eBookDigital Original (Digital Original)
Related collections and offers
Overview
In Martin Heidegger, George Steiner delves into the life and work of the prolific German philosopher. His deft analysis lays bare the intricacies of Heidegger’s work and his influence on modern society, offering a clear and accessible analysis of the philosopher’s more difficult ideas, from the human condition and language to being and the meaning of time. Written with Steiner’s trademark eloquence and precision, Martin Heidegger is the seminal look at the man and his groundbreaking ideas—the perfect study for scholars, Heidegger fanatics, and curious readers alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480411838 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 792,316 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Martin Heidegger
By George Steiner
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1989 George SteinerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1183-8
CHAPTER 1
Some Basic Terms
"Was ist das—die Philosophice?" asked Heidegger at a colloquium held in France in August 1955. The interrogative start is, of course, traditional in philosophic exposition and points back to the Socratic dialectic. But Heidegger's title does not read "What Is Philosophy?" as in the translation. Its actual phrasing is deliberately helpless and halting. It suggests a two-part question. The stress lies as heavy on ist and on das as it does on Philosophie. Before naming the object of inquiry ("philosophy"), Heidegger makes salient and problematic the processes of predication and objectivization. He intimates (and this intimation is at once the source and core of his entire thought) that ist, the postulate of existence, is previous to and crucial within any meaningful question; and he suggests that das, the quid est—the "quiddity" as the schoolmen would say—the "whatness" to which this or indeed any serious question addresses itself is a profoundly complex postulate. Such a postulate of integral presence may be unavoidable, but it is not to be invoked unexamined. Furthermore, by setting off die Philosophie, by compelling a hiatus and pause between the most general form of ontological query (namely, "What is this or that or anything?") and the object actually in view, Heidegger achieves a subtle twofold effect. He makes the notion "philosophy," of which we might have claimed an everyday, confident control, somewhat strange and distant; and he makes it dependent on, ancillary to, the greater, more pressing question and notion of "isness" and "whatness." Thus a fuller translation of his title could read: "What is it to ask—what this thing, philosophy, is?"
It is our task, begins Heidegger, to set discussion on its way, to bring it "onto a path." The indefinite article is intended to underline the postulate that this path is only one among many, and that there is no a priori guarantee that it will conduct us to our goal. It is Heidegger's constant strategy to show that the process of undertaking, the motion on the way, not only precedes the attainment of whatever goal we have set ourselves yet, as we shall see, in some sense equals this goal in dignity and meaning. But although the path chosen will be one of many, it must lie inside the forest. It must give us the assurance "that we are moving within philosophy and not outside of it and around it." This qualification is consequential: it implies the famous dilemma of the "hermeneutic circle": we attempt to define a thing by the use of attributes that already presume a definition. It implies that there are other paths which lead out of the forest and thus mislead (e.g., the history of philosophy, the analysis of philosophic arguments as being the ideological manifest of socioeconomic forces, the view of philosophy as an allegoric preface to the exact sciences, and so on). A path, says Heidegger, not any path.
The customary paths are those which begin with a definition, even if and especially where this definition is subsequently to be dismissed or radically refined (as in the Socratic method). Heidegger offers: philosophy not only is something rational but "is the actual guardian of reason." For "reason" he does not use Vernunft, but ratio, the Latin term with its Aristotelian overtones. "Guardian" is Verwalterin, a word that includes resonances, crucial for Heidegger, of "trusteeship," the active "custodianship" of inherited substance. Even cursory reflection, however, shows that this path will lead nowhere. By introducing the concept of "reason" or "rationality," we have merely substituted one unknown for another. The Heideggerian Weg, the woodsman's trail, is quite different. "And only because it is the nearest at hand is it difficult to find." (Heidegger treasures, and reverts insatiably to, this paradox of proximity, this finding, which is both Socratic and phenomenological, that the highest densities of meaning lie in the immediate, in the most obviously "at hand.") We are asking: "What is this whatness—which we name philosophy?" We are asking a word to disclose itself. How can there be disclosure if we do not listen closely, if we seek to press up on the object of our inquiry some previous or ready-made analytic formula? If we hear "the word 'philosophy' coming to us from its source, it sounds thus: philosophia. Now the word 'philosophy' is speaking Greek. The word, as a Greek word, is a path."
Here we have before us the most characteristic and disputed move in Heidegger's method: the argument from and through etymology. The manifold uses of this argument, and Heidegger's justification of it, will preoccupy us throughout this book. What needs emphasis at this preliminary point is the full generative and evidential aim of Heidegger's maneuver. "Das Wort 'Philosophie' spricht jetzt griechisch." This means, literally, that the word itself, if we hear it rightly, speaks Greek. It is not we who are using a word that happens to be derived from the classical Greek lexicon. The power and agency of statement lie inside the word philosophia (which Heidegger does not transcribe, but sets on the page in its Greek characters). It is language that speaks, not, or not primordially, man. This, again, is a cardinal Heideggerian postulate, to which I must return. And what does the word tell us? "The word philosophia tells us that philosophy is something that, first of all, determines the existence of the Greek world. Not only that—philosophia also determines the innermost basic feature of our Western-European history." ("Innermost basic feature" is an honest attempt at rendering Grundzug. In German, and most notably in Heideggerian German, Grund portends intensely concrete but also numinous strains of rootedness, of earthly ancientness and provenance.) Philosophia is, therefore, the foundation and shaping impetus of Western history. And because it is Greek in its nature and in the articulation that alone can give it authentic meaning and continued existence, philosophy demands of those who would apprehend it, of those whose "path of asking" is truly inward and disinterested, that they rethink the full range of its implications as these were experienced and voiced by the Greeks. (I am, at this stage, leaving to one side the obvious challenge as to whether any such rethinking is possible, as to whether meditation on etymology, however probing, can go upstream in time and discover primal sources. What we want to do initially is to see how Heidegger conducts his argument.)
It is not only "philosophy" that is Greek: it is "also how we question, the manner in which, even today, we ask the question." For to ask What is that? is to ask ti estin? an interrogation whose terms are the seed and dynamic articulation of Greek (therefore of all subsequent Western) thought. The meanings assigned to "what" will vary as between Plato and Aristotle or as between Kant and Hegel. The Platonic Idea is not the Aristotelian "substance" or the Kantian "thing in itself." But the underlying question and the verbal form of the question—the two being for Heidegger wholly fused—are Greek. In asking about isness and whatness, in referring this asking to "philosophy," "we are peculiarly summoned back" to the Greek wellspring. We are "reclaimed for and by it as soon as we not only utter the words of the question 'What is philosophy?' but reflect upon its meaning." In German, "origin," "source" can be Herkunft—literally the place from which we came, the "provenance of our coming." Heidegger's zurückgerufen and reklamiert carry an almost physical edge. There is a "re-vocation," a "summoning back to" the place of our inception and instauration. It is that of Greek speech and thought or, more exactly, "speech-thought." Nor is it any question that we are asking, that we are being "revoked by": "it is the question of our Western-European actuality and being," our Dasein, which, as we shall see, is Heidegger's primary term. If, therefore,
we enter into the total and original meaning of the question "What is philosophy?" then our question has, through its historical origin, found a direction into the historical future. We have found a path. The question itself is a path. It leads from the actual being of the Greek world [von dem Dasein des Griechentums] downto us, if not, indeed, beyond us. We are—if we persist in this question—traveling on a clearly indicated path.
Where does it lead?
At first, it would appear, to mere circularity. Questions, and this too is a Heideggerian postulate, are only worth asking of that which is worth questioning, of that "which is questionable in a sense implying not the guarantee of an answer, but at least that of an informing response." But in order to know whether philosophy "has become worthy of question," we must know beforehand, to a greater or lesser degree, what philosophy is (a familiar Socratic ambush). Heidegger does not fear this hermeneutic circularity. If we treat it stringently, it can become an inward-guiding spiral. Once more, the key is language:
If we listen now and later to the words of the Greek language, then we move into a distinct and distinguished domain. Slowly it will dawn upon our thinking that the Greek language is no mere language like the European languages known to us. The Greek language, and it alone, is logos. ... In the Greek language what is said is at the same time, and in an eminent way, that which it is called (designated as). If we hear a Greek word with a Greek ear, we follow its legein (its speaking), its direct, immediate presentation of what it says. What it presents is that which lies immediately before us. Through the audible Greek word we are directly in the presence of the thing itself, not first in the presence of a mere word-sign.
In what way this assertion does no more than reproduce the allegories of Adamic speech and of Hebrew as we find them in Cabalistic and Pietist doctrines, and what conceivable means there could be of verifying Heidegger's claims, are legitimate and, indeed, urgent questions. What we want to know now, however, is just where this "etymologizing realism" is taking us.
The answer is: to yet further etymologies, which Heidegger's critics hold to be wildly arbitrary. (Even if this is what they should ultimately prove to be, it is worth stressing that they emerge from the cumulative impetus of Heidegger's previous writings, that the Heideggerian lexicon is, with certain exceptions, internally consistent.) The word philosophos "was presumably coined by Heraclitus," for whom there was as yet no such thing as "philosophy." It signified "one who loves thesophon." But in this context, specifies Heidegger, philein, "to love," has that particular Heraclitean sense which we find also in homologein: "so sprechen wie der Lógos spricht, d.h. dem Lógos entsprechen." We must try to translate this "translation": "to speak as the Logos speaks, which is itself the living core, the 'is' of speech; to correspond to the Logos by responding to it, by being its echo and true counterstatement" (all of these figures of reciprocity being active in the prefix en- inentsprechen). "That one being reciprocally unites itself with another, that both are originally united with each other because they are at each other's disposal [zueinander verfügt sind]—this harmonia is the distinctive feature of philein, of 'loving' in the Heraclitean sense." And what of sophon? According to Heraclitus's own conception, says Heidegger, sophon aims at, makes manifest, the insight that "One is all" (Panta ta onto). This insight is founded on and makes sovereignly explicit the fact that "all being is in Being. To put it more pointedly, being is Being." The translation here is straightforward, but the proposition is so central that it should be set out in its original: "Alles Seiende ist im Sein; das Sein ist das Seiende."
Even someone acquainted with Heidegger only summarily or via a notice in a general encyclopedia will know that these two affirmations, which are in fact identical and indivisible, constitute the essence of Heidegger's teaching. Das Seiende, being, and das Sein, Being, are the exclusive, unwavering object of Martin Heidegger's lifelong meditation and discourse. What it is that they "mean" (leaving aside, for now, the crucial question as to whether "meaning" is the category most suitable to their spirit and function); why it is that we use a lower case for our translation of das Seiende and capitalize the one for das Sein, thus contrasting "being," the extant, with "Being," the "isness" of existence; can any other concept or set of terms stand in their place? These are the questions, this is the one question, to which every reader of Heidegger must address himself. I hope to do so step by step. All we know now is that the inquiry Was ist das—die Philosophie? and Heidegger's insistence that the problem inheres in our understanding of certain Greek words and turns of thought have brought us to the absolute heart of the Heideggerian world.
Even before the path has properly begun to reveal itself to us, we have been thrust to the center. We stand at the Lichtung, or clearing, in the innermost part of the forest. Has this happened because we are looking at a summarizing lecture from Heidegger's later period? This might account for the peremptory directness of argument and definition, but not for the substance of the argument itself. "Being" and "being" are the pivot, the core of "lit darkness" to which every path leads, whatever its starting point on the wide circumference of Heidegger's work.
Heidegger goes on: "All being is in Being. To hear such a thing sounds trivial to our ear, if not, indeed, offensive, for no one needs to bother about the fact that being belongs to Being. All the world knows that being is that which is. What else remains for being but to be? And yet, just this fact that being is gathered together in Being, that in the appearance of Being being appears, astonished the Greeks and first astonished them and them alone." These sentences crystallize Heidegger's doctrine of existence and his methodological stance, which is one of radical astonishment. The fact of existence, of being in Being, astonishes Heidegger immeasurably. These sentences also lead toward what it is that philosophy does: "Philosophy seeks what being is insofar as it is. Philosophy is en route to the Being of beings, that is, to being with respect to Being."
Let me attempt a crude, preliminary restatement or circumspection. It is the unique and specific business of philosophy, therein and at all times referential to its Greek inception, to be incessantly astonished at and focused on the fact that all things are; that there is a universal and totally determinant attribute to things, which is that of existence. This astonishment and the meditation it entails—what Heidegger will call "the thinking of Being," "the endeavor to think Being"—sets philosophy on the way toward the question of what it is that is, of what it is that indwells in all extant things, of what it is that constitutes beingness (as opposed, in the first and obvious alternative, to "non-being" or to such existential particulars as "redness," "largeness," "function," and so on).
Socrates and Plato were the first to take "the steps into philosophy." This is to say, they were the first to pose the question of existence in an analytic-rational guise. Theirs is a great achievement, says Heidegger, but (and here he is following a Nietzschean paradox) also a symptom of decline. Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, who came before, did not need to be "philosophers." They were "thinkers" (Denker), men caught in the radical astonishment (Thaumazein) of being. They belonged to a primal, therefore "more authentic" dimension or experience of thinking, in which beingness was immediately present to language, to the logos. Just what it signifies to experience and to speak being in this primary and "thoughtful" way is something that Heidegger labors to explain, to illustrate, and, above all, to "act out" in his late writings.
For Plato the Being of beings resides in eternal, immutable matrices of perfect form, or "Ideas," for Aristotle in what he calls the energeia, the unfolding actuality that realizes itself in substance. The Platonic notion engenders the whole of Western metaphysics down to the time of Nietzsche. The Aristotelian concept, with its concomitant investigation into "first causes" and "dynamic principles," lays the foundations of our science and technology.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Martin Heidegger by George Steiner. Copyright © 1989 George Steiner. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- Introduction—Heidegger: In 1991
- In Place of a Foreword
- i / Some Basic Terms
- ii / Being and Time
- iii / The Presence of Heidegger
- Biographical Note
- Short Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
- Copyright Page