Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education after the "Turn"

At the Limits of Metaphysics

James M. Magrini, Elias Schwieler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315296517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Offering new and original readings of literature, poetry, and education as interpreted through the conceptual lens of Heidegger's later philosophy of the "Turn", this book helps readers understand Heidegger's later thought and presents new takes on how to engage the themes that emerged from his later writing. Suggesting novel ways to consider Heidegger's ideas on literature, poetry, and education, Magrini and Schwieler provide a deep understanding of the "Turn, " a topic not often explored in contemporary Heideggerian scholarship. Their inter- and extra-disciplinary postmodern approaches offer a nuanced examination, taking into account Heidegger's controversial place in history, and filling a gap in educational research.

1
Introduction

The Heideggerian Analysis of Literature, Poetry, and Education: On the Turn in Thought and Language in Heidegger

Since our primary focus in this book is on the thought of later Heidegger, we begin with a basic definition of the “Turn” in Heidegger scholarship, which generally refers to a specific historical period marking an event in the development of Heidegger’s thought, and not merely his biography. The Turn generally refers to a period in Heidegger’s thinking that is traceable to the period immediately following Being and Time as he moves into the 1930s when his attention turns to art and poetry as new paradigms for potentially understanding the event of Being’s unfolding, which, as McNeill (2013) observes, includes “a sustained critique of science and technicity, themselves outgrowths of occidental metaphysics” (1). It must be noted that there are scholars on one end of the spectrum who claim that the Kehre as an event in Heidegger’s thinking never happened (Sheehan 2010, 2010a) and those on the other end that identify the Turn as naming “the beginning of a new ontohistorical age” and “not simply the transformation between [Heidegger’s] early and later work” (Thomson 2015, 79).¹ Because of the complexity of this issue, it is necessary to gain a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the Turn by highlighting several key issues, which are crucial to Heidegger’s complex and difficult move to think beyond the metaphysics of presence and the ontological difference. Our goal within these introductory remarks is to draw out ten elements in the form of “talking points” emerging from Heidegger’s change in thinking and approach to language after Being and Time, attempting to understand their implications for what we argue is Heidegger’s philosophy of, or, better, his renewed “thinking” on, the question of Being or truth of Being, that is, thinking on Being in its intimate and ineluctable relationship to the human and its world, its historical appropriation and grounding, and the way in which thought and language are inseparable from the “historical” Being event itself (Eriegnis).

1. The Turn (Kehre)

From our brief remarks earlier, it is clear that considerable scholarly attention is devoted to elucidating the so-called Turn (Kehre) in Heidegger’s philosophy. The Turn is both a complex and controversial topic, an issue that calls for a rejoinder to the following “grounding” query: What is the Turn in Heidegger’s philosophy as he moves from the fundamental ontology of Dasein in Being and Time in relation to the “question of Being” to the thought of the “truth of Being” in its primordial unfolding? In approaching this question, we begin in a somewhat unorthodox manner, that is, via negativa in the attempt to elucidate and identify signs and characteristics of the Turn. We argue against the view that Heidegger’s entire philosophical corpus, his thinking throughout the many years, is unified, which endorses the position that the later work somehow completes the project of fundamental ontology started in Being and Time. Instead, the position we defend is that Heidegger’s thought, after Being and Time, undergoes a definitive Turn, in terms of a revelatory event in his thinking, and here we seek to clarify for the reader what is meant by this elusive and often debated issue by first examining what the Turn in Heidegger is not.

We agree with Fried (2001) that the Turn is irreducible to simply a “transitional moment” or “putative break or about-face in Heidegger’s personal intellectual biography” (67). This erroneous view is both naïve and potentially dangerous, for it has frightening implications concerning how Heidegger’s politics of the 1930s, his relationship to National Socialism, might be interpreted (see Epilogue §2). For such a view of the Turn can be marshaled as an apology for Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. As the logic runs, because his early thought harbored a latent subjectivism traceable to Heidegger’s entrapment within the linguistic-conceptual schema of metaphysics, his political view was tainted because it was attuned by the metaphysics of presence, opening the context—especially if we consider Heidegger’s philosophical portrait of Nietzsche as last metaphysician—wherein the world and entities reveal themselves and come under the violent dominion of technology and the machinations driven by the will to power. Had this not been the case, if it would have been possible for Heidegger to transcend metaphysics in his earlier philosophy, prior to his “involved” political activities of 1933, he would “never have treated the German Volk as a bearer of Dasein, or Dasein itself as the fulcrum for remaking the world and saving us from nihilism” (78).

In line with Maly (2001), Risser (1999), and Krell (1989), we also contend that the Turn is not simply the abandonment of Dasein’s perspective in favor of a perspective focused exclusively on Being. For example, in Maly (2001) we encounter a definitive rejection of this view, which is untenable, if one merely reads Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”: As Maly concludes,

all talk of a shift from “Heidegger I” to “Heidegger II,” along with the rather simplistic idea that Heidegger’s thinking moved from “Dasein-oriented” to “being-oriented” (at times even more misunderstood by calling that shift a “reversal”) is, once and for all, obsolete.

(150)

This view leads to a host of absurd conclusions, one of which is that it is somehow possible to abandon Dasein, or the “There-Being” (Da) of Dasein, in the quest to interrogate Being qua Being or the unadulterated and primordial event of Being. According to Risser (1999), Heidegger never abandons Dasein, “since the thinking of being never escapes the question of the human being who speaks of being” (2), for Being is always a question of Dasein’s thought and language. Instead, Heidegger’s Turn inspires a shift in emphasis, which moves from the Being of Dasein, or the “Beingness” (Seiendheit) of entities, “to an analysis of the event of being itself that occurs in the ‘there’ (Da) of Dasein [Da-sein]” (3). While it is the case that Heidegger never abandons Dasein, it is also true, as intimated earlier, that the Turn is not a drastic event in which Heidegger abandons his original concern with the issue of Being qua Being from 1927, which would erroneously, as Krell (1989) recognizes, suggest a radical change to Heidegger’s original philosophical concern or problem.

The Turn is also irreducible to Heidegger merely substituting metaphysical (representational) language with a more poietic (nonrepresentational) language when attempting to understand the event of Being, for this oversimplified view is still tethered to a philosophical structure grounded in the analysis of entities (beings) and their metaphysical ground (Beingness)—that is, the ontological difference. This perspective misses the implications that the “failure” (Versagen) of language in Heidegger has for an understanding of the Turn and simply accepts that the failure of metaphysical language in Heidegger’s philosophy is easily overcome by the incorporation of a non-metaphysical language. As Vallega-Neu stresses, “we must not be satisfied with a simple distinction between metaphysical language and its non-metaphysical ‘content,’ as if the right meaning were already there and we needed only the correct words” (26). Considering Heidegger’s reconceptualization of language from the 1930s onward, Being cannot be intellectually grasped and then communicated without distortion in language. For although the event of Being is an occurrence of language, and thinking and saying are inseparable from the originary relationship of time and Being, the truth of Being is a phenomenon that will always remain ineffable to a certain degree, defying complete expression in even the most poietic forms of expression.² Since Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of Dasein in Being and Time embraces the ontological difference, it gives the impression that Being is a concept, and beyond, an a priori structure giving form to the human’s a posteriori empirical (ontic) instantiations as if it stands at an objective remove (the object of contemplation) of the Dasein contemplating it. The interpretation of Being as an a priori phenomenon that awaits the proper forms of thought and language to capture its meaning is the precise view of which Heidegger is critical and seeks to avoid during the Turn, which amounts to, as Polt (2006) argues, “personifying or hypostatizing be-ing—turning it into some hyper-entity or divinity that is calling us, manipulating us, or commanding us” (159).

We now examine an oft-cited quotation from “Letter on Humanism”—originally published in 1947—and these observations by Heidegger (1993), reflecting on the fundamental ontology of Being and Time, bring to light the key issues that ground our understanding of the Turn: (1) the “failure” (Versagen) of language to capture the phenomenon on Being; (2) the problem with the transcendental analytic of Dasein and the issue of latent subjectivism, which includes the issue of the horizon of Dasein’s temporality as the condition of possibility for understanding Being qua Being; and (3) thinking out of the (re)experience of Being’s oblivion:

The adequate execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being and Time the third division of the first part, “Time and Being,” was held back… The division in question was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics… The turning is not a change of standpoint from Being and Time, but in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the location of that dimension out of which Being and Time is experienced, that is to say, from the fundamental experience of the oblivion of Being.

(231–232)

Since the next section deals in detail with the question of language and the Turn, our comments here are limited to the so-called failure (Versagen) of language as traceable to metaphysics, which refers at once to the limits inherent within the language, the mode of conceptuality, and the overall phenomenological-ontological approach Heidegger adopts in earlier work leading up to and including Being and Time. However, to indicate that the linguistic-conceptual schema of metaphysics “fails” to authentically facilitate a legitimate or adequate rejoinder to the question of Being is not to say that Being and Time was itself a failure. For this is not the case, as Thomson (2011) notes, for in Heidegger’s later years, he repeatedly refers to fundamental ontology or the project of Being and Time as a “Holzwege.” It is possible to understand Holzwege in terms other than a woodland path that reaches a “dead-end,” frustrating progress through the woods, for it is also a moment that can be fortuitously beneficial, opening the potential for us to retrace our steps in order find a new way along the journey. In addition, Holzwege can also be understood as a “clearing” in the woods, and the metaphor Thomson offers is helpful for understanding the event of the Turn in Heidegger. The Holzwege, as a lighted clearing (Lichtung) in the woods, brings about something akin to an ontological epiphany: “Out of the encounter with nothing, initially we come to notice the light through which we ordinarily see the forest,” as the Holzwege facilitates our seeing the light “by redirecting our attention from entities to being, that usually unnoticed ontological light through which things appear” (292). Being and Time reached an impasse, because of the failure of the language of metaphysics, and this impasse (as Holzwege) is “what opened up the perspective from which all Heidegger’s later works were born” (292).

This further indicates, as stated previously, that Heidegger does not reject or abandon the fundamental issue of Being and Time; rather, because he is concerned with the inadequacy of the phenomenological method or fundamental ontology to contribute to formulating an adequate rejoinder to the question of Being, Heidegger changes his approach to the fundamental question grounding his philosophy. The Turn, according to Polt (2006), as radical as it is experienced in Heidegger’s thinking, actually provides “deeper insight” into the issues that already formed the back...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Previous Publications
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Heideggerian Analysis of Literature, Poetry, and Education: On the Turn in Thought and Language in Heidegger
• SECTION I From Philosophy to “Thinking”: Heidegger’s Move from the Fundamental Ontology of Dasein to Art and Poetry
• 2 The Truth of Being as “Historical”: From Being and Time Through “The Origin of the Work of Art” and Contributions to Philosophy (1927–1938)
• 3 Heidegger’s Critical Confrontation with Hölderlin and Rilke: The Need for the Poet in “Destitute Times” (1934–1955)
• SECTION II Reading Literature, Poetry, and Education Through the Heideggerian Lens of the Turn
• 4 Poietical Difference: Heidegger, Tranströmer, and Rimbaud
• 5 At the Limit of Metaphysics: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heidegger’s Thinking after the Turn
• 6 Rethinking Gelassenheit in Heidegger’s Turn: Releasing Ourselves to the Original Event of Learning
• Epilogue: In-Between Origins and Futural Implications: Looking Back and Thinking Ahead With Heidegger
• Index