Abstract
Thinking, because we are born into it, does not appear as anything out of the ordinary, that is, till we become conscious of it. When we pay attention to it, the possibility and phenomenon of thought appears stranger and stranger. That which is most familiar now looks inexplicable. And when we directly begin to contemplate this strange thing called thinking, by means of which each one unreflectively achieves their daily ends, a new dimension opens up before us which has no proper language in thought. In meditating on thinking, we can only be underway, as Heidegger puts it, and not arrive at quick or facile conclusions. Thought has inquired into phenomena, but has rarely inquired into itself. There is no ready path of inquiry to be followed but that of careful questioning and observing. To turn and face the origin (essence or matrix) of thinking, we have to first understand and become aware of the nature of the inner verbal and representational traffic thus slowing it down. Besides, since much of this inner traffic is verbal, we have to pay special attention to language and the nature of representation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This early declaration is to allay the suspicion of Heideggerians and reassure that the author does not intend to drag Heidegger in a direction that his thought does not go, and yet recognize the centrality of his thoughts with regard to the present project.
- 2.
This is elegantly described by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the following words: “whenever we interpret and develop the text of an author in this way, there comes a moment when we are aware of our inability to proceed any further without contravening the most elementary rules of hermeneutics . This means that the development of the text in question has reached a point of undecidability where it becomes impossible to distinguish between the author and the interpreter. Although this is a particularly happy moment for the interpreter, he knows that it is now time to abandon the text that he is analyzing and to proceed on his own.” Giorgio Agamben , What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 13.
- 3.
Martin Heidegger , Being and Time , trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 1.
- 4.
The full quote is as follows: “The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being ? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being ?” Ibid., p. 398.
- 5.
Being must not be understood as some higher order entity or ultimate ontological ground waiting to be discovered. That would be in line with the old onto-theological doctrines that Heidegger repudiates. In other words, there is no metaphysics of Presence in Heidegger. Being is always disclosed in beings, but not coincident with the onticity of any particular being . The capitalization of being as ‘Being ’ merely helps to keep the latter in mind .
- 6.
From the previous note, we can say that the relation of thinking to Being is merely the relation between a specific onticization (in response to the world and the “they”) and the ontological generality.
- 7.
Although the present work begins with a critique of the Kantian position, it is fair to admit that the schism between epistemology and ontology goes back before Kant. In fact , there are in Kant, moments of ambiguity, especially in the third Critique, where he seems to admit the possibility of an emptiness -experience (pure time and space) that borders on transcendence. However, these openings are not taken seriously, and the followers of Kant do not elaborate on this point as well, choosing to remain on the categorical path to certainty.
- 8.
Michael Roubach notes: “In primordial temporality, the future is the basic temporal ‘dimension’: it is in terms of the future that the present and past are understood. However, the future is not “a ‘now’ which has not yet become ‘actual,’” as it is usually understood, but is characterized as anticipation: “Anticipation makes Dasein authentically futural” (SZ 325). The meaning of “future” is “[coming] towards-oneself,” it is the move toward oneself that is made by evincing what Heidegger calls “resoluteness” (SZ 329), namely, by Dasein ’s authentic self-disclosure (SZ 296). This future is characterized as “towards-oneself” because it separates Dasein from other entities by turning Dasein toward its own being , toward its death , a separation that requires resoluteness. Heidegger’s basic characterization of the future is, therefore, anticipatory resoluteness (SZ 326). But if, in primordial temporality, the future is basic, what is the meaning of the past? The meaning of the past in primordial temporality is “having-been-ness” (Gewesenheit). The past is understood through the future, because it is revealed through Dasein ’s relation to its own death , its future past-ness. As “having-been-ness,” the past situates Dasein and enables Dasein to encounter that which is given in its environment (SZ 326). Dasein ’s temporality as a whole, Heidegger tells us, is ‘the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been.’” Michael Roubach, “Heidegger’s Primordial Temporality and Other Notions of Time ,” in Cosmological and Psychological Time , eds. Y. Dolev and M. Roubach (New York: Springer, Cham, 2016), p. 265.
- 9.
Heidegger , Being and Time , p. 128.
- 10.
Heidegger observes: “Initially, “I” “am” not in the sense of my own self, but I am the others in the mode of the they. In terms of the they, and as the they, I am initially “given” to “myself.” Initially, Dasein is the they, and for the most part it remains so.” Being and Time , p. 121.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 139.
- 12.
Ibid., pp. 140–141.
- 13.
Martin Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 4.
- 14.
Heidegger, Being and Time , p. 146.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 149. Further, Heidegger distinguishes an organism and a being thus: “Man can be conceived as an organism, and has been so conceived for a long time . Man so conceived is then ranked with plants and animals, regardless of whether we assume that rank order to show an evolution or classify the genera of organisms in some other way. Even when man is marked out as the rational living being , he is still seen in a way in which his character as an organism remains decisive—though biological phenomena , in the sense of animal and vegetable beings, may be subordinated to that rational and personal character of man which determines his life of the spirit. All anthropology continues to be dominated by the idea that man is an organism.” Ibid., p. 148.
- 16.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 121.
- 17.
“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” Ecclesiastes 9:11. The fact that the world is not logical in this simple and direct manner ought to alert the minimally watchful of a different order of things.
- 18.
In the Symposium, Plato suggests that eros is a daimon that can contribute to the understanding of truth, in helping us to participate in beauty as ideal form . It is in a related sense that the word is used here, and not in its usual understanding in literature or in psychology.
- 19.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 126.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 150.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 152.
- 22.
In Phaedo, Plato develops his theory of anamnesis , in part by combining it with his theory of Ideal Forms. First, he elaborates how anamnesis can be achieved: in Phaedo Plato presents a way of living that would enable one to overcome the misleading nature of the body through katharsis (Greek : κάθαρσις; “cleansing” (from guilt or defilement), “purification”). The body and its senses are the source of error; knowledge can only be regained through the use of our reason , contemplating things with the soul (noesis). Secondly, he makes clear that genuine knowledge , as opposed to mere true belief (doxa), is distinguished by its content. One can only know eternal truths, for they are the only truths that can have been in the soul from eternity . Plato , The Collected Dialogues of Plato , Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- 23.
Heidegger : “If we recollect the history of Western–European thinking once more, then we will encounter the following: The question of being , as the question of the being of entities, is double in form . On the one hand, it asks: What is an entity in general as an entity? In the history of philosophy , reflections which fall within the domain of this question acquire the title ontology . The question “What is an entity?” [or “What is that which is?”] simultaneously asks: Which entity is the highest [or supreme, hochste] entity, and in what sense is it? This is the question of God and of the divine. We call the domain of this question theology. This duality in the question of the being of entities can be united under the title ontotheology ,” cited in Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology : Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 13.
- 24.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 159.
- 25.
“In an important later work, ‘the Memorial Address’ (1955), Heidegger seeks to take his audience performatively through a “turning” whereby they come to recognize that although technology is ubiquitous, its meaning remains mysterious. He believes recognizing that the ontological impact of technology remains concealed even though our worlds are saturated with technological devices, and thus that technology reveals itself in a way that conceals its meaning, helps facilitate the crucial insight that enframing is the way “being as such” reveals itself for us —viz., by “concealing” or “withholding” itself (as we noted with respect to his analysis of “earth”). “Where the danger is, the saving power also grows,” then, because that which makes possible our technological understanding of being —and every other understanding of being (without being exhausted by these successive understandings of the being of entities) —is a pretheoretical source of intelligibility which simultaneously elicits and defies full conceptualization, a “mystery ” which, Heidegger thinks is key to understanding ourselves otherwise than in the terms established by enframing’s reductive ontotheology .” Thomson, op. cit. p. 74, footnote 57.
- 26.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 164.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 166. This and the paragraphs immediately preceding and succeeding directly contradict Iain Thomson’s assertion that “Heidegger did not believe that our technological understanding of being could be transcended through a phenomenological practice disconnected from sociohistorical reality .” Thomson, op. cit., p. 74. Heidegger puts his faith in the deepest questioning of thinking , which is definitely phenomenological practice, and one that is unconnected with the sociohistorical.
- 28.
It must be made clear that redemptive thinking as an active possibility is not specifically found in Heidegger. Rather Heidegger offers the notion of “enigmatic solitude.” This solitude is not something solipsistic or sentimental but a getting underway in order to open ourselves to the aloneness of being . For the praxis of philosophical bilingualism , the author must look beyond Heidegger and to elements in Schelling and Goethe that are to follow in subsequent discussions.
- 29.
Ibid., pp. 169–170, text rearranged.
- 30.
“Today, when we know much too much and form opinions much too quickly, when we compute and pigeonhole everything in a flash—today there is no room at all left for the hope that the presentation of a matter might in itself be powerful enough to set in motion any fellow-thinking which, prompted by the showing of the matter , would join us on our way.” Ibid., p. 171. Hence there is the need for invitation to participate and take steps in the way of the inquiry.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 175.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 178.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost/ Is the Unlit lamp.” Robert Browning, “The Statue and the Bust,” The Collected Poems of Robert Browning (New York: A&L Books, 2011).
- 37.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 9.
- 38.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 24–25.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 42.
Friedrich Nietzsche , Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin Classics, 1973), p. 33.
- 43.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 49.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 50.
- 45.
Ecclesiastes 2:11.
- 46.
Ecclesiastes 1:9.
- 47.
Nietzsche writes: “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” Friedrich Nietzsche , The Gay Science , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), s. 341.
- 48.
Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , pp. 53–54.
- 49.
To his friend Georg Brandes, Nietzsche had written: “After you had discovered me…the difficulty is now to lose me.” Cited in Heidegger , What Is Called Thinking , p. 53.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 59.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 69. Further, Heidegger adds, “The thing that the [overman] discards is precisely our boundless, purely quantitative, nonstop progress . The overman is poorer, simpler, tenderer and tougher, quieter and more self-sacrificing and slower of decision, and more economical of speech.” And “The [overman] constitutes a transformation and thus a rejection of man so far.”
- 52.
Nietzsche cited in Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking , p. 64.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 66.
- 54.
For Kant, the question of Being had to be left out of the consideration as it was outside the domain of the sensibilities, that is, not realizable. But for Nietzsche “Caesar with the soul of Christ ” [in a note to Zarathustra] was a human possibility and a distinct imagery of the overman. The crucial difference is that Kant was working within the image of thought available to him whereas Nietzsche rejected the limits posed by the existing beliefs of thinking about itself.
- 55.
Ibid., pp. 67–68.
References
Browning, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Browning. New York: A&L Books, 2011.
Ecclesiastes. The Book of Koheleth.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press, 1996.
Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking. Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin Classics, 1973.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Bollingen Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Roubach, Michael. “Heidegger’s Primordial Temporality and Other Notions of Time.” In Cosmological and Psychological Time, edited by Yuval Dolev and Michael Roubach, 165–176. New York: Springer, Cham, 2016.
Thomson, Iain. Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roy, K. (2018). Heidegger and the Pathless Land. In: The Power of Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96911-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96911-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96910-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96911-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)