Musing with Kierkegaard: Heidegger's Besinnung

Abstract

The article deals with the recently published Besinnung, a work dating from 1938–1939, one among the “unpublished treatises” in Part III of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. It follows the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938), taking up the same themes as that work, such as the last God, the first and the other beginning, etc. But whereas the earlier work, especially the notion of the last God, relates more to Schelling, this one muses on Kierkegaard. The article sets Besinnung within the context of related works of the same period, not only the Beiträge but also Metaphysik und Nihilismus and Geschichte des Seyns. However, Besinnung also breaks new ground, finding a deeper ontological distinction between Seyn and Sein as the basis for the earlier “ontological difference” between being and beings. The work is part and parcel with Heidegger's destructuring of metaphysics, which he sees as really a freeing up of the beginning, as also the issue of onto-theology. Thus it is integral with Heidegger's program of getting God out of metaphysics and being out of theology. It is in virtue of the meaning he attaches to Seyn (Logos) in Da-sein that it is possible for him not only to retrieve the meaning of the other beginning, the en-owning (Er-eignis) of Da-sein, and with it the meaning of the first beginning (in the two senses the phrase has in this work), but also thereby to recover the forgotten meaning of being (Sein). The approach to Seyn, with Kierkegaard, is not through the thinking (Denken) that thinks being, which cannot really get beyond beings and/or the Supreme Being of metaphysics, but through a thinking, a musing, that thinks through to (Er-denkt) Seyn. The article concludes with some reflections on the significance of Heidegger as theo-logian.