Abstract

This is a collection of essays and lectures which have all been published previously. Heidegger prefaces the volume with a series of remarks, written in 1967, which elaborate upon the title Wegmarken. The path in question is what he has called on numerous occasions his Denkweg. The path is the way of thinking into the truly thought-worthy. The path goes back into what was once thought out and is now covered over, and forward into what is to be thought out but is still concealed. The thinker en route to Being has had his thinking set in motion by Being itself. Thinking travels a troubled path, for it stands in constant danger of being flooded by mere information. Whether or not it can bypass this roadblock is still the essential question for our time. Three of the texts collected here were available only in journals and Festschriften. It is also interesting that Heidegger includes all three segments of Was ist Metaphysik? He does not fuse them into a single text but arranges them separately. The other selections are: Vom Wesen des Grundes; Vom Wesen der Wahrheit; Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit; Brief über den "Humanismus"; Zur Seinsfrage; Kants These über das Sein. Here we see what Heidegger himself has singled out as being representative of, and significant for, the course of his thought. The emphasis upon "path" argues strongly for those who would see in Heidegger's thought an evolving, developing growth. The unity of early and later Heidegger then is not the unity of a single doctrine but the unity of a single search or path, unified by a single object of pursuit.--J. D. C.