Martin Heidegger

Timothy Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136815362
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the publication of his mammoth work, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought, and is a key influence for modern literary and cultural theory. This guidebook provides an ideal entry-point for readers new to Heidegger, outlining such issues and concepts as: the limits of 'theory'the history of beingthe origin of the work of artlanguagethe literary workpoetry and the politicalHeidegger's involvement with Nazism.Fully updated throughout and featuring a new section on enviromental thought and ecocriticism, this guidebook clearly and concisely introduces Heidegger's crucial work relating to art, language and poetry, and outlines his continuing influence on critical theory.

WHY HEIDEGGER?

Martin Heidegger is the hidden master of modern thought. His influence on thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century, though often unspoken, is all pervasive, especially in that mélange in the humanities known curiously as ‘theory’. Heidegger’s work touches the deepest, usually unconsidered assumptions of all work of thought, forming a reassessment of the drive to knowledge itself. In the second half of the twentieth century it was often under Heidegger’s direct or indirect influence that the traditional view that intellectual and scientific inquiry, the search for truth, is inherently disinterested, or even critical of unwarranted forms of authority, gave way to arguments that the drive to know is often compromised by elements of domination and control. Heidegger died in 1976 at the age of eighty-six, and his work has become even more prominent since that time, especially in continental Europe where the decline of Marxism has brought Heidegger’s radical critique of Western thought to a new prominence.

Heidegger’s thinking concerns things so fundamental that those coming to Heidegger for the first time should be warned that the bases of just about everything they think, assume, or take for granted are at stake in his texts. Imagine that the whole of Western thought, since the time of the first philosophers in ancient Greece, has been in the grip of a prejudice affecting all its aspects and even what seems self-evident. This is something so deep and all-pervasive that it should not even be called a prejudice if that word implies choice and individual misjudgement rather than an unavoidable heritage into which people are born and receive their most seemingly immediate sense of themselves. This is Heidegger’s massive claim, and his view of ‘Western metaphysics’ as being constituted in terms that call for ‘deconstruction’ since became amplified in the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).

Heidegger’s thinking is both a profound philosophy and a radical critique of the fundamental assumptions of modernity, understanding ‘modernity’ with the critic Lawrence E. Cahoone as:

The positive self-image modern Western culture has often given to itself, a picture born in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment … of a civilization founded on scientific knowledge of the world and rational knowledge of value, which places the highest premium on individual human life and freedom, and believes that such freedom and rationality will lead to social progress through virtuous selfcontrolled work, creating a better material, political and intellectual life for all.

(Cahoone 1996: 12)

Heidegger is deeply reactionary in the proper, not necessarily condemning sense of the word. His thinking aligns him with those who ‘see modernity instead as a movement of ethnic and class domination, European imperialism, anthropocentrism, the destruction of nature, the dissolution of community and tradition, the rise of alienation, the death of individuality in bureaucracy’ (ibid.). Although the term post-dates him, Heidegger is also a major thinker of ‘globalization’.

Heidegger was a philosopher who gave supreme importance to some poetic texts. He retained, however, a philosopher’s contempt for the field of literary criticism, with its mix of moralism and amateur philosophizing. If the literary takes on a new importance for Heidegger, it is because his thinking also disputes what ‘philosophy’ has always meant since classical Greece. In Reiner Schürmann’s words:

The responsibility traditionally incumbent on the philosopher, his true mission, consisted in securing ultimate referents or principles. Whether he analyzed substance and its attributes or consciousness and its intentional acts, he spoke as the expert on deep anchorage: an anchorage that guaranteed meaning in discourse, soundness of mind, objectivity of knowledge, value of life, if not possible redemption from infractions.

(Schürmann 1990: 286)

Heidegger pulls up the anchor. Against the aggressive drive of human reason to justify and understand human existence by reference to its authority alone, Heidegger insists on the limits and fragility of human knowledge.

Pervading all of Heidegger’s work is an intense sense of crisis, of living at a grimly decisive time for the future of humanity. This sense grew initially out of the collapse and humiliation of Germany after its defeat in the First World War. Heidegger’s response was one shared by many Germans at the time, a sense of the utter bankruptcy of the old civilized values and modes of life. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), who was to become Heidegger’s most famous student, remembers the immense shock of first encountering Heidegger’s teaching in the 1920s:

A generation shattered by the collapse of an epoch wanted to begin completely anew; it did not want to retain anything that had formerly been held valid. Even in the intensification of the German language that took place in its concepts, Heidegger’s thought seemed to defy any comparison with what philosophy had previously meant.

(Gadamer 1994: 69)

Heidegger’s thinking embraced not just the philosophical and social crisis of Germany at this time, but became a powerful reassessment of the most basic values and assumptions of Western civilization since ancient Greece. Gadamer describes the massive impact of Heidegger in lectures which encompassed ancient Greek thought and contemporary issues within the same powerful overview: ‘It was like a new breakthrough into the unknown that posed something radically new as compared with all the movements and countermovements of the Christian Occident’ (Gadamer 1994: 69). While other thinkers of crisis from this time, such as Oswald Spengler and his once famous The Decline of the West (1918), have become of merely historical interest, Heidegger’s thought retains an impact which is still working itself out.

Many intellectual positions often labelled ‘postmodern’ inhabit the space opened up by Heidegger’s attacks on the absolutism of modernity’s drive to know. Heidegger’s effect has been to release a sense of the fragility of the grounds of human thought, art and culture generally, an effect reinforced by the influence of Heidegger’s most famous follower, Jacques Derrida. It is ironic therefore that neither would endorse the relativism associated with the slogan ‘postmodern’ to the extent of abandoning the claims of truth and objectivity, by arguing, for example, that modern physics is no more valid or invalid than ancient Chinese astronomy, or that philosophy, science and religion all need to be thus ‘relativized’ as ‘cultural constructs’ (see Derrida 1999: 77–79; Polt 1999: 71–72, 103–6). Both are concerned to take received modes of philosophizing and thought to their limits, yet not with a view to merely discrediting or making them all on a level, but to trace the deepest assumptions of Western thought, its margins and boundaries, opening themselves in the process to what other modes of being and thinking, if any, might be conceived beyond it.

It is in this context that Heidegger turned to the poetic, not merely as one cultural discourse among others, or as an arena for competing historical forces, but as a singular mode of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, meaning these no longer in the sense these have in philosophy or science traditionally understood, but precisely as modes of thought closed off and repressed by the Western tradition.

It is customary in a brief introduction like this to cover the biography of the thinker at issue. This is an approach Heidegger himself despised as a way of evading the one thing that matters in any thinker, the life of their thought. In any case, except for one issue, Heidegger’s biography is pedestrian reading. He was born of a provincial Catholic family in Messkirch, in Swabia, Southern Germany in 1889. He turned from being trained as a cleric to the sciences and mathematics and then to philosophy, becoming the star pupil and then main follower of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), founder of the school known as ‘phenomenology’. Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), on which his reputation was largely based, is dedicated to Husserl, whose thought it nonetheless drastically undercuts. Heidegger became Husserl’s successor, living the uneventful, slightly self-enclosed life of a professor of philosophy at Freiburg. He never left for long his native area of Germany, to which he felt deeply attached. He was buried in his home town in 1976.

The one exception to this uneventful story threatens to remain better known than anything of Heidegger’s thought itself. In 1933, a few months after it had come to power in Germany, Heidegger joined the Nazi party. From 1933 to 1934 he gave the Nazis his support as rector of Freiburg University. The extent of Heidegger’s involvement is controversial, and it seems that some sort of disillusion set in swiftly from 1934. It was sufficient, however, for him to be banned from teaching for five years after the end of the Second World War. So readers of Heidegger have had to hold in their minds two almost irreconcilable facts. That Heidegger is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century: that, for an uncertain time, he was a supporter of the Nazis. These issues are visited in Chapter 7.

CONTEXT

The template for the Routledge Critical Thinkers Series, imposed on every study within it, promises to put these crucial thinkers ‘back’ into their historical context. This is no doubt mainly an appeal to a current intellectual cliché with the aim of attracting readers. It raises, nevertheless, a vital question: what is the ‘context’ for a thinker like Heidegger, and what would it mean, assuming it were possible, to put him ‘back’ into it (as if he were some sort of escaped rabbit)?

The problem here is easily stated: a reading or argument by Heidegger, his work on the poet Rainer Maira Rilke (1875–1926) for instance (PLT: 91–142), will often find that understanding a specific term or issue means unravelling modes of thought that may have first been formed more than two millennia before (with the ancient thinker Parmenides in this case). Gadamer writes of Heidegger as having ‘the determination of a thinker who saw the present and the past, the future and the Greeks as a totality’ (Gadamer 1994: 114). So when Heidegger opens up Rilke’s poetry with a view to ancient assumptions about humanity and being that still encompass the modern West, the ‘context’ at issue is not a ‘historical’ one in the normal, comfortable sense (as for a conventional critic who would open up the text by way of the context of Rilke’s life, his politics, his social prejudices, religious debates and so on). Heidegger’s is, at the very least, a context which modern people still inhabit – or which rather inhabits us to the extent that we will never be able to see it whole. The aim of putting Heidegger ‘back’ into his ‘context’ in that sense is thus incoherent, nonsensical. ‘When people claim to be “against” Heidegger – or even “for” him – then they make fools of themselves. One cannot circumvent thinking so easily’ (Gadamer 1994: 112).

Heidegger’s refusal to be historicized in this containing way is the reason why his thought continues to impact and to be reread. Yet it is also the reason why the major feature of Heidegger’s own immediate ‘context’, his engagement with the Nazis in the early 1930s, becomes so imponderable and disturbing (see Chapter 7). Of all the questions Heidegger’s Nazi episode raises perhaps the most difficult is this one: how far may fascism also be integral to the broad context that the West still inhabits, but which it does not see?

This book is primarily an introduction to Heidegger for students of literature. Heidegger was a philosopher of many sides, but this book is about his thinking on questions of literature and criticism. Although there are several accessible introductions to Heidegger, focused on Being and Time (1927), this is the first such work on Heidegger’s poetics and literary theory, which almost entirely post-date that work. The first two chapters will focus on the crucial elements of the earlier Heidegger that continued into his turn to art and poetry in the mid-1930s. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted almost entirely to Heidegger’s great lecture, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, delivered in the mid-1930s and published in 1950. Chapter 5 looks at Heidegger’s profound and counter-intuitive thinking about language, and Heidegger’s own experiments with writing in dialogue form and his other experiments with different ways of writing in philosophy. This chapter also studies in some detail the kind of close reading Heidegger gives to a traditional philosophical text, in this case just one crucial term from the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus. Attention to how Heidegger reads prepares the ground for understanding his distinctive approach to poetic texts, the detailed concern of Chapter 6. Here the focus turns to the significance Heidegger grants one extraordinary writer, the German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). The second half of this chapter takes the reader through the main moves of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s ode ‘Germania’. Chapter 7 concerns the scandal of Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis in the mid-1930s, and the fraught question of how this must affect the reception of his thought. Is it possible to answer claims that Heidegger’s thinking remains essentially fascist or that it is merely reactionary in the narrow sense? Finally, a last chapter surveys Heidegger’s all-pervasive if often unspoken influence upon literary study since the 1940s, especially his legacy in relation to the continuing ‘deconstruction’ of Western thought engaged by Derrida and others.

Heidegger’s influence has been massive and incalculable on questions of poetic language, the nature of interpretation, the place of art and the crisis endured by the modern artist. However, the inaccessible and recalcitrant mode of Heidegger’s writings makes any attempt to relate Heidegger clearly but also nonreductively to literary and critical debate a considerable labour of re-description and elucidation. So, even if it did not wish to be so, this book cannot but be original in the elucidations and redeployments it makes.

Heidegger’s complete works are still being edited and translated. His greatest work on poetics, the influential study of Hölderlin, only appeared in English a full fifty years later, while the first edition of this book was being written. New texts in the Complete Works appear each year and the tracing of Heidegger’s paths continually involves new maps. So, this introduction also offers a response to the emerging implications and surprises of an extraordinary body of thought that is still appearing.

1

THE LIMITS OF THE
THEORETICAL

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

(A. N. Whitehead)

Heidegger is often acknowledged as the most decisive and most influential thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. All the same it is not hard to see why no introduction to Heideggerian poetics exists. Many assumptions usually at work in an introductory volume of this kind are exactly those Heidegger spent his lifetime attacking – the assumption that philosophical thought or literary reading are a matter of ‘having a theory’ and then putting it into practice, that there are ‘key ideas’ in the sense of conceptual packages that can be transferred like so many commodities across a counter, that a work of thought is in the business of making its matter available in the ‘quickest and cheapest way’ (D: 45). Heidegger’s injunction to free ourselves from ‘the technical interpretation of thinking’ whose origins ‘reach back to Plato and Aristotle’ (P: 240) includes the notion that thinking is a kind of inner tool kit, containing ‘ideas’ to be picked up and employed on ‘problems’ as occasion requires. An introduction to Heidegger’s thinking that does not at once register these issues has already failed to give a sense of its challenge and fundamental disturbance.

Nevertheless, Heidegger need not be hard to understand, once one accepts that he is questioning what ‘understanding’ or ‘knowing’ usually mean. Heidegger’s topic is in fact the obvious, things so basic as to seem beyond question and self-evident. Heidegger’s claim is that the course of European and increasingly global history has been largely determined as the hitherto unseen working out of utterly basic but usually unconsidered modes of thinking and being, dating back to ancient Greece. These are now culminating in a global techno-scientific civilization that Heidegger saw as a threat not just to the earth itself but to the essence of humanity, for such a ‘civilization’ is perfectly capable of regarding people as merely another economic resource or even a waste product. Freedom from this monolith is the concern of Heidegger’s thinking. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• Why Heidegger?
• After Heidegger
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index