Heidegger Circle Proceedings

This paper addresses not only what Heidegger writes about attunement, truth, and errancy, but also how they play out in his own thinking. It focuses on Heidegger’s non-public writings in the 30s and 40s and argues that what one may call Heidegger’s errancies, especially in his Black Notebooks, have their seat in a blindness connected to the ways attunements dispose his thinking. The paper first traces how Heidegger’s understanding of attunements from Being and Time to Contributions acquires more and more a historical determination. It then questions the difference between attunements that are grounding and attunements that are not grounding but disclosive with relation to specific things and events, and how this difference in attunements relates to Heidegger’s understanding of truth and errancy (Irre). This is followed by a closer look at how errancy is operative at a dispositional level (at the level of attunements) in his non-public writings. The paper argues that just as errancy cannot be removed from truth, non-grounding attunements cannot be removed from grounding attunements. In other words, attunements, and this includes Heidegger’s attunements, cannot be simply disconnected from things, events, and embodied lineages. The paper closes with the question of how determinations arise from attunements and what determines attunements.

In the following paper, pursuing a lead from Heidegger’s 1937 reading of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, I look to the 1929/30 lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik for a corresponding conception of awakening in Heidegger’s own (openly metaphysical) thinking that would indicate a deeper connection of the two thinkers than meets the eye. I locate the awakening of a fundamental attunement, which I explore first, through the meaning of awakening as counterposed to sleep (an image of forgetting for both Nietzsche and Heidegger). As a didactic metaphor, I offer the optic of the lucid dream through which we are given to consider the horizonal negotiation of the everyday self and of Dasein as simultaneously awake. The lucid dream can perdure only momentarily, however, lest we risk life and limb, but it nevertheless has the potential to be transformative of life. Once awakening is properly explored, the investigation shifts to method: how should an attunement be awakened? I demonstrate that Heidegger’s argument turns on the horizonal negotiation of the simultaneous Being-there and not-there of the human being. Finally, focusing on the function of horizon in Heidegger’s positive characterization of attunement, I argue that Heidegger’s deployment of the Weise as melody speaks directly to the Weise of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

It is an opinion often ventured that Heidegger, having opened very briefly – in Being and Time – the question of birth, fails to properly engage the matter. It is said that, despite the thinking of historicity initiated there, and the occasional reference in later writings, the question of the natal is not properly addressed in his work. Instead, we are told, it is Hannah Arendt who picks up this neglected thread, turning it into a cornerstone of her thinking. This paper seeks to show that this story is inaccurate: that the development of a conception of ‘Anfang’ in the texts of the late 1930’s can be seen to address in a decisive manner the question of what will be called ‘natality.’ Aspects of the texts from this period, and in particular of the volume Über den Anfang (GA 70) can be read so as to reveal a rich and complex response to this problem, one that reverses many presuppositions regarding Heidegger’s work at this time, and more than filling this apparent lacuna.

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.

The epilogue of Martin Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes quotes Hegel's famous judgment: “[A]rt is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.” With this judgment, Hegel says that art has ceased to be the vehicle of self-knowledge for human beings; Hegel proclaims the pastness of art. But the future of art is thus put into question. This is how Heidegger transforms Hegel's verdict into a question: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which […] truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?” Thus, the question of the pastness of art turns into the question regarding whether art is to be or not to be, into the question of the future of art. Hegel's judgment proclaims the pastness of art, because art is implicated with material contingency. That means that the question of the rehabilitation of art, of the future of art, is at the same time the question of the phenomenological rehabilitation of the material. What is central to this project of rehabilitation is the figure of the work of art with its own peculiar kind of materiality. Therefore, Heidegger reformulates the material of art as earth which is a source not just of contingency but also of potentiality. Yet, Heidegger does not understand art as the creation of aesthetic objects, rather, art is concerned with ποίησιϛ, with the bringing forth of beings out of the unconcealment. Such is the formulaic definition of art as τέχνη in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: “All art is concerned with the process of coming into being, and to practice art is also to consider how something capable of being or not being [τι τῶν ἐνδεχομένων καὶ εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι] […] may come into being.” This formula, although it is nowhere present in the essay, is the hidden center of Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes – such is the claim of this essay. Heidegger returns to the ancient definition of τέχνη to place art within the parameters of history, i.e., starting history anew by introducing new beings. But every bringing forth of beings is a retrieval of the past, i.e., of the earth rich with potentiality from which alone the future can unfold. Thus, every decision concerning the future always takes up the past, i.e., the already-there of the earth.

Drawing on Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” I argue that art is constitutive of dimensions of our existence whereby we exceed our finitude: relationality and historicality. Further, I argue that such a characterization of art allows us to interpret the critique of Rilke Heidegger proffers in “Why Poet?” as follows: despite Rilke’s ability to step beyond the terms of modern experience, his work is limited, from a Heideggerian perspective, inasmuch as it cannot accommodate the relational character of our experience. I conclude by suggesting that identifying this lack of a relational aspect in modern experience helps identify the question most central to it: “what does it mean to be a we?”

This paper examines Heidegger’s largely ignored interpretation of the Alemannic poet Johann Peter Hebel in the 1950s. Taking its point of departure from “Gelassenheit,” it argues that Hebel is the poet who best exemplifies what Heidegger means by the “rule of mystery.” Focusing on Heidegger’s analysis of Nature, it addresses how Hebel’s orientation toward “the invisible” (das Unscheinbare) allows him to reciprocally see “calculable Nature” and what Heidegger describes as a “newly experienced naturalness of Nature” in terms of one another. The mirror-play operative in this ‘reciprocal seeing in terms of’ effects a poetic recuperation of the lived world as enchanted––one that makes concrete what it means to say “yes” and “no” to technology.

“The fate of poiesis” raises the question of whether poetry is a thing of the past that now must be resigned to lamenting its lost vocation. This sense of loss can be understood through the devocalization of language, i.e. the historical movement from oral to literate cultures, or from language as an event to language as a sign, that alters the space of poetry, making it a place of fictions rather than aletheia. Yet poetry and politics both confront the limits of the sayable that determine our historical being-in-the-world. The ability of poetry to seek a different reality and a different language mean we must submit to the poem and take its challenge of ‘making’ into our own lives.

The question that I pursue in this paper is this: How are Heidegger’s entrenched ethnocentrism and his profound interest in East-West dialogue related? While neither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, I show how, starting in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he begins thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what in 1953 he comes to call “the inevitable dialogue with the East Asian world.”

Beginning especially in the 1930s, Heidegger’s ontology famously and frequently used a great deal of obscure technical terminology. His use of this terminology has contributed to confusion in Heidegger scholarship and has been a target for many analytically minded philosophers. In this paper, I have two correlated goals. First, I hope to establish certain elements of a reconceived methodology for interpreting Heidegger, such that a consistent reconstruction of many of his seemingly bizarre concepts becomes possible. Rather than the dominant chronological approach according to which Heidegger’s various renditions of the ontological problematic are understood in relation to their position on the timeline of his career, I argue that these renditions should be arrayed along an axis of ground or what I call a “diagenic axis.” Making good sense of Heidegger’s obscure concepts requires reconstructing them in terms of their position in the methodological evolution of his project along a diagenic axis. Second, I hope to show why on the basis of this methodology a particularly obstinate line of critique of Heidegger goes wrong – the Carnapian critique, which captures the spirit of many who dismiss Heidegger on the basis of his difficult terminology. Accomplishing both of these goals, I argue, is dependent upon clarifying the methodological operation by which Heidegger’s ontology evolves and the role of the concept of ground in this evolution. In his early work, Heidegger provides a way of making sense of this evolution in terms of a “produktive Logik” characterizing his ontology.

The aim of this paper is to consider ways that Heidegger’s thinking relates to some main lines of traditional Jewish thought. Following Heidegger’s own hermeneutical principle of trying to think what an author leaves unthought, Marlene Zarader took up a similar line of consideration in her aptly named work, La dette impensée: Heidegger et l’heritage hébraique. Zarader’s work has come in for at least two sorts of criticism. She has been criticized for (a) leaving the impression that there is a single Hebraic tradition to which Heidegger’s debt can be traced and (b) largely restricting her account of that tradition to twentieth century scholars (notably, Scholem). In my opinion, these criticisms, though not without merit, overreach. Still, while such considerations mitigate the force of these criticisms, they do so by conceding that they have a point. Accordingly, the present paper is meant to serve as a complement to Zarader’s project, in light of these criticisms. In the interest of indicating how Heidegger’s thinking echoes various Hebraic traditions, I discuss three distinct sources of those echoes: Maimonides’ negative theology, Mendelssohn’s conception of language (as it contrasts with Solomon Maimon’s conception), and the messianic idea of the Lurianic Kabbalastic tradition.

The relation of Heideggerʼs philosophy to theology is a problem that remains of current interest, particularly because Heideggerʼs later philosophy offers some hints towards an interpretation of religious language between theism and non-cognitivism. According to this post-theistic reading, the talk about god neither refers to an existent being, nor simply expresses religious feelings. Instead, religious language can be interpreted as describing in its own way the groundlessness of the world. This paper discusses Heideggerʼs later philosophy against this background. In what follows, I will draw upon the work of Wittgenstein and refer to the cosmological argument to read Heidegger in terms of a post-theistic account of religion. This not only contributes to a philosophical understanding of religious language, but also yields a new interpretation of Heideggerʼs later philosophy, which, in spite of its hermeticism, has a specific relevance to the philosophy of religion that still needs to be explored.

The idea that Husserl’s phenomenology is a kind of reflective philosophy inspired by the Cartesian tradition has become a commonplace in the philosophical literature. Heidegger was one of the first thinkers who criticized the Husserlian emphasis on reflection and transcendental phenomenology. Since then it is easy to find the affirmation that Husserl and Heidegger developed two different, even antagonistic concepts of phenomenology. Here is not the place to continue embracing this discussion. Based on the complex development process of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology in the course of his early lectures in Freiburg, the present paper weighs up some of Heidegger’s critical remarks regarding the reflective nature of Husserlian phenomenology in the light of important textual evidences ignored not only by Heidegger, but also by a surprising number of specialists in the fields of philosophy, cognitive sciences, and philosophy of mind.