Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger

George Pattison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134634026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Martin Heidegger is one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings are notoriously difficult: they both require and reward careful reading.
The Later Heidegger introduces and accesses:
* Heidegger's life and the background to his later works
* The ideas and texts of some of his influential later works, including The Question concerning Technology, The Origin of the Work of Art, and What is Called Thinking?
* Heidegger's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought.

Chapter 1

Is there a later Heidegger?

The danger and the turning

In December 1949 Martin Heidegger, banned from lecturing in the University of Freiburg on account of his involvement with Nazism, gave a series of four addresses to ‘The Club’ in Bremen, a gathering of business and professional people who, for the most part, had no great interest in or understanding of philosophy, but who were happy to turn out to hear a man known as their country’s most influential living philosopher. In these lectures Heidegger spoke of the danger hanging over the present age. This was already the era of the Atomic Bomb and the beginning of the Cold War, in which the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear exchange was a continuous threat to the peoples of the world, and especially to those of Central Europe. Perhaps Heidegger’s non-philosophical auditors may have heard in his words a reference to that situation, and perhaps he was himself happy to use the rhetorical force of such an allusion to win a hearing for his argument, but the danger with which Heidegger was chiefly concerned operated on another level altogether. This danger was neither Russian Communism, nor American capitalism, nor the prospect of all-out war between them, but, in Heidegger’s own formulation ‘The coming to presence of Enframing is the danger.’ (QT: 41) What did he mean? In order to answer this question, let us look, firstly, at what Heidegger means by the odd-sounding term ‘enframing’.

‘Enframing’, in Heidegger’s sense of the word, is not unconnected with the world of technology for whose darker possibilities the Atomic Bomb was, at that time, the most potent symbol. Nevertheless, as Heidegger many times insists, enframing is not itself anything technological. Very provisionally, we may say that it is something like the mind-set underlying modern technology. However, ‘enframing’ is not only manifested in such things as atomic bombs, televisions or washing-machines, but is equally present in culture and everyday life. When we talk of ‘the culture industry’ or ‘quality time’ or of being ‘consumers of the countryside’ we are revealing the influence of enframing on our way of thinking. And, quite apart from such threats as nuclear war and environmental degradation, the ‘danger’ of which Heidegger spoke would still, in his terms, remain. For the danger is in enframing itself, not in the success or failure of the technology that it sustains or in the malign application of that technology.

As the mind-set that underlies the rise of technology and that permeates our daily habits of speech and thought, enframing is Heidegger’s term for a way of objectifying our world and our experience (including our experience of ourselves) in such a way as to make what is enframed available for our use, manipulable and transformable in the service of designated goals and purposes. Put like this, it may sound as if enframing is merely shorthand for the human ambition of achieving dominion over nature. That is how it may seem both to those who are the agents of enframing and to many of those who see themselves as its enemies. However, as Heidegger understands it, the roots of enframing in some sense precede ‘man’, and certainly precede ‘man’ as conceived by post-Renaissance humanism. Humanism, with its slogan ‘Man, the measure of all things’, is not the cause of the situation but its expression. The origin of enframing does not lie in any human act, but, Heidegger says, hails from a destining of primordial Being.

With this enigmatic assertion we are already confronted with two of the key terms of the later Heidegger, ‘destining’ and ‘Being’, and we are already face to face with the problems of translation that have dogged the reception of Heidegger in the English-speaking world. ‘Destining’ translates the German term Geschick, which has the twofold meaning of ‘destiny’ and ‘suitability’ or ‘capacity’ – and Heidegger intends both of these meanings to be heard in his use of the word. ‘Destining’ is therefore not simply a destiny or fate imposed on the world from outside, but suggests a self-adaptation on the part of Being to the way the world is, making its self-giving and self-disclosure suitable to the capacities of those who receive it. It is therefore a two-way process. But what is ‘Being’ that is the source of this destining? Being is, of course, a key word in the Western philosophical vocabulary, the meaning of which has been widely debated and contested. For some philosophers it has been virtually a synonym for God, whilst others have spoken of it more as the substratum of the world, or the most abstract of all possible categories. I shall look more closely at Heidegger’s use of the term in the following section, noting for now only the general point that, for Heidegger, the question of Being is the question that most of all needs to be thought about by philosophers, the question that decides how things are for us and for our world.

But if enframing is a destining of Being, and is therefore a self-adaptation of Being to our capacities, where does the danger lie? Surely whatever comes to us from Being must reflect the way things are and, therefore, be in some sense true? So it may seem; yet, whilst Heidegger says that enframing comes from or is an event within Being, he also says that it shrouds Being in oblivion. In other words, when we are immersed in seeing the world as enframed, there is a real possibility that we fail to see or to understand what it is for Being truly to be.

What then is to be done?

Such a question may seem like a natural response to any perceived danger – but what if it already betrays a humanistic, action-oriented perspective that is itself an expression of enframing?

However, if waking up to the danger we’re in is not a call to action – what is it? A call to thinking, maybe: and, if the danger is ultimately rooted in Being, that must mean a call to attend thinkingly to what is going on in Being itself. Heidegger liked to quote some words of Hölderlin: ‘Where danger is, grows also that which saves’. The implication of these words is that, if becoming aware of the danger of the oblivion of Being directs us to attend more urgently to the question of Being, then, paradoxically, the danger itself may in the long term prove to be of service to Being. The paradox is that precisely because enframing prevents us from seeing Being, Being is protected from us. Neglected, even abandoned, Being is left to itself. Yet, Heidegger’s argument continues, for this to happen, or for the situation to be understood in this way, enframing will have to be seen for what it really is, and therefore the danger will have to be seen for the danger that it is. However, because this cannot occur as the result of human planning, willing or doing (since these are already compromised by their entanglement in enframing), it can only occur as the outcome of an event within Being itself, and ‘When and how it will come to pass … no one knows. Nor is it necessary that we know.’ (QT: 41) Our task is not to secure for ourselves a clear and distinct knowledge of Being but ‘to be the one who waits, the one who attends upon the coming to presence of Being in that in thinking he grounds it. Only when man, as the shepherd of Being, attends upon the truth of Being can he expect an arrival of a destining of Being’ (QT: 42).

What is to be looked for, then, is a turning, a reversal, that is both a turning in Being and a turning in humanity: in Being in that its oblivion is transformed into a safekeeping, in humanity in that we are transformed from homo faber, man the maker, Lord of creation and Master of the Universe, into the Shepherd of Being, the one who waits. ‘Perhaps,’ Heidegger muses, ‘we stand already in the shadow cast ahead by the advent of this turning’ (QT: 41).

What the business and professional people of Bremen made of this we do not know, but, if there is a single issue that can be said to constitute the centre around which the thinking of the later Heidegger revolves, then the question and expectation of this ‘turning’ would have a good claim to consideration. For, from the 1930s onwards, Heidegger is continually preoccupied with the danger that he sees as threatening modern civilisation and with the hope that there might yet be a new event within the history of Being itself that would, in some as yet undefined way, save us from the danger and from ourselves.

In focusing on this theme of the turning we have already run on ahead of ourselves. In arriving so quickly at ‘the centre’ of the later Heidegger we have put in play terms and topics that remain unexplained, and we have, inevitably, left much out. Nothing has been said so far about the later Heidegger’s paramount concern for language, or about the role of language in enabling the turning of which he speaks to come to pass – yet some commentators would say that the philosophy of the later Heidegger is nothing if not a philosophy of language. And there are other themes, too, that we have not broached, or that lie submerged and unremarked in what has been said thus far. There is, then, a lot to do in terms of clarifying and amplifying these few introductory pages, and such clarification and amplification is, in essence, the burden of the remainder of this book. At the same time it is worth remembering that, at one level, the heart of Heidegger’s later thinking can be reached quite quickly and stated quite simply (if not exactly perspicuously). For it is important to Heidegger that the kind of waiting upon Being to which we are called is not something that can only be reached or constructed as the result of a protracted and complex chain of reasoning or by the acquisition of new knowledge. Instead, he aims to make us look again at what we already know, to see what is already within the compass of our possible experience, but to which, intoxicated by the fantastic results achieved by enframing, we fail to attend. As Heidegger said many times, it is the simplest things that are hardest to think, and the nearest things that are most remote – yet it is just these to which his philosophy wishes to lead us.

The motif of the ‘turning’ is, I have claimed, central to the thought of the later Heidegger. But does the thought of the later Heidegger itself represent a ‘turning’: a turning-away from the existential analysis of Dasein that was the focus of Being and Time, and a turning towards the kind of ruminations upon the history of Being to which the lecture on ‘The Turning’ has already introduced us? And, if we are justified in speaking of such a turning in Heidegger’s own career, what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that at a certain point Heidegger simply abandoned the complex of questions and methods that found their fullest expression in Being and Time? Or does it mean that the same questions were carried over but subordinated to other, newer questions, or were subjected to different methodological treatment? How much continuity, and how great a discontinuity is there between the earlier and the later Heidegger? Are we in fact justified in talking about the later Heidegger at all? Or should we be ultra-cautious and follow those scholars who speak of an early, a middle and a late Heidegger? In any case, are these divisions, breaks and paradigm-shifts things that can be dated precisely or tied to particular works? So just what is meant by the later Heidegger?

Since an adequate answer to such questions would presuppose a substantive interpretation of Heidegger’s work as a whole, I shall for now simply sketch some of the reasons why I believe that we are justified in speaking of the ‘later Heidegger’. These amount to the view that there is a complex of themes, methods, topics and even stylistics that, taken together, define a distinctive body of writing that can be read and studied in relative independence from the Heidegger of Being and Time, and that this body of writing constitutes in its own right a particular (and a particularly important) position in the twentieth-century philosophical landscape. There are those, of course, who contest whether these writings can genuinely be called philosophical at all, a challenge to which I shall return in the final section of this book.

The earlier and the later Heidegger

In attempting to define more closely what is meant by the later Heidegger, we must identify both the continuities and the discontinuities that shape Heidegger’s philosophical career. But we also have to ask why Heidegger ‘turned’, and to say what the philosophical motivations were that led him to direct his thought in the new ways opened up by his ‘turn’. Let us take these points one at a time, beginning with the question as to the discontinuities that separate the later from the earlier Heidegger.

As Heidegger himself and many of his commentators since have stated, one crucial area of discontinuity concerns the way in which the question of Being is addressed.

Being and Time opened with a clarion call to philosophy to reopen the question of Being, a question that, Heidegger claimed, had been forgotten by contemporary philosophers. In such a situation, in which the question of Being is no longer asked, the very first challenge facing anyone seeking to reopen it is: where to begin? How can one ask such a big question without any kind of philosophical context in which to ask it?

True, says Heidegger, philosophy as it is now studied and taught in universities is not engaging with this question and can give us very little by way of a direct lead, but this does not mean that we are entirely without resources. After all, even philosophers still participate in the average, everyday discourses in which human beings talk amongst themselves about themselves. Now, human beings are precisely those beings for whom their own being is an issue, who can ask what it is for them to be, what their being means, and who are thus, essentially, describable as Da-sein (literally: ‘there-being’), beings in whom the question of Being is brought out into the open, brought out ‘there’ into the public space of the world. Now even though human beings, Dasein, are for the most part immersed in the daily round and common task and are caught up in the idle chatter of average everydayness, what they say about themselves, their hopes, fears, plans and projects, does reveal to an appropriately attuned listener what their being means to them. Even if Dasein’s everyday self-understanding is only the expression of the mumbling confessions of unfulfilled lives, we can deduce from these confessions what it is that Dasein considers would count as full and authentic Being, what Dasein has it in itself to be – even if, for the most part, it falls far short of realising its own possibilities. The disclosure of authentic Being that occurs when Dasein confronts its own finitude and death and resolutely accepts its utter immersion in the raging flux of time that carries it inescapably towards its death provides philosophy with a basis from which to sketch a horizon for the interpretation of Being as such.

This account became definitive for what became known in Germany as the philosophy of existence and subsequently played a decisive role in the shaping of French existentialism. In the most popular version of existentialism, as propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre, Heidegger’s Dasein was identified more or less unproblematically with the individual human subject, becoming an angst-ridden version of the Cartesian ego – ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ as the title of one of Sartre’s popularising works put it. The human subject, in this view, is defined by the fact that his existence precedes his essence. Rather than being determined by some pre-existing ‘human nature’ (as both Christian theology and scientific anthropology would have it), the individual is simply the sum of his own actions, actions issuing from a radical and undefinable freedom. Everything – absolutely everything – in our lives is what it is as the outcome or expression of a free act – ‘there are no accidents’, Sartre declared. Fairly obviously, despite humanism’s long-standing affirmation of human freedom, such an account goes well beyond anything traditional humanism had dared to say. Sartre is uncompromising in his rejection of any objectivising or essentialising interpretation of the human situation, whether theological, scientific, sociological, psychological or philosophical. Our freedom – and that means our very identity – is rooted solely in an upsurge of nothingness, a vortex of indeterminacy in the midst of the congealed mass of Being-in-itself that is the world. However, this passionate advocacy of the primacy of freedom not only leads Sartre to oppose conventional theories of human identity, it also brings him into conflict with everyday moral discourse. Like Heidegger, Sartre regards human beings as typically evasive in face of their own possibility for free self-affirmation. We characteristically talk about our own behaviour and that of others in terms that blunt the razor edge of radical freedom. We ascribe our conduct or our attitudes, our achievements or our failures, to our nationality, our class, our gender, our upbringing or our lack of a private income. We might, for example, dismiss Sartre’s whole philosophy as the expression of a pampered male bourgeois intellectual occupying a particular time and place in French cultural life. That, we might think, ‘explains’ Sartre. And if we catch ourselves behaving badly, we always have a set of mitigating circumstances to hand: I was drunk, I was tired, I was frightened, I was seduced, we say – meaning: I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t my fault. But that, says Sartre, is fake, or, as he put it, acting ‘in bad faith’. The truth is that we are always responsible for everything, and even the Resistance fighter who has been tortured beyond the point of endurance is responsible for betraying his comrades. There are no excuses. We decide, by our actions, each for ourselves, who we are and the values we live by.

Given that, in the popular imagination at least, Sartre owed his central insights to Heidegger, this seemed to be the outcome of Heidegger’s own phenomenological analysis of the human situation in Being and Time. However, Heidegger himself did not see it that way. Although he was personally interested in the possibility of meeting Sartre, his repudiation of Sartrean existentialism was spelt out in the 1947 Letter on Humanism, a title deliberately referring to Sartre’s own Existentialism is a Humanism, published the previous year.

Like Sartre, Heidegger is prepared to see the human situation in terms of ontological homelessness, meaning that on this earth we have no abiding home, since we are not embedded in the world as a part of nature. Instead we are, as it were, thrown into the world, into a life we did not choose but which, now we are here, we must choose or, in one of a myriad ways, evade. However, as Heidegger tells the story in 1947, this does not lead to the apotheosis of individual subjective freedom. For Heidegger, it seems, man’s thrownness is part of a larger story: ‘The human being is … “thrown” by being itself into the truth of being,’ he writes (1998: 252). Our abandonment is not an arbitrary fact, but is to be understood in terms of our abandonment of Being and, conversely, of our abandonment by Being. This situation confronts us with a certain danger, as we have seen, but it also contains the possibility of a kind of salvation. If, as Heidegger has it, existence is ek-sistence, Dasein’s standing-out from a world, it is not simply standing out into the nothingness of freedom (as for Sartre), it is ek-sisting into the nothingness of Being, ‘ecstatic inherence in the truth of being’ (1998: 251).

Sartre had doomed us to the absurd situation of continually seeking to be the ground or foundation of our own Being, to act ‘as if a man were author of himself’ – although it is impossible to be our own self-author, since our freedom, because it is grounded in nothing, cannot establish anything objective. It is neither deducible from any chain of causality nor can it influence any chain of causality. Thus, for Sartre, man is ‘a useless passion’, whose freedom is bought at the price of absurdity. In contrast to Sartre, Heidegger now sees our distinctiveness within nature, our radical freedom and the nothingness that is interconnected with it, as issui...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Is there a later Heidegger?
• 2. 1933 and after
• 3. Technology
• 4. Seeing things
• 5. Nietzsche
• 6. The first and second beginnings of philosophy
• 7. Hölderlin
• 8. What kind of thinker?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index