The Heidegger Dictionary

Daniel O. Dahlstrom

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441171023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Heidegger Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Martin Heidegger, arguably the most important and influential European thinker of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all his major works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Heidegger's thought. Students will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Heidegger's writings and detailed synopses of his key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on Heidegger's major philosophical influences, including Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche, and Scheler and Husserl. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, offering clear explanations of often complex terminology. The Heidegger Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying Heidegger or Modern European Philosophy more generally.

A–Z dictionary

Absence (Abwesen)

An absence can be no less gripping than a presence. Moreover, while nothing is fully present to us, whatever is present necessitates the absence of something else and vice versa. In this way, absence and presence are co-dependent. To be is to be present to someone, but never exhaustively. In addition, the presence itself is typically absent from our consideration as we concern ourselves with what is present. By misconstruing how beings are dynamically present and absent, traditional equations of being with presence have led to construing being as abstract and universal, if not simply empty or indeterminable. SZ first attempts to address this tradition by demonstrating how time, including but not equated with the present, provides the sense of being of our being-here (Da-sein). Heidegger’s mature writings emphasize how Western indifference and obliviousness to being in favor of beings is due to the fact that being (presence) absents itself from the beginning of Western thinking, albeit not without a trace.

Abyss (Abgrund)

Considered in terms of the notion of a ground, being has a grounding character but is itself an abyss, i.e. itself groundless. Heidegger makes this point sometimes about being (Sein) simpliciter, other times about historical being (Seyn) as the self-concealing presence of beings to human beings. Historical being as this appropriating event is the ungrounded yet constitutive ground of everything that is (including God and humans) in the sense that whatever is needs it in order to be. Just as the principle that everything that is has a ground (sufficient reason) does not itself have a ground, so being is removed from any ground. In order to think being, it is necessary to make the leap (Sprung, Satz) from the pursuit of grounds or reasons other than being, since that pursuit amounts to reducing being to an entity or particular being (10: 87, 164–9; 70: 9ff).

Heidegger first broaches the notion of the abyss by way of grounding the essence of grounds in the freedom of transcendence. Every entity has a ground, because Dasein transcends entities, projecting them on to some world, or, equivalently, understands them as being. The transcendence that underlies the transcendental, grounding character of being is grounded in Dasein’s freedom. “But as this ground, freedom is the abyss of Dasein” (9: 174f).

In Heidegger’s subsequent attempt to think being historically (i.e. non-transcendentally), the abyss is the “first essential clearing concealment, the unfolding of truth.” Far from the denial of any ground, the abyss is the affirmation of grounding “in its hidden expanse and distance.” The hiddenness of historical being, not supporting itself on any entity and fending off any ground, is an abyss as “the unity of the primordial timing and spacing” and “the site of the moment of the ‘between’ that Da-sein must be grounded as” (65: 379–88; 66: 99, 131; 70: 53). There are different senses of “abyss” for each beginning of thinking. In the first beginning, the abyss is the “ungrounded [character] of the truth of historical being”; in the second, it is “the appropriated [beginning] of the going-under [Untergang],” presence’s self-concealing (70: 13). The truth of the appropriating event is the “primordial ground” (Ur-grund) that opens itself as self-concealing only in the abyss (Ab-grund) (65: 380).

Aletheia

Aletheia, the Greek word for truth, typically stands for the correctness of a thought, perception, or assertion, and, in fact, as early as Homer, a cognate of correctness, homoiosis, served as a synonym for it. According to Heidegger, this construal of aletheia derives from its more basic meaning as un-hiddenness, where the privative prefix ‘un-’ apes the corresponding privative Greek prefix ‘a-’ in ‘a-letheia’ and ‘letheia’ derives from words for the hidden or forgotten. For example, “the sun shines” is true in the sense of being correct only if the sun’s shining is not hidden. Just as the hidden is hidden from someone, so aletheia as the unhiddenness of “things” entails their actual or potential presence to someone (for Heidegger that someone is Dasein). Since “being” stands for this presence of something (together with the absences the presence entails), aletheia is at bottom the truth of being (genitivus appositivus, like the ‘city of New York’), irreducible to beings or to human beings, to objects or subjects.

Greek thinkers were so taken by aletheia as the sheer unhiddenness of things that they equated it with being, so much so that attending to the unhidden thing displaces consideration of unhiddenness itself. The yoking (zugon) of aletheia—in Plato’s Cave Allegory—to the manifest way things look in the light marks a key site of its devolution from unhiddenness to correctness (5: 37f; 9: 223–34; 34: 21–112; 45: 180f; 65: 331–5; 66: 109f).

The foundation of a-letheia (un-hiddenness) in hiddenness is fatally lost when aletheia is translated as veritas (truth) and its opposite is no longer the multiple forms of hiddenness but simply falsehood. This hiddenness encompasses the obstruction of some entities by others, observers’ shortsightedness, the fading past and the oncoming future, and—ironically—the unhiddenness itself. The essence of aletheia (truth in a primordial sense) is neither the correctness of assertions nor the unhiddenness of beings, but the interplay of that hiddenness and unhiddenness or, equivalently, the strife (eris) between earth and world. Aletheia in this basic sense is the hidden “openness” in the midst of beings that grounds their unhiddenness (65: 339, 342–51, 357).

Letting things present themselves-as-they-are supposes an opening, identified in SZ with Da-sein as the clearing or disclosedness, and thus “the most primordial phenomenon of the truth” (SZ 133, 220f). This openness amounts to nothing if things are hidden from us. Aletheia as this unhiddenness is “a determination of entities themselves and not somehow—like correctness—a character of an assertion about them” (45: 121). Truth as correctness accordingly “stands and falls” with truth as the unhiddenness of entities (45: 20, 96–103, 129ff). Far from ignoring bivalence, this account of truth as the struggle of unhiddenness and hiddenness, in advance, as it were, of any human shortcomings, provides a way to explain it (9: 191). Some critics (e.g. Jaspers, Tugendhat) charge that the interpretation of truth as sheer disclosedness forfeits its specific meaning, where correctness (bivalence) is fundamental. Yet errancy is inherent in any human disclosedness; we are in the untruth as much as in the truth (SZ 222f; 9: 196ff). Moreover, to apply the notion of correctness to truth as unhiddenness is itself a category mistake since correctness presupposes unhiddenness and not vice versa (65: 327).

In a late address, in contrast to his practice for three decades, Heidegger proposes holding off from construing “truth” (Wahrheit) as a translation of aletheia. In light of the traditional equation of truth with correctness, he concedes that “aletheia, unhiddenness thought as clearing of presence is not yet truth,” though he continues to insist that the correct correspondence presupposes it, “since there can be no presence and making present outside the realm of the clearing” (14: 86; 15: 396).

Anaximander

Anaximander, one of the thinkers of the first beginning, is the author of the oldest surviving Western philosophical fragment, a saying (Spruch) that is typically translated: “That from which things come to be gives rise, too, to their passing away, according to necessity; for they pay one another recompense and penalty for their injustice, according to the order of time.” According to Heidegger, the fragment speaks, not simply of things in nature, but of entities as a whole, thereby undercutting the objection that the fragment’s mention of justice is anthropomorphic, illegitimately importing a moral notion into a non-moral sphere. Instead the fragment is about how being, signaled in the first clause, imparts itself to beings described in the second clause. Though the saying announces the difference between being and beings, that difference is subsequently overlooked because being conceals itself in the process (5: 363ff; 78: 159, 211–16).

Heidegger reads Anaximander’s fragment, like those of Parmenides and Heraclitus, as launching Western thinking, yet before its captivation by the enormous power of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. Heidegger accordingly reads the fragment eschatologically, as superseding all subsequent thinking and gathering into itself what is ending and what is coming as the destiny of historical being. What warrants this critical engagement with Anaximander is the possibility the engagement presents for unleashing “another destiny of being” (5: 335).

Whatever else Anaximander’s fragment means, it signals that to be is to be in motion, coming to be and passing away. Rejecting the dichotomy of being and becoming, Heidegger insists that being, in essence, bears and stamps becoming (5: 343). A gloss of a verse from Homer confirms that the Greeks originally understood being as an emerging-and-disappearing presence. In being, so understood, presence and absence are joined at the hip, the presently present emerging into unhiddenness from hiddenness and passing in turn into it (5: 347–50).

Against the backdrop of this understanding of being, Anaximander’s fragment says that beings are “out of joint” (in contrast to the usual translation “for their injustice”). This cannot mean that they are no longer present or that they are occasionally out of joint. Instead, it says that they are out of joint as such, which entails that there must be some sense of being right (not out of joint) that holds for them. Beings are between coming to be and passing away, and “this ‘between’ is the fit [Fuge] according to which what whiles away is respectively fitted, from its arrival here to its passing away” (5: 355; 78: 172). Being between in this way is the being that is imparted to them.

Yet though this joint or fit (where presence and absence meet) constitutes the being of beings, beings are also out of joint (Un-fug) insofar as they insist on taking themselves as exceptions to their transitional state and, hence, doing so in reckless opposition to other things. The fragment is thus telling us that things both are and are not out of joint. They have a tendency to be out of joint by rebelling against the fitness of presence and absence that is their being, the being that usage imparts to them. Yet this tendency is subordinate to that fitness itself, and, indeed, to be themselves, beings must turn back (verwinden) the disorder by coming to terms with their absence and that means, too, allowing for other things to come to themselves, to “be a while” themselves (5: 372; 51: 94–123).

Animals (Tiere)

Neither irrational beasts nor sophisticated machines, animals have a way of being that is instructively different from being-human. Aristotle already appreciated rudiments of this difference in terms of the difference between the human logos and animal voices (18: 17, 55, 99, 111, 238f). Thus, being alive is not the same as being on-hand or handy, but it is also not the same as being-in-the-world, since the world is essentially tied to human freedom (SZ 50; 25: 20; 28: 189; in contrast to an earlier gloss of zoon (living) as “a manner of being and, indeed, being-in-the-world,” see 18: 18, 30). At the same time, the only path to determining the ontological status of living things is through a “reductive privation on the basis of the ontology of Dasein” (SZ 194).

Animals are “world-poor” in comparison with humans, though the notion is used only for the purpose of “comparative illustration,” not for affirming a hierarchy. An animal dispenses with the world in contrast to a stone that is worldless, incapable of even dispensing with something like a world. Unlike stones, they have access to their environment (Umwelt)—but such an environment or, better, such surroundings (Umgebung) do not constitute a world. Instead of comporting themselves to a world, they behave toward their surroundings, and this behavior (Benehmen) is based upon a complex relation of their drives to their surroundings—and only the surroundings—which dis-inhibit (enthemmen) those drives and the facilities based upon them. In the process, animals are continually drawing circles around themselves, not in the sense of encapsulating themselves, but in the sense of opening up or, better, struggling to open up a sphere “within which this or that disinhibiting factor can disinhibit” (29/30: 370).

In keeping with our necessarily privative approach to animals, Heidegger characterizes the animal’s relation to its surrounding as “captivation” (Benommenheit), a term he also uses to characterize Dasein fully in the grip of its concerns (29/30: 153, 376f; SZ 61). Thanks to this captivated behavior, animals do not relate to beings as beings. The animal lacks this elementary “as” structure (29/30: 361; see ibid., 345, 367, 372, 416, 496; 54: 237f). An animal’s openness to its surroundings is not to be confused with the openness of human beings to a world. The captivated character of animals underlies their world-poor character, rather than vice versa (29/30: 393f, 509). Instead of being able to relate to things as they are, animals are driven from drive to drive, in what amounts to a continual process of eliminating what it is that inhibits them (29/30: 362–8). By contrast, humans form a world, a world that only is what it is in this process (29/30: 413f). “World is always spiritual world. The animal has no world, not even an environment [Umwelt]” (40: 48; 65: 276f).

Anxiety (Angst)

In everyday life we are immersed in things handy and relevant to one another in a system of relevance (meaningfulness) that is ultimately in place for our sake. As we move from project to project, we find nothing that is not part of some context of relevance in the purposeful world of our concerns. For example, as we get in a car to drive somewhere, everyth...

Table of contents

• Bloomsbury Philosophy Dictionaries
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• A–Z dictionary
• Heidegger’s published writings, lectures, and posthumous works
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index