thanquestions regarding the ontic relations between particular beings, iswhat primarily interests Heidegger. Moreover, his central concern is notjust with regional ontologies, that is, with the meaning of the beingof, for example, biological things, artificial things, mental things, socialthings or imaginary things. Rather, following Aristotles understand-ing of ontology as first philosophy, Heidegger wants to know firstand foremost about being as such. What is the sense of being that allentities share? What is the being of all beings?

For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean whenyou use the expression being. We, however, who used to think weunderstood it, have now become perplexed. Heidegger opens his firstgreat book, Being and Time (1927), with this quotation from Plato(Sophist244a). He goes on to say that not only do we in our time nothave an answer to this question of the meaning of being, but we are nolonger even perplexed about this most fundamental of philosophicalconcerns. We have forgotten the questionof being. After Plato, Aris-totle wondered about the question of being quabeing (on hei on),that is, the question of what it means for anything to be, irrespective


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of whatever other qualities it may have. While an ontological enquirymight go on to ask, for example, what makes the being of an animaldifferent from the being of an artefact, the foundational question of

ontology asks: what does it mean for anything at all to be?As Heidegger points out, later philosophers such as Leibniz andSchelling rephrase the fundamental question of ontology as: Whyare there beings at all, and not rather nothing? (seeIM1 =EM1;PM290 =GA9: 382). But this way of framing the question of being canbe misleading, in so far as it would lead us to think of being (dasSein)as the highest being or entity (das hchsteSeiende), and to think of therelation between being and beings in terms of causality (in the sense

in which one entity gives rise to another). In this manner, theologiansmight answer the question of being by saying that God is the highestbeing who creates the world, and that is why there are beings rather thannothing. For Heidegger, such answers evade rather than address thequestion of being, in that they fail to see what he calls the ontologicaldifference between being and beings. The being of beings is itselfnot a being, and so the first philosophical step in understanding theproblem of being consists in not determining beings as beings bytracing them back in their origins to another being as if being had thecharacter of a possible being (BTS5 =SZ6).

Being is not one being among others; being is not this or that entity.It is not even the highest being from which lower levels of beings derivetheir privative measure of being, as is thought in the many versions ofthe great chain of being (see Lovejoy 1964). Nor is being to be derivedfrom beings by way of generalization, for example in the followingmanner: dogs and cats are animals, animals and plants are animateentities, animate and inanimate bodies are material entities, materialand mental entities are both substances, and they are all that is; thus sub-stance is the being of all beings. For Heidegger, when being is thoughteither in terms of the highest being (as it often is in theology), or interms of the most universal category of entities (as it often is in ontol-ogy), it is thought from or in terms of beings or entities, the ontologicaldifference is missed, and the question of being as such is forgotten.This oblivion of the question of being is said to pervade the historyof Western metaphysics, which is dominated by what Heidegger calls

ontotheology.Being (dasSein) is not itself a being or something that is (das Seiende),

but rather what determines beings as beings, or what it means for abeing or an entity to be (seeBTS45 =SZ6). Ultimately, for Heidegger,being or rather, as he sometimes writes, beyng (Seyn) is the appro-priating event (Ereignis) through which the meaning of the being of


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beings gets determined (see CP=GA65: pt VIII). Although he doesnot always clearly mark this distinction in his terminology, Heideggeris increasingly concerned not just with the difference between being

and beings, but also with the difference between the being of beings(what it means for beings to be, the horizon of their intelligibility) andbeyng itself (the originary event through which the being of beings getsdetermined). While the question of being and the ontological differ-ence between being and beings have fallen into oblivion over the courseof the history of Western metaphysics, beyng itself was intimated yetremained largely unthought even in the Greek beginning of Occi-dental thinking.

Rethinking being, together with time, humans and truth

For Aristotle, although being is spoken of in many ways, the primarymeaning of being is substance (Categories45;Metaphysics VII).3Substance (ousia) is the enduring substratum (hupokeimenon) of some-thing that underlies changes in its qualities, location and so on. Thesubstance of something remains constantlypresentdespite whatever elsechanges through time. Heideggers dismantling (AbbauorDestruktion)of the Western tradition of metaphysics proceeds by pointing out thetemporaldetermination of being implied in this thinking of being interms of constant presence. Thus, inBeing and Timehe writes thattime is that from which Da-sein tacitly understands and interpretssomething like being at all, and so time must now be brought to lightand genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding of andinterpretation of being (BTS15 =SZ17).

The following quotation from a transcript of lectures Heideggerdelivered in 1925 gives a particularly clear formulation of Heideggersdecisive critique of a certain interpretation of being [that] pervades thehistory of philosophy and determines its whole conceptuality:

What is striking here is how the Greeks interpreted being in termsof time: ousia[being] means presence, the present. If this is whatbeing signifies, then authentic being is that which is never not

there, i.e., what is always there (aei on[perpetual being]). Withinthe tradition, this concept of being was employed to understandhistorical reality, a reality that, however, is not always there. It isclear that if the Greek doctrine of being is uncritically accepted asabsolute, then it becomes impossible for research to understanda reality such as historical Dasein. (SUP175; see alsoBH273)


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Heidegger goes on to claim that Descartes and Husserl, for example,fail to ask about the being of the I am and, using unawares a tempor-ally restricted conception of being as constant presence, fail to give an

adequate account of human being. Such an account would have to takeinto consideration the temporal ek-stasis (literally standing outsideoneself) of human being: human existence is not simply immersedin the present, but also lives out towards the future and back towardsthe past.

Yet Heideggers call for a rethinking of the temporal dimension ofbeing is not restricted to questions of philosophical anthropology. Fromhis early analysis of the temporality of Dasein (human existence) to his

later being-historical thinking (seinsgeschichtliches Denken), one ofHeideggers central and most decisive philosophical claims is that beingitself essentially occurs temporally and historically. Indeed,Being andTimenot only begins with the hypothesis that the meaning of the beingof that being we call Da-sein proves to be temporality (BTS15 =SZ17), but also ends with the question of whether time can be consideredthe horizon of being as such (BTS398 =SZ437). In the final chaptersofBeing and Time, Daseins temporality is shown to be involved in ashared historicity (BTS=SZ727), and in later texts Heideggerbegins to speak of the occidental history of being. Indeed, in placeshe goes so far as to say that the history of being is being itself (EP82 =NII489; see alsoN4221 =NII362).

Another crucial claim Heidegger makes is that human being asDa-sein (literally being-there) is the site of the occurrence of being.In his later thought Heidegger comes to say that humans are required(gebraucht) for the appropriating event (Ereignis) that opens up a mean-ingful world, and it is only in such a world that beings can be the beingsthat they are (see CP=GA65: 1945;EGT53 =GA5: 3678;PM308 =GA9: 407). Hence, Heidegger often stresses that his question ofbeing must be understood as a question of the relationbetween beingand human being, a relation he characterizes as a belonging together(see WCT79 =WhD74;IDS3032 =ID1719). This relation was inone way or another at the centre of his thought-path from beginningto end, and all the turns in his thinking of being both those of histhinking and those of being must be understood in terms of his abid-

ing concern with this pivotal relation between being and human being.The question of being is thus at once the question of the place androle of human being in the temporalhistorical event that lets beingsbe the meaningful beings they appear to be. While an important shiftdoes occur in the course of Heideggers path of thought with regardto his idea of the proper comportment of human being to being a


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shift from an ambivalent tendency towards voluntarism in his early andmiddle periods to a fundamental attunement of releasement (Gelas-senheit) and an explicit attempt to think non-willing(ly), which is not

to say passively, in his later period (seeDT=G; CPC=GA77; Davis2007) the question of being for Heidegger remains throughout allthe phases of his thought a question about the relation between beingand human being.

A third crucial claim Heidegger makes is that being never reveals(orde-conceals, entbirgt) itself completely. As Heraclitus wrote, physis[nature or being] loves to hide (fr. 123). The epistemological demandfor certainty and the omniscience of unbounded unconcealment

belongs to the metaphysical misrepresentation of being as constantpresence. Heidegger is not a sceptic, since he does not relinquish thequest for truth; nor is he a relativist (or even a pragmatist), in so far asthat would mean that truth varies according to mere subjective opinionor instrumental usefulness. Truth for Heidegger is not arbitrary; it isnot subject to our individual or collective whims. Events of truth dotake place events that open up a clearing (Lichtung) or a space ofintelligibility wherein knowledge of beings first becomes possible andwe are called on to take part in these events, which appropriate us intothe world as a place of significant relations wherein we belong. Mean-ingful configurations of the world do come about, but such events ofunconcealment (Heideggers literal translation of the Greek word fortruth,aletheia) always entail at the same time a withdrawal into con-cealment. Truth is always coupled with untruth, openness with seclu-sion, clarity with mystery. Being withdraws as it comes to presence; itexpropriates as it appropriates; it holds back as it gives. This under-standing of truth as a twofold event of the revealing/concealing of beingis a central thread running through Heideggers path of thought (seeesp.BTS=SZ44;PM13654 =GA9: 177202).

Given these three basic characteristics of Heideggers thinking ofbeing namely beings essential temporality/historicity, its requirementof human being, and its truth as an event of revealing/concealing it isnot surprising that Heidegger considered his own path of thought tobe always on the way towards a more appropriate conception of, andrelation to, being. When approaching the key concepts of his think-

ing, it is thus generally advisable to proceed chronologically; and sothe chapter topics of this book are arranged roughly according to theorder in which they appear as specific foci of his thinking. It shouldimmediately be added, however, that the earlier concepts usually carryover into later periods, even as they get recontextualized and rethoughtalong the way. While some readers may end up preferring (aspects of)


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Heideggers earlier thought to his later thought, Heidegger himself,as one would expect, maintained that his journey brought him evernearer to a proper thinking of being. But he also stressed the necessity

of retracing all the steps along the way. The reader will find that keyconcepts first formulated in earlier way-stations can often be heardstill resounding in the clearings in the forest of being to which thewinding wood paths (Holzwege) of Heideggers thought later lead.Heidegger might have characterized his pathway of thinking in terms ofa deepening spiral rather than a linear progression, a spiral that alwayscircles around the central question of being and its proper relation withhuman being.

Language and basic concepts

Before allowing the reader to study in greater depth the key conceptsselected as chapter topics for this volume, there is one other centralaspect of Heideggers thought that deserves special comment in thisintroduction. In all periods of his thought, languageis vitally import-ant for Heidegger. As he famously wrote in the Letter on Humanism(1947), language is the house of being (PM239 =GA9: 313); that isto say, language demarcates the parameters of a realm wherein humanscan meaningfully dwell. Language domesticates being: it makes theworld liveable for us. InBeing and Time, Heidegger spoke of the asstructure of experience, meaning that when I hear a sound I hearit asa motorcycle or asa babys cry (BTS=SZ32). It is lan-guage that allows us to perceive and understand things as the thingsthat they appear to us to be. In a later text, commenting on the poetStefan Georges lines, Where the word breaks off no thing may be,Heidegger writes: Only where the word for the thing has been foundis the thing a thing. Only thus isit (OWL62 =GA12: 154). In his lateraccounts of the history of being, Heidegger goes so far as to claim thatthe horizon of intelligibility of an entire epoch is founded on a singleterm or cluster of terms: such words asphysis(nature as what emergesof itself), ousia(substance as what permanently endures), actualitas(actuality), subject and will to power determine the manner in which

the being of beings is revealed (and concealed) in the various epochsof Western civilization (seeEP=NII).

Heideggers accounts of the history of metaphysics, as well as hisown attempts to think otherwise, often focus on certain basic or funda-mental concepts (Grundbegriffe). A number of titles of his texts testifyto the centrality of such concepts: for example,Fundamental Concepts


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of Ancient Philosophy(1926,FCAP=GA22),Fundamental Conceptsof Metaphysics(1929/30,FCM=GA29/30) andBasic Concepts(1941,BC=GA51). Although in his earlier texts, such as Being and Time,

Heidegger often attempts to fashion a new philosophical vocabularywith such neologisms as thrownness, readiness-to-hand and being-in-the-world, in his later writings Heidegger more often attempts todraw on etymology and cognate connections to retrieve a more originalsense from accustomed locutions, letting words speak anew from theirorigins. For example, Heidegger attempts to let the everyday word forevent,Ereignis, name the event of appropriation in which humansrediscover their proper (eigentliche) relation of belonging to being, and

through which beings are brought back into their proper interrelationalplace in the world. It is also the case, however, that even in his earliestwritings Heidegger is concerned with uncovering profounder implica-tions of everyday words (for example, see his emphatic use of this verysame word,Ereignis, in TDP63 =GA56/57: 75). Indeed, it should beborne in mind that when inBeing and Timehe speaks of the destruc-turing of the tradition, his aim is to recover access to those originalwellsprings out of which the traditional categories and concepts werein part genuinely drawn (BTS19 =SZ21). It is also the case that weoften find him composing neologisms even in his later period, such asthe fourfold (Geviert) of earth and sky, mortals and divinities.

In his later writings on language, Heidegger famously claims thatLanguage speaks (Die Sprache spricht), while humans speak in thatthey correspond [entspricht] to language (PLT207 =GA12: 30, trans.mod.). In the course of his thinking, Heidegger became increasinglyconcerned with lettinglanguage speak, with undergoing an experiencewith language (OWL57 =GA12: 149), in contrast to a voluntaristicgrasping (begreifen) of concepts (Begriffe) (WCT211 =WhD128).Already inBeing and Time, in fact, Heidegger had defined his methodof hermeneutical phenomenology as an attempt to let what showsitself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself , as opposedto a theoretical imposition of subjective categories on things (BTS30 =SZ34). Later, he sharply distinguishes his approach to languagefrom logical positivisms project of constructing a metalanguage inorder to supposedly clear up the obscurities of everyday language and

philosophy. In so far as Analytical philosophy is set on producingthis super-language, it is, as metalinguistics, the thoroughgoingtechnicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument ofinterplanetary information (OWL58 =GA12: 150). Such attempts tomaster language are, Heidegger thinks, one of the greatest hubristicfollies of modern humanity. Humans act as though they were the


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shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains themaster of humans (PLT213 =VA184, trans. mod.).

Nevertheless, and despite Heideggers penchant for rhetorical revers-

als, it is crucial to recognize that for him the task of thinking, as lettinglanguage speak, is not simply passive. Rather, it involves a non-willingcorresponding a listening and a responding to the address of being.The fundamental words of our historical worlds arise in the conversa-tion that takes place between the address (Zuspruch) of being (Sein)and the correspondence (Entsprechung) of human Dasein. With theirbasic concepts, according to Heidegger, great thinkers should aspire tonothing less than such historically determined and determining words

of being. Thinkers can also aspire to nothing more, unless perhaps, as inthe case of Heideggers own basic concepts, they attempt to articulatethe abiding relations involved in this always finitely word- and world-bestowing event.

Heideggers legacies

As this introductory chapter has begun to reveal, and as the remainingchapters in this volume will explicate in more detail and depth, in hisattempt to rethink the most fundamental issue of ontology, the questionof being as such, Heidegger radically rethought such basic philosoph-ical concepts as time, space, the self (Dasein), interpersonal relations,things, the world, language, truth, art, technology and the divine. Theoriginality of Heideggers ideas is matched only by the thoroughnessof his engagement with the texts of the history of philosophy, and theradicality of his reinterpretations of their key concepts. As a result of itsoriginality and radicality, the influence Heideggers thought has exerted and continues to exert on subsequent developments in philosophyand in related disciplines of intellectual enquiry is arguably on a par withsuch landmark figures in the history of philosophy as Plato, Augustine,Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche.

While it would be an exaggeration to claim that, for the past three-quarters of a century, the history of philosophy has now become aseries of footnotes to Heidegger, the legacies of his thought, especially

in Europe and in continental philosophy around the globe, havebeen extensive and profound. As his reputation as a lecturer spread ina manner Hannah Arendt compared to the rumor of the hidden king,Heideggers name became well known in German universities yearsbefore the publication ofBeing and Timelaunched him on to the worldstage in 1927. Since that time, and on account of his prolific writing and


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continual lecturing until nearly the end of his life in 1976, Heideggersthought has left a major impact on and in many cases helped found orat least radically reform a number of areas of philosophy, including

phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, ontology, epistemology,the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, the philosophy oftechnology, the philosophy of art, the philosophy of language, psychoa-nalysis and the philosophy of religion.

In the 1920s, Heidegger quickly rose from being Edmund Husserlsassistant to being a collaborator and then rival shaper of the new fieldof phenomenology, and subsequent generations of phenomenologists(notably such French figures as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul

Sartre and, more recently, Jean-Luc Marion) were influenced as muchby Heidegger as they were by Husserl. Although he never acceptedSartres label, Heideggers early thought clearly influenced the philo-sophical and literary movement of existentialism. With his attentionto history and the problem of interpretation, Heidegger paved theway for the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, PaulRicoeur and Gianni Vattimo. Heideggers existential analyses of humanbeing were decisive for critical theorists (such as Herbert Marcuse),psychologists and psychoanalysts (such as Medard Boss and JacquesLacan), and Protestant as well as Catholic theologians (such as RudolfBultmann and Karl Rahner). HeideggersDestruktionof the traditionof Western ontology paved the way for Jacques Derridas deconstruc-tion of the metaphysics of presence, and his account of the epochs ofthe history of being decisively influenced Michel Foucaults genealogiesof regimes of truth. Heideggers critique of modern technologicalsociety, the questionable role of ethics in his thought, as well as hiscontroversial political engagements and thought, have inspired greatdiscussion and debate (among such figures as Hannah Arendt, JrgenHabermas, Hans Jonas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Emmanuel Levi-nas, Karl Lwith and Jean-Luc Nancy) over the many provocative andthought-worthy issues they raise. Heideggers writings on poetry andart have become standard reading material, not only for literary andart critics, but also for many poets and artists themselves. In additionto leading Heidegger scholars and continental philosophers (such asRobert Bernasconi, John Caputo, Edward Casey, Franoise Dastur,

Richard Dreyfus, Michel Haar, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann,David Farrell Krell, Luigi Pareyson, Otto Pggeler, William Richard-son, John Sallis, Dennis Schmidt, Reiner Schrmann, Franco Volpi andDavid Wood, to name just a few, and without mentioning those listedamong the contributors to this volume), a wide variety of analytic (orpost-analytic), pragmatist, and other North American philosophers


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(such as Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor) have beensignificantly influenced by Heideggers thought, as have many British,Australian, South American and other philosophers around the world.

Scholars from India (such as J. L. Mehta) have taken a serious interestin Heideggers philosophy and, in the Far East, philosophers such asthose associated with the Kyoto School in Japan (including Kuki Shuzoand Watsuji Tetsuro, as well as Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji) havebeen profoundly affected by their prolonged dialogue with Heideggerand his thought.

This sketch of Heideggers extraordinary philosophical legaciesremains fragmentary (indeed another book would be required to

properly introduce the influences of Heideggers thought), and theselegacies continue to grow. As the remaining volumes of his CollectedEdition (Gesamtausgabe) followed by their translations steadilybecome available, more books and articles continue to be publishedon Heidegger each year than perhaps on any other philosopher. Thevariety of approaches this scholarship takes ranges from the aggressivelypolemical to the unquestioningly defensive. There are also, thankfully,many scholars who attempt to steer a course between the bashers andthe idolizers to engage in a critical appropriation of and/or a dialogi-cal confrontation with Heideggers thought. Although it is certainlynot my intention to prescribe how the reader should read Heidegger,it is my hope that the present volume will serve to facilitate a genuineunderstanding of, and thereby an authentic encounter with, his wayof thinking.

Notes

1. Theodore Kisiel warns against the abuse of this often cited remark (in whichHeidegger apparently rejects the relevance of biography in understanding aphilosopher), especially by those who would rather simply ignore the incon-venient aspects and episodes in Heideggers life. Kisiel argues that ironically thequotation is often taken out of context, given that at the time Heidegger wasdeveloping his hermeneutics of facticity, which stresses the interplay of theontic and the ontological and the equiprimordiality of the historical with thesystematic. Kisiel also points out that Heidegger had begun another course onAristotle two years earlier (in 1922) by noting that the life and works of thephilosopher are presuppositions for the course (GA62: 8; Kisiel 1993: 287,540 n.3).

2. For other biographical highlights see my chronology of Heideggers life at theback of this book. Safranski (1998) is a well rounded and illuminating philo-sophical biography. Ott (1993) is an informatively detailed biography that criti-cally examines what Heidegger once (in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1935) called


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the two great thorns in my flesh the struggle with the faith of my birth, andthe failure of the rectorship [of Freiburg University] (ibid.: 37). Geier (2005)is a concise and very good biography in German. Another excellent source ofbiographical information available in German is Mehring & Thom (2003).

3. In trying to steer a middle course between a materialistic and an idealisticunderstanding of substance, that is, between Thales water or Anaximenesair or Democritus atoms on the one hand, and Platos Forms or Ideason the other, Aristotle makes a distinction between two senses of substance,and wavers between giving priority to one or the other of these. Substance iseither a particular something, a this, or it is the universal characteristic thatmakes a particular something what it is. According to Heidegger, these twonotions of substance in Aristotle which become the fundamental metaphysicaldistinction between thatness (Da-sein, literally that-being) or existentia(existence) on the one hand, and whatness (Was-sein, literally what-being)or essentia(essence) on the other are thought by him as modes of presencingwhose fundamental characteristic is energeia, a word that gets translated inthe course of the history of metaphysics as actualitas, actuality and reality(seeEP48 =NII4027). While Heidegger tends to think of this history asa decline from the greatness of the Greek beginning, he also draws attentionto the unthought temporal determination of the Greek notion of substance bytranslating Aristotles ousiaas presence (Anwesenheit). Heidegger claims thatwhat the Greeks experienced, but failed to fully think, was the presencing(Anwesen) of what presences, that is, the temporality of being as an event of

emergence (physis) and unconcealment (aletheia).

References

Davis, B. W. 2007.Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston,IL: Northwestern University Press.

Geier, M. 2005.Martin Heidegger.Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag.Kisiel, T. 1993. The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time.Berkeley, CA: Uni-

versity of California Press.Kuhn, T. S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd enlarged edn. Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lovejoy, A. O. 1964. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press.

May, R. 1996. Heideggers Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work,G. Parkes (trans., with essay). New York: Routledge.

Mehring, R. & D. Thom 2003. Eine Chronik. InHeidegger Handbuch: LebenWerkWirkung, D. Thom (ed.), 51539. Stuttgart: Metzler.

Ott, H. 1993.MartinHeidegger: A Political Life, A. Blunden (trans.). New York:Basic Books.

Safranski, R. 1998.Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, E. Osers (trans.).Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


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Further reading

Primary sources

See Heideggers Basic Writings; Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His EarlyOccasional Writings, 19101927, Being and Time; Country Path Conversations;The Heidegger Reader;Introduction to Metaphysics; Off the Beaten Track; andPath-marks.

Secondary sourcesFor introductory and reference works in English see de Beistegui (2005), Dreyfus& Wrathall (2007), Guignon (2006), Inwood (1999), Polt (1999) and Safranski

(1998). In German, see D. Thom (ed.),Heidegger Handbuch: LebenWerkWirkung(Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003).For more advanced studies in English see Bernasconi (1993), Krell (1986),

Macann (1996), Pggeler (1987), Richardson (2003), Sallis (1990, 1993) andWood (2002).


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ONE

Hermeneutics of facticityTheodore Kisiel

Comprehending factical life in its holistic concreteness:through Dilthey to Heidegger

It was Fichte who first coined the abstract term facticity (Facticitt;laterFaktizitt) for the philosophical tradition. He was thereby notreferring to empirical facts or a collection of them, but to the centralfact of the tradition of modern thought, which takes its starting-pointfrom Descartes famous regress to the fact of the I-think, understoodas the irreducible limit of reflection behind which one can question nofurther. It then becomes the ground on which all of modern philoso-phy takes its stand in order, like Atlas, to move the entire world. Thelocution of the fact of the I-think appears on occasion in Kants FirstCritique, which he supplements with another comprehensive fact earlyin the Second Critique, when he proclaims the moral law, in its cor-relation with freedom, to be the sole fact of pure [practical] reason.It might accordingly be called a transcendental fact, although Fichtetended to call it facticity, especially in his later lecture courses. Theposthumous publication of these courses and later works by his theo-logian son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, could be considered the mostproximate source of the diffusion of the term into the nineteenth-century literature of both philosophy and theology. Nineteenth-centuryProtestant theology is replete with references to the facticity of theevents of Christian salvation history, on which the Christian faith takesits original stand. The persistent albeit sporadic use of the term innineteenth-century writers such as Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Dilthey andthe neo-Kantians is a matter of lexical record (Kisiel 19867, 2008).


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Diltheys occasional use of the term is especially influential onHeidegger. In the context of distinguishing between mythical thoughtand religious experience, the early Dilthey makes the following obser-

vation about the world of early humanity:

[T]his context grounded in religious experience is likewiseconditioned by the way in which reality is given to human beingsin those days.Reality is lifeand remains life for them; it does notbecome an intellectual object by way of knowledge. Therefore, itis in all ways will,facticity, history, that is, living original reality.Because it is there for the whole living human being and has not

yet been subjected to any kind of intellectual analysis and abstrac-tion (hence dilution), it is therefore itself life. Life is neverexhausted by thought.(Dilthey 1988: 161 = 1973: 141, emphasis added, trans. mod.)

And yet life is amenable to thinking, when performed without the-oretical intrusion, that is, phenomenologically. In his quest for a critiqueof historical reason, Dilthey gradually renounces the elevated reason ofthe detached transcendental ego, in whose veins flows no real blood(1973: xviii), and calls instead for a return to the this-side of life,to the full facticity of unhintergehbareslife itself, behind which [the-oretical] thought cannot go, the vital original reality given to humanbeings to live before they come to think about it, an irreducible ultimateand irrevocable givenness that human beings cannot but live in and arebound to live out. It is the phenomenological return to the things them-selves, in this case, back to the transcendental fact of life itself. Startingfrom the ineradicable givenness of factic life, the phenomenologist mustnow enter into this life in order to understand it from out of itself, in itsown terms. In his philosophy of historical life, Diltheys ambition was todevelop the categories Heidegger will eventually call them existen-tials orbasic structures of historical life out of factic life itself, whichprior to any thought spontaneously articulates and contextures itself ina manifold of vitally concrete and meaningful basic relations (beginningwith I-myself-being-embodied-in-the-world-with-others-among-things)that constitute its immediate lifeworld. In Diltheys pregnant phrase,

das Leben selbst legt sich aus: life itself lays itself out, interpretsitself, generating its own meaning and senses of directionin the com-bined shape and thrust of a working context and operative continuity ofstructure(Wirkungszusammenhang) (Kisiel 1993: 1345).

In fact, human life is this self-articulating and therefore funda-mentally understandable operative continuity of context. Accord-


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ingly, phenomenology as the pre-theoretical proto-science of originalexperience is a hermeneutics offacticity, whose initial aim is to makeexplicit the implicit structures into which historical life has already

spontaneously articulated itself, laid itself out, prior to any extra-neous thought or alien theoretical intrusion. The young Heideggerthus sharply juxtaposes the historically situated I over against any sortof theoretical I or transcendental ego abstracted in Cartesian fashionfrom its vital context, thereby denuded of its world, dehistoricizedand devitalized (ibid.: 456; TDP616, 747, 174 =GA56/57: 738,8891, 206, 2089).

This historically situated I will soon be ontologically identified

with Da-sein as being-in-the-world (see Chapter 3). The language oflife now slides into the language of be-ing. Yet, behind the scenes ofDasein as being-in-the-world, the spontaneous hermeneutics of facticlife experience continues to operate as a pre-theoretical primal domainof being. Consider the theme of the understanding-of-being. Humanbeing understands being. But this understanding-of-being is at firstnot conceptual in nature; it is rather the more matter-of- fact under-standing of what it means to be that comes from simply living a life. Tobegin with, we do not know what being means conceptually, but weare in fact quite familiar with its sense preconceptually in and throughthe manifold habitual activity of living. If the term knowledge stillapplies to this understanding of life in its being, it is more the immediateknow-how or savoir faire of existence, a knack or feel for what itmeans to be and how to go about the business (umgehen) of beingthat comes from life experience. We already know howto live, and thispre-understanding of the ways of being is repeatedly elaborated andcultivated in our various forays into the environing world of things andthe communal world of being-with-others, both of which intercalateand come to a head in the most comprehensive of meaningful contexts,the self-world of our very own being-in-the-world.

This repeated cultivation and explication of our pre-understandingof being into habitually reinforced articulated contexts of relationalmeaning is what Heidegger has called a hermeneutics of facticity,where the of is regarded as a double genitive. That is to say, the fac-ticity of life experience, on the basis of a prior understanding, already

spontaneously explicates and interprets itself, repeatedly unfoldinginto the network of meaningful relations that constitutes the fabric ofhuman concerns that we call our historical world. Historically situatedexistence in its facticity is thoroughly hermeneutical. Accordingly, anyovertly phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity, in its expositoryinterpretation of the multifaceted concerns of the human situation, is


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but an explicit recapitulation of an implicit pan-hermeneutic processalready indigenous to historical life. Facticity is through and throughhermeneutical (understandable, intelligible, meaningful).

But there is more. Also related to thehermeneutic situationof facticlife is one of Heideggers most celebrated theses, namely, thatDaseinis disclosiveness, the locus of truth as the unconcealment of be-ing (seeChapter 8). This originary mode of truth is already manifest from thetacit dimensionof pre-predicative understanding that must be repeat-edly explicated out of its precedent latency and concealment, first ofall in the persistent exercise of the habit of living, which can then bemore overtly explicated by way of deliberative existential and phenom-

enological exposition. The hermeneutic situation of factic life itself,unfolding itself against the background context of the environing worldof tool usage and procurement of products, the interpersonal world ofsocial usage and communal custom in being-with-others, and the self-world of striving-to-be and discovering oneself in ones unique being,is the proximate disclosive arena of originary truth as unconcealment.Truth is thereby displaced from its traditional locus in judgement andassertion even seemingly comprehensive assertions such as Cogito ergosum to the existentially contextualized expository question, especiallywhen it is poised at the doubled frontier of concealment of the humansituation in its mystery and its errancy.

The comprehensive disclosive capability of human existence was infact recognized quite early by the philosophical tradition. Aristotle, forexample, observes that the human soul is, in a way, all beings, that is, itis capable of coming together with all being by way of cognitive intel-lection (SZ14, citingDe anima3, 430a14). But for this tradition, whichruns from Parmenides to Husserl, the basic mode of knowing is thetotal transparency of illuminative seeing, intuition, which in temporalterms means a making-present. In the context of a hermeneutics of fac-ticity, by contrast, the basic mode of knowing is interpretive expositionout of a background of understanding that by and large remains tacit,latent, withdrawn and, at most, only appresent, a tangential presencethat shades off into the shadows of beings concealment. Discoveringbeings and disclosing the self and its world take place in a temporalclearing of unconcealing being that displays an overriding tendency

to withdraw into concealment. But this very withdrawal is what drawsthe enquiring human being to unceasing thought in its questioningpursuit of the temporalsense and mystery of being.


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Countering ruinance and formally indicating the facticity of life

The facticity of life was first thematized indicatively and schematically1

in the War Emergency Semester of 1919 under the heading of the pre-theoretical primal something (Ur-etwas) of life in and for itself(Kisiel 1993: 212, 38, 5055; TDP1867, 98 = GA56/57: 21920,116). The semesters that follow make factic life the sole and centralmatter of a phenomenology defined as the pre-theoretical primal sci-ence of original experience.

Heideggers most exhaustive phenomenological treatment of facticlife itself occurs in Winter Semester 19212, replete with an elaborate

system of categories in the spirit of Dilthey that trace the complexmotions of life in its relations with the world. The transitive movementsof life include to live in, live out of, live for, live against, live with,and so on, something. This something that sustains these manifoldrelations of living is called the world. The category world accord-ingly names what is lived, what life holds to, the content aimed at bylife. Consequently, if life is regarded in its relational sense, the worldthen characterizes its sense of holdings, its sense of containment. The

relational sense of living can be further formally specified as caring. Tolive is to care. Broadly understood, to live is to care for our privationsor needs, for example, our daily bread. What we care for and about,what caring adheres to, can be defined as meaningfulness. Meaningful-ness is a categorial determination of the contextured world. The worldand its objects are present in life in the basic relational sense of caring.An act of caring encounters them, meets them as it goes its way (PIA68 =GA61: 90). Caring is an experience of objects in their respectivemode of encounter, ranging from things and persons to oneself, whichrespectively occupy the environing world, the shared world and onesown world, the three specific worlds of care. To be an object here is tobe met on the path of care and experienced as meaningful. Meaningful-ness is to be taken broadly and not restricted to a particular domain ofobjects, say, objects of value. Meaningfulness is not experienced assuch, but can become explicit in the expository interpretation of onesown lifeas factic(PIA70 =GA61: 93).

The deeper structure of factic life that underlies the intentional cor-relationbetween us and the world thus proves to be the correlativity ofcare and meaningfulness. This deep structure might now be properlyidentified as its facticity, which as an articulated context of meaning isin no way a brute fact closed in on itself but instead a meaningful con-text open to further development. One such development Heideggerhere calls it the actualization of a tendency inherent in factic life is for


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factic life in its caring to enter into the world to the point of becomingtaken by it and never managing to return to itself.

Heideggers first detailed phenomenological account of the ways of

decadence in this semester called ruinance (Ruinanz) is presentedin an idiosyncratic language and at a level of complexity that will byand large be abandoned in future accounts, as it is inBeing and Time,where it is described as a falling into inauthenticity (see Chapter4). A sampling of just one of the ways of ruinance developed here maysuffice. Lifes tendency to become totally absorbed in the world canreach the point of abolishing the sense of distance from the world assuch. Instead, its sense of distance gets shunted into dispersion, being

transported from one meaningful arena to another, now seeking distan-tiation withinthe meaningful world. The life of care in the shared worldis accordingly directed towards rank, success, position, advancement,advantage, superiority (PIA77, 90 =GA61: 103, 121). This care for dis-tantiation and distinction finds ever new gratification in the dispersion,which multiplies itself endlessly. Life, in its inclination to disperse itsrelational sense into distantiation, is hyperbolic (PIA78 =GA61: 104).Multiplicity itself becomes a mode of meaningfulness. In its endlessquest for variety and novelty, life at times even lapses into the temptationof curiosity, the fascinating lust of the eyes. In incessantly looking atthe world, life looks away from itself. In being drawn into the world,life is in fact in flight from itself. The very multiplicity of possibilitiesincreases the possibilities of mis-taking ones self in ever new worldlyways. One is embarked on a life of interminable mis-takes, a veritablelife of errancy. Succumbing to the illusion of infinite possibilities, lifesequesters itself off from itself. In so doing, factic life constantly eludesits self and pursues the path of the elliptical(PIA81 =GA61: 108), cul-tivating multiple ways of self-evasion, dissembling and self-deception.

Here, accordingly, a counter-ruinant hermeneutics of facticityassumes the role of unmasking dissemblance and disguise, in order tobring factic life back from its lostness in the multiplicity of the worldandrestore it to itself in its most original self-standing and uniquelyunified stance in the facticity of life. The counter-movement to lost-ness in decadence is the movement of transcendence towards simplyfinding ones self in the sheer and utter facticity of ones own unique

factic situation of simply being-t/here in its full insecurity and radicalquestionability. It is of the essence of philosophy to be counter-ruinantin its persevering movement towards facticitypure and simple. Counter-ing the flight of factic life from itself, it seeks out its own facticity in itsfullest temporal and historical concretion, which turns out to be its veryown factic self in its unique historical situation, as the unique basis for


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interpreting its hermeneutic situation. How this is to be achieved callsfor a review of thesenses of directionthat underlie the above accountof the intentional movements of factic life.

We have already highlighted the containment sense of the worldas meaningful context and the relational sense of caring, and stressedthe broad formality of these senses interlocked in the most basic ofthe intentional relationships of facticity. The caring relationship withthe world has been mobilized into a multiplicity of forms and mani-festations, and thereby brought to concrete actualization. This is itssense of actualization, at this ruinant stage by and large improper orinauthentic. A more proper (eigentlich: authentic) concretion is to

be attained by the temporal and historical extension of the actualiza-tion sense, its temporalizing sense, which indicates how the actualiza-tion becomes actualization in and for its [holistically proper] situation,how it temporally develops, matures, comes to fruition. This temporalripening is to be interpreted on the basis of the sense of temporaliza-tion (PIA40 =GA61: 53, emphasis added). The factic experientialcontext now acquires a unique historical thrust in its sense of actualiza-tion. This holistic context is to be understood and interpreted not inobjectivehistorical but in actualizationhistorical terms, as history-in-enactment, asself-actualization in ones unique and whole historicalcontext. It is an invitation for the self to-be-historical in and for its ownpropersituation. And it is by way of the temporalizing sense whichin Being and Timebecomes the authenticating unitary movementof originary temporality that one now owns up to ones very ownhistorical situation in its wholeness, thereby itself becoming a proper,historically situatedself. Pervading the comprehensive temporalizingsense is a sense of the kairos, a sense of the timeliness of ones ownhistorical situation coming to its fullness of time, soliciting theselftorespond with a correspondingly appropriate timeliness in order to be itstime. Comprehending that situation at once properly and holistically,the temporalizing sense thereby transforms the intentional categories oflife intoproperhermeneutic categories operating in theirproperly com-prehensivehistorical context, categories that are accordingly formallyindicative in character, indicative of ones very own concrete situationin its proper actualization while remaining formal on the level of the

holistic life-nexus(PIA87 = GA61: 116). Unified by the properly com-prehensive sense of temporalization, the triple-sensed prestruction (thesenses of containment, relation and actualization schematized above) ofthe intentional relation between life and the world now becomes a fullyfledged formally indicative concept; and in the end Heidegger considersformally indicative concepts to be the only properly philosophical


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concepts. The triple-sensed prestruction is itself now translated intothe triadic presuppositional structure (of prepossession, preview andpreconception) of the properhermeneutic situation, which becomes

the concrete site of interpretation out of which life and philosophy willnow ripen into full maturity and come to themselves.Since philosophy, radically understood, always starts from the pre-

theoretical realm of the facticity of original experience, it does notin fact pose or posit its presup-positions. For it has already beenpositioned within its most basic presupposition, the very facticity offactic life. In Heideggers early language, its basic Voraus-setzungis infact Voraus-dasein(PIA12022 =GA61: 15961), pre-existence in

its being-t/here. Rather than a positing, it is more a matter of a radicalreturn to the original facticity of the concrete life-situation in whichwe already find ourselves positioned, interpretively appropriating itand developing it into our own unique hermeneutic situationin whichand out of which philosophy is to do its work of expository interroga-tion. Presuppositions of this sort are to be lived, seized as such in orderto plunge wholeheartedly into the factically historical dimension ofexistence (IHS478 n.4). What is to be brought into view as the basicprepossession of ones own temporally and historically particular her-meneutic situation is the full concretion of factic life itself, which is thesole and comprehensive object of philosophical research. And since itis itself a mode of factic life, philosophical research is itself the explicitactualizationof a basic movement of factic life and constantly maintainsitself within that life (IHS158, emphasis added). Philosophy actualizesitself only by way of the radical and concrete questioning that arisesfrom the anxiety over its very own historically particular situation.What is being placed in question is the very facticity of ones own timeand generation. Being thus questioned by a historical situation that isuniquely its own, philosophy is what it can be only as the philosophyof its time (OHF14 =GA63: 18).

It is accordingly incumbent on each time and each generation ofphilosophers to subject its current hermeneutic situation, which to beginwith has been transmitted to it in an already given interpretedness, toa deconstructive regress in order to explicate the hidden motive forcesthat are operative within that factic interpretation. In the end, phil-

osophys entire history must be subjected to a destructive contestationof its venerable concepts in order to retrieve the original experiencesfrom which they have developed. All this in order to direct the presentsituation towards a more radical possibility of appropriation of itshistorical situation. What Heidegger achieves at this stage from thevantage of facticity is a critique of the Greek-Christian tradition of the

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[R] Eds. Davis - Martin Heidegger - Key Concepts - 2010