Abstract
This essay, drawn from the book Heidegger's Way of Being, brings back into view the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought: Being as the temporal emerging, showing, shining-forth, manifestation of all beings and things. Highlighted is the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation—"the truth of Being"—and how Heidegger also named and elucidated this Ur-phenomenon as aletheia, Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. The essay is part of a larger project that aims to recall and restate the originality and distinctiveness of Heidegger's thought and to offer a rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and especially those that propose a reduction of Being to "sense" or "meaning" and maintain that the core matter is human "meaning-making."
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Notes
Thomas Sheehan has made the most concerted effort to argue for the pure transcendental reduction of (Heidegger’s) Sein to Sinn (of Being to meaning or sense), “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review, 34 (2001), 183–202. See also more recently, “Astonishing! Things Make Sense!” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, 1 (2011), 1–25. Related: Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger (New York: Springer, 1993). My readings and reflections that follow in these studies are broadly mindful of all such strictly “transcendental-phenomenological” readings of Heidegger’s core matter, and of Sheehan’s reading in particular. Even so, I would also make note that many years earlier, Hubert Dreyfus had laid out his basic reading of Heidegger that the source of the “sense” of things is to be found in Dasein’s “absorbed,” everyday, skillful coping practices; see his Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Related: William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2006); Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 27–49. Sheehan and Dreyfus read Heidegger from within very different philosophical traditions, no doubt, but it remains, nonetheless, that for both the central matter of Heidegger’s thinking concerns the human being—Dasein and Dasein’s making “sense” of things.
See, for example, Heidegger’s letter to Manfred Frings dated 20 October 1966 in Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, ed. Manfred Frings (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 17–21. Also his Preface (1962) to William J. Richardson’s book Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963/1974), xv: “the question of Being in the sense of the thinking of Being as such (the manifestness of Being)”.
GA 15: 385-6; Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 72.
§13-15 in GA 56/57: 63–76; Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Athlone Press, 2008), 51–60.
For the German word welten, see the entry in the Deutsches Wörterbuch by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Vol. 28 (at 1563). For world as a verb in English, see the entry “world, v.” in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). Consider as well how this reading helps us understand his many later statements regarding “world,” such as from 1941/42: “The springing up of the world comes to pass as the self-opening…The opening is aletheia; it is unconcealedness, truth” (GA 88:325). And in his many readings of Heraclitus from the early 1940 s onward, “world,” properly understood as the Heraclitean kosmos, is another name for Being—and world/kosmos/Being is that which “shimmers ungraspably throughout everything.” (GA 15:282; Four Seminars, 8).
I examine the central importance of the image of the “sun” and “light” for the early and middle Heidegger in my Engaging Heidegger, Chs. 5 and 6. Apart from the texts, another clue is to be found in Heidegger’s famous hut in Todtnauberg. In Adam Sharr’s book Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), there is a lovely photo of Heidegger, reposed and pensive, sitting at the head of the dining table (p. 33). To the left of him, as if an honored guest at his table, is a great smiling sun that is carved into the wood of the inside back of a chair. Heidegger’s “sun”: the enabling light that allows all things to appear—Being itself! Even though the trope of “light” (lumen, lux) became more problematical to Heidegger in the later years because of the Platonic/metaphysical overtones, still, it remained a central feature of his thinking of Being from start to finish (see Ch. 2).
Martin Heidegger, “Die Grundfrage nach dem Sein selbst” (“The Fundamental Question Concerning Being Itself”) Heidegger Studies, 2 (1986), 1–3. Note that Heidegger clearly refers to the question of Sein selbst (Being itself) as the Grundfrage (the fundamental question). In contrast, the Leitfrage (the guiding question) is Heidegger’s term for the inquiry into Seiendheit (beingness), the beingness of a being, which in his view was primarily pursued in the metaphysical tradition of thinking from the very beginning. I maintain that Sheehan’s reading of the Grundfrage is at odds with Heidegger’s own many statements on the matter, such as this one. Furthermore, Heidegger’s synoptic statement here gives us an indication of why even in his earliest work he did not focus on Husserl’s key notion of “constitution”. That is, we might say that Heidegger’s focal point was always the manifestness of Being—and the manifestness of Being is structurally prior to, and the ontological condition of, any such “constitution” of meaning. Being is not reducible to meaning, and this is elucidated further in the following chapters.
GA 15: 345; Four Seminars, 47.
GA 15: 334–5; Four Seminars, 40–41.
GA 54; GA 55; GA 9.
GA 27: 78 (my translation; no available English translation). See also in the same volume, 104–5. Heidegger, in maintaining that it is the being itself that is manifest, uses the phrase an ihm selbst rather than an sich selbst. This way of phrasing the matter appears to enable him (1) to draw a clear contrast with the Kantian/Neo-Kantian Ding an sich and (2) to emphasize that it is the being in it itself that is “true”. Heidegger also often employed the phrase von sich her—a manifestation or showing of the being from itself forth; see, for example, the 1969 seminar in Le Thor in GA 15: 326–29, where he also characterizes the being “in its place” (in seiner Lage) as “it lets itself be seen” (327). Note that this instructive phrase “in seiner Lage” is omitted in the English edition, Four Seminars, 35. See also Ch. 3.
Heidegger’s culminating statement on this Aristotelian text can be found in his 1930 summer semester lecture course in GA 31. See especially §9 (c), (d), and (e): 80–109. The Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Athlone Press, 2005), 56–74.
GA 23 (no available English translation); specifically §10–15: 41–68. For Heidegger’s exchange with Scheler in 1924, see “Being-there and Being-true According to Aristotle” in Becoming Heidegger, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 233.
Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 1, De Veritate, ed. P. Fr. Raymundi Spiazzi, O.P. (Rome: Marietti Editori, 1953), 3.
“Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182 (marginal note a); GA9: 237. Also consider a marginal note he made concerning Thomas in the text of the 1949 “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics?’’’: “Veritas in Thomas Aquinas always in intellectu, [even] be it the intellectus divinus.” In Pathmarks, 280 (marginal note c); GA 9: 369. I also note that this original and distinctive position that Heidegger maintains time and time again—Being as Aletheia, Being is Aletheia—is altogether missed by Sheehan in his readings of Heidegger. For Sheehan, Heidegger’s aletheia pertains to Dasein only; see, for example, his “Astonishing!,” 10–11. Yet, again, let us keep Heidegger’s distinctive position always in view: “Being is the truth as such” (see the recently published GA 73.1:133, his italics).
Martin Heidegger, “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” trans. Richard Capobianco and Marie Göbel, Epoché, 14:2 (Spring 2010), 213–23. GA 16: 620–33, but see our preface to the translation for a complete provenance.
Ibid., 219–20. For a discussion of Heidegger’s special use of the word glänzen, see Ch. 2.
Consider the clarity and force of Heidegger’s position as stated in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (composed 1940): “Unconcealedness reveals itself…as the fundamental feature of beings themselves.” And further, “As Plato conceives it, unconcealedness remains harnessed in a relation to looking, apprehending, thinking, and asserting. To follow this relation means to relinquish the essence of unconcealedness” (my emphasis). In Pathmarks, 182. GA 9: 237–38. See also the Parmenides volume, GA 54:50: “Nevertheless, for the Greeks, and still for Aristotle, aletheia is the character of beings and not only a character of the perceiving of beings and of statements about them”.
GA 15: 327; Four Seminars, 35. Wittgenstein’s opening proposition in the Tractatus is generally translated as “The world is all that is the case”.
“The Fundamental Question Concerning Being Itself,” 1, my italics.
GA 88: 205 (my translation, no available English translation; my italics).
GA 88: 311.
GA 77: 147 (italics mine, except for the last line).
GA 10: 103; The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 70.
GA 15: 345; Four Seminars, 47.
These texts and other similar texts explicitly state or strongly suggest that Being and its "truth" "is" even if the human being is not; they also clearly speak to the trajectory of his thinking after Being and Time. See also Heidegger’s own retractatio of his early position in Being and Time in the “Letter on Humanism,” Pathmarks, 256–57; GA 9:336–37. The first and second lines cited are from “Recollection in Metaphysics”/“Die Erinnerung in die Metaphysik” (1941). GA 6.2:441, 447, my italics. Cf. Joan Stambaugh’s translation in the volume The End of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 76, 82. The third line is from a text included as an Addendum in the Parmenides volume (lecture course 1942–43), GA 54:249. The German reads: “Nur weil das Sein und die Wahrheit des Seins wesentlich ist über alle Menschen und Menschentümer hinweg,….” The word "Menschentum" is commonly translated as “humanity,” but Heidegger uses the plural (rare), which would be oddly translated as “humanities,” as Schuwer and Rojcewicz do in Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 166. Consequently, I have opted for “every [historical] humanity,” though Heidegger’s use of the plural form in this paragraph could also be captured by “every historical people” or “all historical peoples”. The fourth line is also from the Parmenides volume, GA 54:164; Parmenides, 111. The fifth line is from the 1943 lecture course on Heraciltus, GA 55:166. Also with respect to this line, see the seminar in Le Thor in 1966 (9 September), where Heidegger restated the view that physis and Logos and kosmos spoken of by Heraclitus say the same as Being. Commenting on fragment 30, he observed: “kosmos [is] older than the gods and human beings, who remain related back to it, since not the gods or human beings could ever have brought it [kosmos] forth”. GA 15:282; Four Seminars, 8; my italics.
See especially Heidegger’s 1955/56 lecture course “Der Satz vom Grund,” GA 10, translated as The Principle of Reason (cited above).
In this regard, note Heidegger’s remark in Le Thor in 1969: “We must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that the determinations of phainesthai and of the [on hos] alethes are fully present in the Platonic eidos.” GA 15: 333–4; Four Seminars, 40. See also my remarks in Ch. 3.
Engaging Heidegger, Ch. 1.
Engaging Heidegger, Ch. 6.
Engaging Heidegger, Chs. 2, 5, 6.
See Engaging Heidegger, 43–47. For Heidegger’s characterization of Ereignis as “the most gentle of all laws,” see GA 12: 248. Richard Polt, though not making the same point as I am here, nonetheless takes note of the connection to the early 1919 seminar in his careful study “Ereignis,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 375–91.
See especially Heidegger’s 1957 lecture “The Principle of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 36.
GA 14: 26; On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 21. See Engaging Heidegger, 47–50.
GA 9: 334: “Denn das ‘es,’ was hier ‘gibt,’ ist das Sein selbst.” Pathmarks, 254–55.
Engaging Heidegger, Chs. 5, 6.
GA 9: 332; Pathmarks, 253.
“On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” 221.
Zollikoner Seminare, ed. Medard Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987/2006), 223. Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 178 (translation slightly modified). Such texts are plainly at odds with Sheehan’s repeated claim—a claim that is central in his “new paradigm”—that, for Heidegger, the human being is the whole of the clearing; see, for example, his “A Paradigm Shift,” 193, and “Astonishing!,” 9. Furthermore, in this same passage, Heidegger refers to Dasein as the guardian “of the Ereignis”. According to Heidegger, then, Dasein is the guardian of Being, Lichtung, and Ereignis, and thus we have additional reason to state that Being, Lichtung, Ereignis say “the same”—and additional reason to question Sheehan’s reading of Ereignis as reducible to Dasein’s thrownness or finitude.
GA 15: 386–7; Four Seminars, 73.
GA 55: 371 (my translation; no available English translation).
GA 9: 239–301; Pathmarks, 183–230.
GA 55: 175 (my translation; no available English translation). The first epigraph that opens this essay is found within this passage. Heidegger’s two brilliant lecture courses on Heraclitus that comprise GA 55 (first published in 1979) have not yet been translated into English in complete form. Yet for a further discussion of these important texts with a focus on the matter of Being in relation to the human being, see Chs. 5 and 6. Consider, too, Heidegger’s equally clear and firm statement in his 1955–56 lecture course “On the Principle of Ground”: “Self-revealing is a fundamental feature of Being” (GA 10:102).
The opening lines from Whitman’s poem “A Song of the Rolling Earth.”.
GA 55: 179: “physis itself is the self-showing that essentially shows itself in the signs.” See also Ch. 5.
GA 15: 403; Four Seminars, 94.
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Richard Capobianco, "Reaffirming ‘The Truth of Being'" in Heidegger's Way of Being. Published and © University of Toronto Press, 2014. Reprinted (with minor alterations) with permission of the publisher.
