Heidegger Circle Proceedings

Heidegger’s three Country Path Conversations have generated much scholarly interest for their elaboration on Heidegger’s thinking of Gelassenheit, scientific and technological thinking, the work of art, evil, and the political aftermath of World War II. In this paper, I argue that these texts also, upon closer analysis, contain a Heideggerian pedagogical philosophy. In each text, I will show, a dynamic of teaching and learning is at play, most especially when it seems to be absent. Further, I will show how only when these three texts are read together does a fuller account of Heidegger’s pedagogy emerge. In the “Triadic Conversation,” I draw out the affective dimensions according to which the Guide’s teaches the Scientist to contest his own worldview. In the “Tower Conversation,” I show how the Teacher must practice what he himself teaches, choosing to tarry with that which causes him discomfort and anxiety. Finally, I read the “Evening Conversation” as an example of students assuming the teaching role themselves when the teacher is nowhere to be found, fulfilling the hopes any teacher would have for her students.

This presentation has two tasks. First, following Heidegger’s presentation of the method of formal indication in his 1920-21 lectures on the Pauline Epistles, I draw out two possible meanings for the method. On the one hand, formal indication could be a hermeneutic tool, a use of the how indicated in language to guide one in understanding the original relation in experience as original relation (enacted). On the other hand, formal indication could be the enacting of the original relation myself, in other words, appropriating the original relation in my own life as something to be enacted by me. The second task of the presentation is to read the First Epistle of John in the context of formal indication and these two possibilities, highlighting the affinities between the Epistle and the early Heidegger’s method and ultimately arguing that the dialogical imperative in John presents its necessary foil.

Martin Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art moves beyond an aesthetic reading of the artwork that focuses on questions of judgment towards a hermeneutical understanding of art as a realm where truth happens. Such a truth presents itself as an aletheiac unfolding of the strife between Earth and World, a tension revelatory of our historical situation. To better understand this truth, Heidegger turns to a painting of Van Gogh’s shoes, providing an account of the artwork that moves beyond the “thingly” character of the shoes to its “equipmental being”. That he attributes Van Gogh’s shoes to a peasant woman is telling in that her being female points to a gendered relation between woman and Earth. However, in only focusing on the equipmental being of her shoes and her labor in the fields, a historical truth about the tension between her labor of reproduction and production, a strain inherent in the Earth/World dynamic becomes eclipsed. This tension is felt as a reckoning of, not only one’s finitude, but of one’s natality. Heidegger looks to Van Gogh’s shoes and analyzes how toils in the field set up a world; however, as Gaston Bachelard notes, “Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ as claimed by certain hasty metaphysicians, man is laid in the cradle of the house.2” To explore our natal origin that begins in the cradle and stretches along to our death, this paper presents a hermeneutical reading of two works of art, Berthe Morisot’s “Cradle” and “Wet Nurse”, suggesting that in seeking an origin of the work of art and the tension that resides there, an understanding of reproduction (and its relation to production) should complement Heidegger’s treatment of the artwork.

Martin Heidegger’s concern for the notion of freedom is evident in his masterwork, Being and Time (SZ). As presented in SZ, care becomes the locus for a robust discussion of freedom, here defined as the ‘letting-be’ of others who are co-present, but with the addition of authentic solicitude. As Dasein is a being defined by care, we turn to Heidegger’s translation of a line from Augustine as our guide: “Volo, ut sis” – I want you to be what you are. For the Heidegger of SZ, authentic solicitude is that which allows us to be free for our ownmost possibilities – and to free others for theirs.

Until the mid-1930s, Heidegger used the word “metaphysics” with no pejorative implication; it simply meant philosophy. By about 1936, however, he began using the word to refer not to philosophy as a whole, but to a dominant tradition beginning with Plato and ending with Nietzsche. Metaphysics, he would now say, does not just happen to fail to address the question of being, but occludes it, concealing it and rendering it unaskable, virtually incomprehensible. Heidegger’s disavowal of the word “metaphysics” was in part a rhetorical response to Carnap, but it also marked the beginning of his substantive critique of “representational” or “calculative” thinking. Representational thinking aspires to comprehend entities as such and as a whole in their being. But the horizon or background against which such comprehension takes place cannot itself occupy a place in the totality of entities, so the metaphysical aspiration is forlorn. Heidegger’s later thought aims at an “overcoming of metaphysics” – not in Carnap’s sense, but rather to think not just the meaning of being, which is to say being understood as the being of entities, but the truth of being, that is, the way in which being as such manifests itself. Confusion about this change of direction in Heidegger’s later thinking has been generated in part by his own disingenuous attempts to rewrite the history of his own early philosophy in order to make it appear more consistent with his later critique of metaphysical thinking.

If Martin Heidegger is a thinker of Being par excellence, he is also one of the west’s key thinkers concerning the nothing. This paper has two main aims. The first is to highlight the continuity of the way in which Heidegger develops the theme of the nothing, in its close kinship with Being, throughout the long arc of his thought: from Sein und Zeit (1927) and his summer 1928 lecture course on Leibniz, through his famous treatment in the inaugural lecture “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1929), his subsequent “Nachwort” (1943) and “Einleitung” (1949) to that work, to his extended letter to Ernst Jünger, published as “Zur Seinsfrage” (1955). However, the second aim of the paper is to bring this extensive thematic thread into close association with Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander, especially his summer 1932 and winter 1941 lecture courses. What emerges is a striking account of the nothing as the Seinsvergessenheit, but also as the “the unlimited” origin of all beings in their “stepping forth” into appearance, and that to which they return. Thus, τὸ ἄπειρον effectively becomes for Heidegger another name for the nothing, or Being in its lethic or “hidden essence”: i.e., the hyperbolic or abyssal excess that is the ἀρχή of the appearance of beings. I conclude with some brief reflections on the sense in which Heidegger considers the vocation of “courageously” and “thankfully” thinking this nothing as perhaps the fullest expression of human freedom.

Heidegger’s 1929 lecture on Nothing is usually considered as a critique of logic and, more generally, of the sciences that mainly rely on it. However, it can also be interpreted as a strong attempt to overcome Western metaphysics, i.e., the metaphysics of Anwesenheit, as well as a specific interpretation of the principle of non-contradiction on which this metaphysical perspective is grounded. In this new particular philosophical framework proposed by Heidegger, Dasein’s thrownness finds its proper space — the space of Dasein’s freedom. In my paper, I will argue that Heidegger’s proposal, more than just a critique of logic, is a call to re-think some fundamental topics of philosophy and, above all, is a call to be attentive to what is. Surprisingly, this fundamental attention is also the element that discloses Dasein’s thrownness, making possible its freedom. This latter, then, assumes in Heidegger’s thought a very different character from its usual understanding: it is not recognised as a completely absolute possibility of action, i.e., untied from constraints, but rather an attuned response to Being.

This paper is an attempt to think through the issue of freedom in Heidegger’s thought from the perspective of what is anything but a simple methodological concern: the question of reading. I argue that reading designates an essential feature of being itself: as being enters the realm of signification – “language is the house of being,” as Heidegger says – it becomes a written trace that gives itself to be deciphered and read. What I thus call the legibility of being is housed primarily in poetic language for Heidegger, Hölderlin’s poetry having a pride of place in this regard due to its reflexive theorization of poetic language itself. In this paper, I call attention to a particular philological problem in a poem by Hölderlin where it is impossible to tell whether Hölderlin wrote “spricht” (speak) or “spielt” (play), an impossibility that ought to have prevented Heidegger from ruling out free play from the speaking essence of poetry.

Utilizing Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” as a starting point, I want to examine the ontological character of prosthesis despite Heidegger’s own specific account of the prosthetic. How might the making of prosthetics, the disposal of inorganic prosthetics as they become artifact, or the relation of prosthesis to dwelling and to aletheia fairly be read from Heidegger’s conception authentic being-in-world and to mit-sein? Comparatively, I discuss the ready-to-handedness of the tool, the temporalization of tools, and, most importantly, the habilitation of the world through the prosthetic effect of tools.

This panel explores Heidegger’s complicated relationship with phenomenology. One question is whether Heidegger was a phenomenologist at all. For Husserl, phenomenology was the study of essential structures of consciousness, and since Heidegger rejects both the ontological and methodological priority of consciousness, it might seem like he rejects phenomenology as well. On the other hand, the defining motto of phenomenology is ‘to the things themselves,’ and this seems to capture the persistent aim of Heidegger’s thinking, be it the work of art, technology, language, animality, or Dasein itself. Yet even if there is some way that Heidegger is ‘doing phenomenology,’ it’s not at all clear how he is doing it. He abandons Husserl’s reliance on the epoche, self-reflection, eidetic variation, and so on, and yet, while clearly not employing such a method, Heidegger does frequently write about a way of thinking proper to philosophy—can this way be described as phenomenological? In some ways our question is intractable—there are just too many ways to define phenomenology and too many ways to read Heidegger such that no single, broad consensus on both is likely to emerge—and yet, the question seems crucial for the understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole. Phenomenology, one can argue, holds the double promise that we can still think with Heidegger, instead of thinking about him as historical figure, and that there is something in his thought that is revealed, and not just postulated or construed.

This paper uses the phenomenon of Post-Traumatic Stress flashbacks to illuminate a phenomenology of identity. By taking a phenomenological approach to flashbacks, I delineate the fragility and, what I consider to be, the multi-dimensionality of identity and, correspondingly, the multi-dimensionality of the world (i.e., the contexture of intelligibility opened up when Dasein projects onto a multi-dimensional identity). When severe flashbacks occur, the ontological experience may not seem intelligible to das Man (i.e., the “they”) for the immediate illumination of the multi-dimensional aspect of being does not adhere to the “everydayness” of the world as articulated by das Man. This rapid shift in the world and the meaning of entities made possible within that world provides a significant illustration of the multi-dimensionality of identity. In other words, during a flashback a person’s vocation towards an identity, one whose visceral experience causes action, is an experience that does not coincide nor seem intelligible to the “everydayness” of Dasein. The multi-dimensionality of identity, however, allows entities to afford Dasein in intelligible ways. This state of being that retracts from the “everydayness” of das Man has drastic consequences for those who experience such a rapid shift. Here, I argue that flashbacks that occur are the result of the multi-dimensionality of Being-in-the-world.

I examine Heidegger’s concept of body in SZ against the background of trauma studies which has, for some time, assigned the body a central role in trauma, not just as biological entity, but as a lived body with a specific temporality. For humans, as embodied and mortal, trauma is not merely an empirical possibility, but is an essential one; namely, the possibility of an essential dissociation in which wholeness and ‘mineness’ are fundamentally called into question. In my paper I first indicate the significance of wholeness for his project, and the role of the ontosomatic in it. Heidegger seeks in being-toward-death Dasein’s being-whole, but his death analysis reveals a displacement of somato-onticity that obscures its peculiar temporality. Two themes converge in this analysis: embodiment and temporality. I propose that the body and its temporality as a (surviving) worldly being is not extrinsic to ‘who’ Dasein is, or to its ‘mineness,’ and to that extent, Dasein’s body is essentially disruptive of Heidegger’s project. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology purchases (ontological) wholeness at the expense of the interminable openness of being-with of having-been (natality) and legacy (future) that cannot be understood apart from bodiliness. In this regard, trauma is not an adventitious occurrence, but a fundamental condition of Dasein.

It is often remarked that Heidegger’s Being and Time was originally proposed as a book on Aristotle, and that formative work for this initial expression of Heidegger’s existential ontology was developed through the early 1920s in a series of lecture courses and seminars on Aristotle’s practical philosophy. This paper examines select details from Heidegger’s 1924 summer course in order to question the presuppositions of Heidegger’s decision to found the project of fundamental ontology on a purely philological reading of Aristotle. At stake is the method of investigation which permitted Heidegger to think politics through ontology in his most controversial writings from the 1930s—and ultimately the meaning of philosophy itself.