Heidegger

A Critical Introduction

Peter Trawny

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509521760, 9781509521753
• eBook ISBN: 9781509521791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century philosophy but his reputation was tainted by his associations with Nazism. The posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks, which reveal the shocking extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism, has only cast further doubt on his work. Now more than ever, a new introduction to Heidegger is needed to reassess his work and legacy.

This book by the world-leading Heidegger scholar Peter Trawny is the first introduction to take into account the new material made available by the explosive publication of the Black Notebooks. Seeking neither to condemn nor excuse Heidegger's views, Trawny directly confronts and elucidates the most problematic aspects of his thought. At the same time, he provides a comprehensive survey of Heidegger's development, from his early writings on phenomenology and his magnum opus, Being and Time, to his later writings on poetry and technology. Trawny captures the extraordinary significance and breadth of fifty years of philosophical production, all against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century.

This concise introduction will be required reading for the many students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory who study Heidegger, and it will be of great interest to general readers who want to know more about one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy.

1
The “Facticity of Life”

“There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king.”¹

Hannah Arendt

Phenomenology and hermeneutics

It is not easy to determine Martin Heidegger's philosophical beginning. At one point in a lecture course, he says: “Companions in my searching were the young Luther and the paragon Aristotle, whom Luther hated. Impulses were given by Kierkegaard, and Husserl opened my eyes.”² Each of these figures left behind traces in Heidegger's thinking. However, it would be shortsighted to let this quartet suffice. Thus we would have to mention Wilhelm Dilthey and Oswald Spengler, or Hegel and Nietzsche, or Dostoyevsky and medieval philosophy. Heinrich Rickert, the neo-Kantian and Heidegger's teacher, writes in his comments on his student's qualifying dissertation (Habilitationschrift) that he could “achieve great success” in the study of the “spirit” of medieval logic.³ In other words, Heidegger's philosophical starting point springs from many sources, and it would be a mistake to seek to derive his philosophizing from only one tradition.

In a journal entry from the 1940s, Heidegger mentions “in passing” the importance of his “Habilitationschrift on Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Signification.”⁴ The “Doctrine of Signification” and the “Doctrine of Categories” considered the “essence of language” and the “essence of being” respectively. “Right away” he had the “experience of the oblivion of being,” and Being and Time was “on its way.” This “journey” was “helped by Husserl's way of thinking.” However, we can sense the intention to tell a story in such a retrospection. The beginning appears only belatedly, as it were. And yet Heidegger names what are arguably the two most important sources of his thinking.

It is possible to characterize the beginning of Heidegger's thought by means of two philosophical methods. These are two methodological decisions which the philosopher was already making in his first lecture courses and which repeatedly stimulated his philosophy with ever new impetuses. Early on, at the beginning of the 1920s, he immersed himself in the two philosophical methods and schools of “phenomenology” and “hermeneutics.” “Schools” adequately names both of these ways of thinking only insofar as we learn in school how something can be thought. Thus we are not to understand phenomenology and hermeneutics as particular subject matters but, instead, as ways in which philosophical questions can be posed and answered.

Heidegger tells us that he worked on Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900) already as a student in his first semester in the winter of 1909–10. This work stands as the founding document of “phenomenology,” a philosophical method aiming to investigate thematically not the theories of “things” but, instead, the “things themselves,” the way and manner in which “things” are given to me, how they appear. In Greek, phainomenon means that which is appearing. “Phenomenology” is thus a way of thinking that concerns itself with what appears and its appearing.

Heidegger's first lecture courses already exhibit their own terminology and independence with respect to the thematic orientation of this method. The theme of these courses, the fundamental question of his thinking at that time, is “factical life.” “Life” here means a mostly unthematized relation of the human being to himself. It is a form of “self-sufficiency.” I live on my own and in relation to myself. The “facticity of life,” its factuality or givenness, consists in how existence and its motivations are fulfilled in the everyday. Life happens to us each time of its own accord, as it were. Heidegger expresses this by way of a turn of phrase: “Life is simply this way, thus it gives itself [so gibt es sich].”⁵ A philosophy of “factical life” deals with these “modes of givenness.” A phenomenon presents itself as a gift (Phänomengabe) that cannot be thought in advance.⁶ Phenomenology is a restrained way of thinking because it contemplates what “there is” (es gibt).

Thus, in a way that is not entirely unproblematic, Heidegger does not allow biological or corporeal aspects to imbue the fundamental phenomenon of his early thinking, his concept of “life.” Phenomenology is the “absolute original science of spirit in general.”⁷ It is therefore not the life of the body but rather the life of “spirit” that interests the theologically educated young philosopher. We can sense the influence of early readings of works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Wilhelm Dilthey.⁸ For example, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel had broken down the “life of spirit” into the metamorphoses proper to it.

Life is never present as an isolated object. It has each time its own place and its own time. “Our life is the world,” writes Heidegger, meaning that life unfolds itself in a variety of ways into inscrutable relations to fellow human beings and things.⁹ A phenomenology of life has to do with the “life-worlds” in which the human being is practically and theoretically caught up in his own manner.

The concept of “world” or “life-world” – already used by Husserl earlier on – corresponds especially to this concept of “life.” It provides possibilities of a differentiation necessary to the full development of the concept of “life.” Thus “world” is always “environing-world,” “with-world” and “self-world.”¹⁰ We live in “worlds” that merge concentrically and that may eventually form a unified “world.” I live with my friends, loved ones, and enemies, etc.; I live each time in a “personal rhythm.” On the basis of such a differentiated understanding of “world,” Heidegger carries out his phenomenological analysis. We shall see how, during the course of his thinking, Heidegger r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the English Edition
• Introduction
• 1: The “Facticity of Life”
• 2: The “Meaning of Being”
• 3: The “History of Being”
• 4: The “Essence of Technology”
• 5: Reverberations
• Biographical Facts in Historical Context
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement