Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena

Fredrik Westerlund

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350086494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This book offers a broad critical study of Heidegger's lifelong effort to come to terms with the problem of phenomena and the nature of phenomenology: How do we experience beings as meaningful phenomena? What does it mean to phenomenologically describe and explicate our experience of phenomena? The book is a chronological investigation of how Heidegger's struggle with the problem of phenomena unfolds during the main stages of his philosophical development: from the early Freiburg lecture courses 1919-1923, over the Marburg-period and the publication of Being and Time in 1927, up to his later thinking stretching from the 1930s to the early 1970s. A central theme of the book is the tension between, on the one hand, Heidegger's effort to elaborate Husserl's phenomenological approach by applying it to our pre-theoretical experience of existentially charged phenomena, and, on the other hand, his drive towards a radically historicist form of thinking. Heidegger's main critical engagements with Husserl are examined and assessed along the way. Besides offering a new comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's philosophical development, the book critically examines the philosophical power and problems of Heidegger's successive attempts to account for the structure of phenomena and the possibility of phenomenology. In particular, it develops a critique of Heidegger's radical historicism, arguing that it ultimately makes Heidegger unable to account either for the truth of our understanding or for the ethical-existential significance of other persons. The book also contains a chapter which probes the philosophical commitments that motivate Heidegger's political engagement in National Socialism.

Part Three

THE OPENNESS OF BEING

Introduction

Heidegger’s later thinking is focused on the question of the event—Ereignis—that opens up and gives historical being. My claim is that Heidegger’s turn to this question is centrally a turn in his way of interrogating the problem of phenomena.

Since the period under consideration is long and complex—stretching from 1928 to Heidegger’s last writings from the early 1970s—let me begin by offering a rough overview of how I see his thinking as developing during these years.

In the first years after the publication of Being and Time in February 1927, Heidegger continues his effort to advance and complete his project of fundamental ontology. In the introduction to the lecture course “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,” delivered in the summer term 1927, Heidegger promises to take on the decisive task reserved for the suspended third division of the first part of Being and Time, namely, to explicate the sense of being as temporality. In his concrete lectures, however, he never gets beyond a very rudimentary sketch of this theme.

1928 is the beginning of a series of intensively probing lecture courses and other texts—for example, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic” (1928), “Introduction to Philosophy” (1928–9), “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929), “On the Essence of Ground” (1929), and “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” (1929–30)—in which Heidegger moves away from the project of fundamental ontology toward a new understanding of the guiding question and task of thinking. The primary aim of Being and Time was to explicate the historical as-structure of Dasein’s phenomenal experience. However, while claiming that our experience of phenomena is determined by the historical contexts of meaning in which we always already live, Heidegger never raised the question of how such historical meanings can be given as binding or primordial to us—as somehow transcending and distinct from the factical collective prejudices of the They. His failure to deal with this question, I argued, undercut two of the book’s central concerns. First, it pushed his account of Dasein’s authentic self-choice into an inadvertent vacillation between subjectivism and collectivism. Second, it made it impossible for him to implement his programmatic vision of phenomenology as a historical, hermeneutic-destructive mode of thinking. What happens in 1928 is that Heidegger raises precisely the question concerning the binding character of historical being: How can our historical world of being-relations address us as binding and obligating? At this time, he tries to tackle this question by arguing that being opens up as binding to us as the result of a free projection of a historical world. The change of the question implies that his view of the task of philosophy also changes. The fundamental ontological task of explicating the structures of Dasein is, he claims, ultimately motivated by the “metontological” task of freely projecting a binding historical world. Furthermore, his strengthened emphasis on how our understanding of historical being determines all our ontic understanding of beings brings with it a need to depart from the method of phenomenological reflection used in Being and Time. By the beginning of the 1930s Heidegger insists that philosophy has to take the form of a radically historical thinking, a thinking that can only hope to overcome the metaphysical tradition by tracing and retrieving the latent resources harbored by the Greek beginning of the tradition (cf. GA 94: 52–3/39–40).

These transformations in Heidegger’s thinking gradually lead him to give up the project of fundamental ontology. After the spring of 1929, we do not hear him talking about a continuation of Being and Time anymore (cf. Sheehan 1984: 186). However, although the years 1928–33 certainly initiate Heidegger’s turn to his later thinking, his formulation of his guiding question still remains groping and unclear. Moreover, he is still unable to offer more than very crude indications of the dynamics that open up historical worlds and of the methodological character of his historical thinking.

In the beginning of the 1930s Heidegger becomes captivated by the growing National Socialist movement, which he sees as a counterforce against the nihilism of the modern age and as a possible beginning of the philosophical world-projection that he is envisioning. In 1933 he decides to engage himself politically. For one year—April 21, 1933 to April 12, 1934—he serves as rector of the University of Freiburg with the task of implementing the Nazi program for university reform. However, although Heidegger soon becomes disenchanted with the politics of the party and starts to view National Socialism as yet another version of nihilism, the story of his relationship with Nazism does not end here. Not only does Heidegger continue to believe in the metaphysical potential of National Socialism and to entertain anti-Semitic thoughts at least until the late 1940s. Indeed, it seems that he is never able to face and acknowledge the moral calamity of Nazism and the Holocaust, to say nothing of taking responsibility for his own actions. I will deal with the story of Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism in greater detail in Chapter 10. There I will also raise the question about the connections between Heidegger’s Nazism and his philosophy.

After his debacle as Nazi rector, Heidegger puts his effort into clarifying and articulating the question and task that is to guide his later thinking. This happens in a progression of lecture courses and papers from the mid to the later 1930s—for example, “Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germanien’ and ‘Der Rhein’” (1934–5), “Introduction to Metaphysics” (1935), “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), and “Basic Questions of Philosophy” (1937–8)—as well as in the massive self-reflective manuscripts Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) written in 1936–8 and Mindfulness written in 1938–9. Apart from Hölderlin, who plays a pivotal role, Heidegger’s main philosophical influences during these years are the early pre-Socratic thinkers and Nietzsche. As I will argue, Heidegger’s turn basically consists in a redirection of his interrogation of the problem of phenomena. Whereas Heidegger in Being and Time concentrated on phenomenologically describing the historical structure of Dasein’s experience of phenomena, he now insists that the basic philosophical question must concern precisely the openness or givenness of historical being itself: how does being open up and address us as a binding historical context of meaning? Heidegger’s transformation of his central question opens up and determines all his subsequent later thinking. As concerns his conception of phenomena and phenomenology, this has two main consequences. First, the question of the openness of historical being leads Heidegger to provide a new account of the dynamic happening which allows a historical world to arise and shine. Second, it brings with it a change in the methodological character of his thought, so that the phenomenology of Being and Time gives way to a more radically historical reflection tracing the possibilities of understanding contained by our history.

From the mid-1930s until the end of the war in 1945 Heidegger is primarily occupied with articulating his new guiding question of the openness of being—which he primarily names “the event” (Ereignis) or the “clearing” (Lichtung) of being—and sketching the historical program of his later thinking. This essentially involves elaborating—chiefly through a set of extensive courses on Nietzsche—a new explication of the nature of metaphysics as well as a diagnosis of how the subjectivist and technical understanding of being characteristic of the metaphysical tradition gets radicalized into the modern technical understanding of being as a material reserve for human desire and manipulation. This destiny, Heidegger claims, can only be overcome through a return to the Greek beginning of the history of metaphysics, such that we attempt to reflect on the hidden and bypassed origin of this “first beginning” in order, thereby, to open up the basic philosophical possibilities required to prepare the way for an “other beginning.” During these years—especially in the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”—he also works out an analysis of the dynamics that allow a historical world to arise and shine, and which centrally take the form of a “strife” between the historical “world” and the material-sensuous “earth.”

After the war, in 1946, Heidegger publishes his “Letter on Humanism,” which is his first public written presentation of his late philosophy. His 1949 lectures at the private Club zu Bremen, titled “Insight into That Which Is,” mark the beginning of a new phase in his philosophical development. Here Heidegger introduces a new lapidary and meditative style which from now on will characterize his thinking. In contrast to his texts from the 1930s and 1940s, which were often marked by terminological excess and grand historic-apocalyptic visions, he now attempts to open up the questions by pursuing finite paths of thinking which take their point of departure in specific contexts of questioning: philosophical texts, poems, or some aspect of the contemporary situation. Hence, the bulk of Heidegger’s key texts from the 1950s onwards consist in shorter essays gathered in anthologies such as Lectures and Essays, Identity and Difference, On the Way to Language, and On the Matter of Thinking. Among Heidegger’s main philosophical endeavors in the 1950s we may name his deepened reflections on language, poetry and technology as well as his rearticulation of the dynamics that open up a world in terms of the “fourfold.” In the 1960s, Heidegger once more returns to the question of phenomenology. In On the Matter of Thinking—especially in the essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” from 1964—he offers his most thorough attempt to articulate the methodological nature of his late thinking.

The discussion of the later Heidegger’s conception of phenomena and phenomenology has largely been dominated by the hermeneutic-deconstructive line of interpretation. This is no surprise, given the later Heidegger’s focus us on how being is given as a historical destiny and given his express intention to abandon intuition-based phenomenology in favor of a deeply historical mode of reflection. For the transcendental phenomenological reading, Heidegger’s early production culminating in Being and Time has naturally been the prime point of focus. Despite Heidegger’s proclaimed intention to transform phenomenology into a historical mode of thinking, the method of intuition-based phenomenological reflection is at the core of his early lecture courses and Being and Time. From the point of view of this reading, Heidegger’s turn in the 1930s is prone to appear as a more or less drastic parting with his earlier phenomenology in favor of a radical historical thinking that is essentially in jeopardy of collapsing into historicism and speculative construction. However, although the attitude toward the later Heidegger has generally been skeptical, there have been attempts to argue that even his later thinking contains elements of intuitive transhistorical grounding. As regards the question of phenomena, David Espinet has recently suggested that Heidegger’s notion of the “earth” can be read as an attempt to salvage a dimension of sensuousness that transcends our historical contexts of meaning. As regards the question of phenomenology, it has been argued—for example by Steven Crowell—that Heidegger despite his strong insistence on the historicity of thought never completely abandons the method of phenomenological seeing.

I hope to shed some new light on the sense of and motives behind Heidegger’s turn after Being and Time by interpreting it as a turn in his interrogation of the problem of phenomena. It seems to me that previous interpretations have not been able to articulate with sufficient clarity how and why Heidegger turns from interrogating the historical structure of phenomenal experience to interrogating the openness and phenomenality of historical being itself. There has also been a general failure to recognize his guiding ambition to account for how a historical world can open up and prevail as binding and obligating. In what follows, I offer explications of Heidegger’s view of the dynamics that open up historical being and of the historical character of his later thinking. My interpretation can basically be seen as confirming and elaborating on the dominant hermeneutic-deconstructive reading. I will argue that although Heidegger, by introducing the notion of the “earth,” points to an irreducible dimension of sensuousness and material nature, this does not unsettle his basic conception of the ontological difference, namely that our historical heritage constitutes our primary and determining source of meaning. Furthermore, I will argue that although Heidegger is unable to dispense completely with intuition-based phenomenology, his use of phenomenological descriptions in his later work is ambivalent and quite weak.

As concerns the philosophical questions at stake, I ultimately believe that Heidegger’s effort to demonstrate the radical historicity of being and thinking is bound to fail and that it builds on a momentous denial of what I suggest is our intuitive transhistorical access to beings as an independent source of truth and ethical-existential normativity. In the epilogue of the book, I will make an attempt to critically examine the problems and limited insights of Heidegger’s radical historicism.

This part comprises four chapters: In Chapter 9, I trace and explicate the sense of Heidegger’s turn to the question of the openness of being. In Chapter 10, I discuss the philosophical roots and import of Heidegger’s engagement in National Socialism. In Chapter 11, I explicate Heidegger’s view of the dynamics that open up historical being as a binding destiny. Here, the primary focus is on Heidegger’s analysis of the struggle between the “world” and the “earth” as it is developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Chapter 12, I discuss the methodological character of Heidegger’s late historical thinking and its relationship to phenomenology.

9

THE QUESTION OF THE OPENNESS OF BEING

The Question of the Turn

It is clear that Heidegger’s philosophical approach undergoes a change, or a set of changes, in the decade following the publication of Being and Time. The change concerns both the guiding question and matter of his thought as well as the task and method of his thinking. In the secondary literature, this change has commonly been labeled the “turn”—following Heidegger’s word “die Kehre”—and has generally been seen as the rough dividing line separating the early from the late Heidegger. However, it is far from obvious how the philosophical sense of Heidegger’s alleged turn should be understood, the last fifty years having witnessed a massive scholarly debate regarding this issue.

In his pioneering work Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought from 1963 William J. Richardson established the standard interpretation that has dominated the literature to this very day. According to Richardson, Heidegger’s thinking undergoes a turn in the years 1930–5, a turn which consists in a “shift from There-being [Richardson’s translation of “Dasein”] to Being” (1963: 624). Whereas the early Heidegger primarily focuses on Dasein and basically conceives of being as “the project of There-being” (238), the later Heidegger turns his principal focus to being itself as something which preced...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Also Available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations: Heidegger and Husserl
• Heidegger
• Husserl
• Introduction
• Part Two The Historical Structure of Phenomena
• Part Three The Openness of Being
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page