Martin Heidegger

Stephen Mulhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754625339
• eBook ISBN: 9781351919630
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Although Heidegger's writings are not extensively concerned with the analysis of political concepts or with advocating particular arrangements of political institutions, his basic way of understanding the human relation to the world accords a constitutive significance to its social, cultural and historical dimensions. There is thus a political aspect to his thinking about every philosophical matter to which he turns his attention. This collection of essays is designed to identify, contextualize and critically evaluate the main phases of his intellectual development from that perspective.

Part I
Being and Time — Fundamental Themes

[1]
Where Does Being and Time Begin?

John Sallis

Ich kann mir kein seligeres Wissen denken, als dieses Eine: daB man ein Beginner werden muB.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, "Zur Melodie der Dinge"

From its very beginning a project of philosophical thinking must be directed toward the matter that is at issue for that thinking (die Sache des Denkens). It must be specifically directed so as to allow that thinking to set about its task of disclosing the matter at issue, so as to empower that thinking to entice the matter to show itself. Yet, in order for philosophical thinking to be capable of taking up such direction, that matter must already somehow be disclosed in such a way that thought, having the matter before it, can then direct itself accordingly. Indeed, even before any such self-directing, the matter must already have come into view in order even to become something at issue for thinking. But in that case, the beginning already takes the matter as granted—that is, negatively, it proves to be infested with presuppositions.

This renexivity—starkly formal though it be, ever so close to that elusive limit that divides genuine thought from sophistry—suffices to prevent the question of beginning from degenerating into a mere ascertaining of a point from which thought would set out. It necessitates holding the question of beginning within the sphere of philosophical thought itself, letting the beginning of philosophy be itself a problem for philosophy.

The issue of beginning, then, has to do not with a point but with a circle. How does beginning have to do with a circle? Heidegger writes: "What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way."¹ What is the right way into the circle? How does the philosophical project initiated in Being arid Time come into the circle? Where does Being and Time begin?

The Untitled First Page of Being and Time: The Greek Beginning

In the most literal sense Being and Time begins with a passage from Plato's Sophist. The passage is cited on the untitled first page of Being and Time, first in Greek and then in Heidegger's translation, and it is literally the first statement in the work, the beginning of the work. This beginning is not to be passed over as though it were some innocuous preliminary, as though it were only an announcement, prior to the work itself, that the work to follow is to deal with some of the celebrated problems handed down since the beginning of philosophy among the Greeks. The passage from the Sophist is not merely preliminary but, on the contrary, bears importantly on the way in which Being and Time begins; it already belongs even to that beginning. With the passage from the Sophist the beginning of Being and Time is already both under way and at issue. One should, first of all, wonder at the fact that the first words of Heidegger's work are not his own but rather words spoken in a Platonic dialogue.

Where does Being and Time begin? It begins in the middle of a Platonic dialogue. Its first words are those of the Stranger from Elea. What is the context in which those words are spoken in the dialogue? Speaking with Theaetetus, the Stranger pretends to be addressing a group of men identified as those who seek to understand "how many [πόσα] and of what nature [ποῖα] the beings [τὰ ὄντα] are."² It is this identification which launches that section of the dialogue in which the passage occurs with which Being and Time begins. Along with it there is a second characterization of these same men, which indicates quite concisely what is principally at issue in this section. The Stranger says of these men that they always seem to tell us a story [μῦθόν τινα . . . διηγεῖσθαι]—that is, they tell of such things as the warfare and love in which beings come to be from other beings and pass away into them—that is they determine "beings as beings by tracing them back in their origin to some other beings, as if Being had the character of a possible being" (SZ 6). It is to these men and it is in view of their peculiar way of telling about beings that the Stranger speaks in that passage which stands at the beginning of Being and Time:

For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression "being" [ὄν—Heidegger translates: seiend]. We, however, who once thought we understood it, have now become perplexed.³

Yet, what the Stranger proceeds to show in the course of addressing these men is that they are not at all able to say what they mean by "being"—that, as long as they cling to their characteristic "story-telling," they can at best accomplish no more than to be led into just that perplexity with which their condition was ironically contrasted. In turn, this result brings about the transition to the next section of the dialogue in which the Stranger pretends to engage in questioning Parmenides. In other words, the Stranger carries through the transition from the level of the mere determining of beings through other beings, i.e., of a determining which is oblivious to being as such and which cannot say what being means, to the Parmenidean level at which a genuine discussion of what being means is possible, whatever difficulties may be encountered. Thus, in its original context that statement which Heidegger sets at the beginning of Being and Time occurs within the transition from the level of those who are oblivious to being to the level of those who, like Parmenides and the Stranger himself, are alive to questioning about being. What this transition and the ensuing questioning of Parmenides eventually provoke is the γιγαντομαχία πεϱὶ τῆς οὐσίας.

Yet, Being and Time begins within the Sophist in order that, granting its distance from the ancients, it might then pose for itself, for thinking "today," that question which the Eleatic Stranger was engaged in posing to those of the ancients who told stories about beings. Heidegger asks: "Do we have today an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being'?" (SZ 1). Attending to the original context from which the question is drawn, one hears behind it the issue of that fundamental transition within which the question was raised by the Stranger. And attending, furthermore, to the perplexity into which such questioning proved to lead and to the strenuousness of the battle that had then to be waged over this issue, the γιγαντομχία πεϱὶ τῆς οὐσίας one is then prepared for the unqualified negative reply which Heidegger gives when the question is posed to us today. And so, since we "in no way" have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word "being" ("seiend"), it is fitting that, following the Stranger, we "pose anew the question of the meaning of Being" [die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein] (SZ 1). To what extent are we prepared to follow the Stranger into that transition which he enacts in the Sophist? What is required in order that we be able to pose this question anew? To what extent can the beginning of Being and Time correspond to that beginning which the Stranger enacts with respect to the question of the meaning of Being in the Sophist?

In the Sophist it is the Stranger himself who poses the question about the meaning of Being and who, having posed the question, is able to proceed into a genuine attempt to answer it. But in order to do so, it becomes necessary for him, in the pretended dialogue, to leave behind those who, telling stories about beings, remain unaware that they are unaware of what they mean when they use the expression "being." In his own perplexity regarding what Being means, the Stranger abandons those incapable of arriving at such perplexity and moves on to engage in a pretended dialogue with Parmenides. With respect to the attempt to raise the question anew, it is crucial to ask whether today we share, from the beginning, that perplexity by which the Stranger was driven on to genuine dialogue regarding the meaning of Being or whether, on the contrary, we belong on the side of those story-tellers who, remaining untouched by such perplexity, remain therefore closed off from pursuing the questioning about Being. Heidegger asks where we are today with regard to perplexity about Being. He asks whether we share, at the beginning, the perplexity which the Stranger had won; his answer is an emphatic "no":

But are we today even perplexed at not understanding the expression "Being"? In no way. And so it is fitting first of all to awaken again an understanding of the meaning of this question

(SZ 1).

We today belong on the side of those unperplexed ancients who told stories about beings—that is, we not only lack an answer to the question of what we mean when we use the expression "being" but also have still to come even to understand the question, have still to come into that state of perplexity out of which we could then genuinely unfold the sense of the question about Being. Where does Being and Time begin? It begins at that place where we of today already are in the beginning. Thus, the place of its beginning corresponds, not to that place which the Stranger has reached when he raises the question of the meaning of Being, but rather to the place occupied by those who are unperplexed about Being, who have no understanding for the question. But it is precisely the task of the beginning to bring us into that movement by which the Stranger leaves behind the unperplexed "story-tellers"—to set us on the way through perplexity into the unfolding of the sense of the question about the meaning of Being, into an engagement with the question.

Against the background of this projection of the place and task proper to the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger poses the aim (Absicht) of the work as a whole: "Our aim in the following treatise is to work out concretely the question of the meaning of Being" (SZ 1). The statement is provocative. What does it mean to work out a question? To what end is such a working-out (Ausarbeitung) directed? Is its concern with asking the question—perhaps in the sense of unfolding and developing it as a question? Or, does it seek to answer the question? Or, is this question— and, hence, any questioning genuinely engaged in it—perhaps so radical that the very distinction between asking and answering gets called into question? Furthermore, what does it mean to work out this question concretely? Is it not, rather, the most abstract of all questions?

Heidegger adds, finally, a statement of the preliminary goal (vorläu-figes Ziel) of Being and Time: "Our preliminary goal is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being" (SZ 1). The interpretation is to exhibit time as that horizon by reference to which Being becomes genuinely understandable. Yet, as Heidegger later indicates explicitly (section 6), time has, in fact, played an important role in the understanding of Being throughout the history of ontology, for example, in the demarcation of modes of Being. Even in the Sophist the γιγαντομαχὶα πεϱὶ τῆς οὐσίας is an engagement in a questioning of Being largely in regard to its relation to γένεσις and ϰίνησις and to that extent Being is secretely held to time as its horizon. What has come to pass secretly is to be worked out openly.

(A) Perplexity

The task of the beginning of Being and Time is to carry out that movement enacted by the Stranger: the movement into perplexity and then the movement from perplexity into an engagement with the question of Being. This task of beginning is accomplished in the first chapter of the Introduction. Here Heidegger determines the place of the work Being and Time—that is, he opens up the question for our perplexity, lets what is asked about in it become questionable, and places the question, lets it unfold into that place where it is to be worked out. The second chapter of the Introduction, taking the beginning for granted, then projects the stages of the work as a whole and, attendant to the placing of the question, lets the demand for method unfold toward that place. In accordance with my guiding question, I limit consideration to the first chapter.

Measured against the demands exhibited in the Sophist, we are today in need of perplexity regarding what we mean when we speak of Being. However, the form which this need assumes with us by no means coincides with the form in which it is exhibited by those ancient "story-tellers" of whom the Eleatic Stranger speaks. Because we are moderns, not ancients, the need takes a different form. What is the difference, and how does it bear on the way of moving into perplexity? What is required in order to begin where we today already are?

The relevant difference and the consequent requirement can be seen in the title of secton 1 and in the first sentence: "This question has today been forgotten"—and so there is, as the title says, "the necessity of an explicit repetition [ Wiederholung] of the question of Being." The form which our need takes is different, because for us the question has already been posed (by Plato and Aristotle); and however much the question may today be forgotten, our way into a posing of it is, nonetheless, a way back into something once accomplished. Our need of perplexity is a need to regain a stance once attained, or, rather, to reenact that movement into perplexity and that posing of the question of Being which were accomplished by Plato and Aristotle; and, as once accomplished, the posing of the question is attested in such ancient texts as Plato's Sophist, which thus offers a place where we may begin. Even though this question—the question that occupied Plato and Aristotle—subsequently subsided as a thematic question, even though it lost that element of questionableness in which it belonged for the Greek thinkers, even though subsequent thinkers failed to hold themselves in that provocative perplexity about Being, nevertheless what the Greeks had accomplished, what they had "wrested from the phenomena," remained. It remained even though in the end it was trivialized by being torn loose from the perplexity and questioning out of which it arose and by which it was sustained. To us there are handed down traces of the question: both the ancient texts and the question itself in that trivial, almost empty form into which it has devolved. Thus, alongside the beginning gr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I BEING AND TIME: FUNDAMENTAL THEMES
• PART II THE TURN: LOGIC, METAPHYSICS AND ART
• PART ART III PHILOSOPHY, POETRY AND THINKING
• PART IV INHERITING HEIDEGGER
• Name Index