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The texts and notes collected in this volume offer unique insight into the development of Heidegger’s thinking on language and art from the late 1930s to the early 1950s – a tumultuous period both for Heidegger personally and for Germany as a whole. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, Heidegger was banned from teaching at Freiburg University, where he had been a professor since 1928, and his thinking underwent significant changes as he began to cultivate different modes of silence and non-saying in his philosophy of language. This volume illuminates these shifts and charts the evolution of key terms in Heidegger’s philosophy of language during this key period in the development of his thought.
The central theme of Heidegger’s reflections on language in this volume is his repeated engagement with the character of the word, silence and the unsaid, and his rejection of the instrumental conception of language, where he instead prioritized conversation as the “homeland of language.” Alongside references to Hölderlin and von Hofmannsthal and shrewd scrutiny of aural phenomena such as silent thought and speechlessness, speech is demonstrated to be intimately connected to the human essence. In a later section, Heidegger examines the place of art, in particular the plastic arts, and the role of the artist in conjunction with the new industrial landscape and architecture of his time, and in juxtaposition with ancient Greek attitudes to space and the polis.
This key work by Heidegger, now available in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger’s thought.
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Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Introduction
Part One: On the Essence of Language
The Saga
1. The Resolution
2. The Characteristics of the Decision
3. The Question of Being
4. The Question of Being (The First and the Other Inception)
5. The Two Leaps in the Attempt to Think Being
6. The Three Insights and Knowledge
7. Beyng, “Spirit,” Cognition
8. The Saga
9. The Beyng-Historical Inception
10. The History of Beyng
11. “The History of Philosophy” and the History of Being
12. Beyng-Historical “Thinking”
13. Steadfastness and Thinking
14. The “Concept” – Distancing – Naysaying
15. The No of Beyng-Historical Thinking
16. Naysaying and Questioning
17. The Word
18. Beyng and Word
19. Beyng as the Appropriating Event (The Human)
20. Beyng and Attunement
21. Beyng
22. The Nothing and Beyng
23. Beyng as Nothing
24. The Nothing
25. The Event of Appropriation
26. Event of Appropriation
27. Beyng
28. Beyng, God, the Human
29. Beyng
30. Beyng is and only Beyng Is
31. Abyssal Ground
32. Beyng
33. The More Inceptual Saga
34. The Untenability of the Differentiation between “Being” and “Becoming”
35. Truth and System
36. The Attunement of the Voice Determines
37. Where is a Measure?
38. Not What “is Coming”
39. What Are “We” To Do
40. Not a “New” Philosophy
41. Where Do We Stand? Directed Toward the History of Beyng
42. A Curious Delusion of this Age
43. Steadfastness and Duty
44. The Saga
45. The Crux of the Error
46. Time-Space (cf. Contributions, Grounding)
47. The Temporalization of Time
48. Time-Space
The Word. On the Essence of Language
The Quickening Element of the Word
The Birth of Language
The Beginning
The Unique Element
Addenda
Word – Sign – Conversation – Language
I. The Word and Language
II. The Sign (Its Essence Bound to the Event)
III. The Word. Conversation and Language
IV. The Word (CF. Poetizing and Thinking)
V. The Word and Language
VI. Word and “Language”
VII. The Essential Prevailing of the Word
VIII. Image and Sound – The Sensible
IX. Language
X. Language
On Eduard Mörike’s Poems “September Morning” and “At Midnight”
ADDENDA Image and Word
Part Two: On the Question of Art
On the Question of Art
Art and Space
The Work of Art and “Art History”
Reflection upon the Essence and Conduct of the Art-Historical “Science”
Editor’s Afterword
Glossaries
English–German
German–English
End User License Agreement
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Editor’s Afterword
Glossaries
End User License Agreement
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Martin Heidegger
Edited by Thomas Regehly
Translated by Adam Knowles
polity
Originally published in German as Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst © Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2010
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3600-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939683
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
The present volume contains notes, sketches, and sections of fully articulated treatises, which provide unique insight into the development of Heidegger’s thinking on language and art in the 1940s. The German-language reader of this text might be inclined to describe Heidegger’s writing in this volume with one particularly vivid adjective: wortkarg. Roughly translated, wortkarg means sparse with words, with karg meaning stingy, austere, and meager. A patch of soil that is karg is barren, desolate, and unyielding. Heidegger’s language in this text is marked by a distinct barrenness. It is a language hewn down to the bone, with all unnecessary adornments stripped away. If the language is evocative or is even pleasant to read, then it is evocative and pleasant in the same way that a barren landscape might be pleasant to look at. Gazing at a barren landscape, the viewer is taken as much by what is there as by what is not there. Heidegger’s spare prose is not a language that seeks to reach the flowery heights of the German language, but is instead the language of the roots. A writer of different inclinations might seek to use the German language to soar. With Heidegger, one trudges and plods open a rocky landscape, coursing through a barren terrain of sparse words. The task of the translator is to render that sparseness without filling it up with too many expository accoutrements – which creates a delicate balancing act when the task of the translator is also to render comprehensible philosophical prose.
Heidegger’s cultivation of a sparse language creates a number of distinct challenges for the translator of this phase of Heidegger’s writing. While many portions of the book consist of fully formulated manuscripts, other sections contain fragmentary formulations, sentences with a loose structure, and paths of thought which Heidegger intentionally leaves incomplete. Consequently, the fragmentary nature of the original text does not so much reveal a work that is incomplete, but instead one that is intentionally left open ended. I have attempted to replicate the open-ended nature of the work, but my first priority was always to produce a readable text in English. Hence, where necessary, I have furnished fragmentary sentences with finite verbs or missing parts and have broken up long sentences, which threatened to tax the limits of English syntax.
My decisions were guided by a fundamental distinction evident in the styles of writing Heidegger employs in the present volume. In the sections formatted as paragraphs and consisting primarily of complete sentences, I generally transformed the occasional fragmentary sentences Heidegger employs into complete sentences for the sake of rendering a comprehensible philosophical analysis. In the sections which consist of lists or series of fragments, I endeavored to maintain the sparse and barren nature of the prose as much as possible and left the fragmentary in its original state. This applies especially to §§ 149–163 in the notes on language. My goal in these sections was to keep the strangeness of the original intact. This allows the reader to experience the barrenness of Heidegger’s prose without sacrificing comprehensibility in the more fully fleshed-out sections of analysis.
For the sake of readable English, I was unable to maintain another peculiarity which runs throughout the text. Often, Heidegger creates sentences beginning with interrogatory words and formulated grammatically as questions, though they are not furnished with a question mark. These formulations intensify the sense of inquisitive openendedness, which characterizes the text as a whole. For the most part, I have furnished these sentences with a question mark and rendered them as fully formed questions. Additionally, in many sections the title of the section serves as the beginning of the first sentence of the section. Given that the English sentence structure does not lend itself to replicating the order of the German sentence, it was often not possible to put the phrase from the title as the first element in the English sentence. Consequently, I was forced to abandon this feature for the most part and to start each section with a new sentence by imbedding the title in the sentence.
Individual terminological decisions are detailed in the Glossary at the conclusion of the book. The Glossary indicates the basic translation for a term; where situational flexibility demanded a different formulation, I varied from the basic translation. A few remarks are in order about fundamental terms in this work. Although they have their justified detractors, I followed two terminological decisions now common in many translations of Heidegger: (1) I translate Anfang and its cognate terms as “inception.” (2) I translate Ereignis and its cognate terms with the basic translations of “event,” “event of appropriation,” and, in the verb form, “happening of the event.” There is often no general felicitous rendering of the permutations of these terms and, while a translator might be tempted to render them with an array of different terms according to each unique setting, it is also necessary to situate this translation within the now well-established terminology used to render Heidegger in English. Employing the basic translations mentioned above risks lending a certain rigidity to the text, but it has the advantage of situating the translation within the formidable traditions of translating Heidegger.
A few remarks regarding specific terminological decisions in this text are in order. First, and perhaps most importantly, given the centrality of the word “word” in Heidegger’s analysis of language, is Heidegger’s play with the two plural forms of “word [Wort].” German possesses two plural forms of “word [Wort]”: Wörter and Worte. Wörter indicates the totality of a language’s lexicon. Hence, a dictionary is called a Wörterbuch and not a Wortebuch. Worte generally refers to a specific collection of words and would be used to render phrases such as the “words of Hamlet” or “words of a sentence.” Heidegger draws a consistent distinction between the two plurals, which I have rendered by translating “Wörter” as “vocabulary” and “vocabulary words” and “Worte,” the generic plural, as “words.” This distinction is complicated by the further fact that the singular “Wort” also refers to a dictum or saying, applying to locutions such as “a word from Shakespeare,” which of course refers to a phrase or plurality of words and not a single word. Heidegger’s frequent use of the singular “word” ought to be read as resonating with this plurality. Throughout this text, Heidegger tends to associate “Wörter” (vocabulary) with the decline or downfall of language, linking it with a number of phenomena such as discourse (Rede), drivel (Faselei), the forgetting of being, the use of language as a tool, and logic. On the other hand, Heidegger associates Worte with terms such as saga (Sage), the mantra (der Spruch), saying (das Sagen), language (die Sprache), the authentic word (das eigentliche Wort), the inception (der Anfang), conversation (das Gespräch), the essential prevailing of the word (Wesung des Wortes), poetry (Dichten), and the event (Ereignis).
A somewhat awkward neologism was unavoidable, given that it is a precise rendering of the German original: isses [istet]. To create this term Heidegger plays with the third-person singular indicative form of the irregular verb “to be [Sein]”: “is [ist].” He treats the third-person singular form as if it were derived from a correlating infinitive of a regular verb (to is; isten) and then conjugates that hypothetical infinitive in third-person singular. The outcome is the conjugated verb istet used to refer to the being of the beyng of beings. Heidegger uses this term both intransitively and transitively, i.e. with and without a direct object, combining it at times with “beyng” and “refusal” as direct objects. In German, copula verbs such as “to be” are strictly intransitive, meaning that they take no direct object. The use of the transitive with a form derived from a copula verb lends the construction an air of intentional uncanniness.
I follow the now well-established convention of employing “beyng” to render Heidegger’s use of the antiquated spelling of “Sein” as “Seyn,” while rendering the singular “das Seiende” as “beings,” as opposed to the cumbersome yet more literal rendering of “that which is.” “Dasein” has been left untranslated, except in a few instances where Heidegger divides the component parts of the word into “there [Da]” and “being [sein].” Heidegger frequently uses hyphens to draw terminological distinctions in words such as “Da-sein,” always placing the hyphens in the natural breaks between parts of words (e.g. Aus-einander-setzung; Ver-ab-redung). Where the English word lends itself to hyphenation between the parts of the words, I have done so, as for example in the cognate forms of in-ception (An-fang). Where the chosen English term does not allow for a hyphenation in the natural joints of the word (e.g. Ver-ab-redung as “appointment”), I have indicated Heidegger’s use of the hyphen by putting the original German word in brackets.
The series of cognate terms related to the adjective heiter play a significant role in the text: heiter, die Heitere, das Heitere, das Heiternde, and heitern. Heiter as a modern adjective means merry, joyful, bright, amusing, and serene. For example, it is a common term employed in weather forecasts and promises a day of pleasant weather. I translate the adjective as “radiant.” The generic neuter collective form das Heitere (literally: what is heiter, that which is heiter) is related to that adjective and is translated as “radiance.” Das Heitere is not to be confused with the somewhat antiquated feminine noun die Heitere, which refers to a luminescence or brightness. I have thus translated die Heitere consistently as “resplendence.” Heidegger often uses the nominalized active participle form of verbs such as das Heiternde, derived from the infinitive form heitern (meaning: to make heiter), which is likewise somewhat antiquated. I translate the infinitive form as “to quicken,” rendering the active participle form “das Heiternde” as “the quickening” or “the quickening element.”
I would like to thank Richard Polt and Arun Iyer for their generous assistance with unraveling tricky passages. My gratitude as well goes to the many translators of Heidegger who have come before me and paved the way across the rocky paths. I have benefited immensely from their pathbreaking efforts.
Adam KnowlesZürich, SwitzerlandMarch 2022
That is what needs no effectiveness in order to be.And henceThere is a courageousnesswhich can even forego heroism.
Essential thinking is contained in these two sentences;saying out of nihilation.Nihilation as leaping in.
Whether one only reports from the domain of beings and plans in relation to beings.
Whether one, turned toward beings as a whole, implements such reports and plans with what “is” in all metaphysics – with “ideas” or with the “elemental,” both of which are then consequently called “values.”
Whether one is compelled to say beyng, even if only because he questions beyng and no longer appeals to any beings nor to beingness (to values).
To found something which is not calculated in terms of an effect and which can wait for a long time until its non-actuality itself illuminates as beyng itself, so that concealment as the event lets everything become something that is.
Beyng does not require beings, through which it might somehow “prove effective.”
“Effect” is not essential to it.
But why has metaphysics posited the essence of being (beingness) into actuality and simultaneously interpreted actuality as objectivity?
Because it is never capable of thinking concealment as the event of appropriation.
What are beings? Beings themselves are beings. Beings themselves are in being [ist seiend]; they are in beingness; beingness is being.
And what is being? What is it that beings are in this way? What is the what-being [Was-sein] of beings? This: that they are. What beings are is that they are [Daß-sein].
And to say that being (and not in the first place that beings are) is, “what” does that mean? (Presencing – visibility – ἰδέα – οὐσία; yet for Aristotle πρώτη οὐσία is τόδε τι.)
Questioning in this way, the question of being asks after beings at times in an unambiguous and clear manner, at times in a confused and vacillating manner, in that it asks what beings are.
Yet how is it decided or does it even become binding without further consideration, that being must be or even could be inquired into in terms of the what-question and what is yielded by that question?
From where does the question: What is … take its primacy? Is this the question of essential prevailing? Why τί ἐστιν?
Does the original inceptual thinking of Parmenides and Heraclitus and the saying of Anaximander inquire in the sense of τί ἐστιν τὸ ὄν?
They speak of ὄν and name τὰ ὄντα – but the what-question as such is not developed.
What is being asked after when the what is addressed?
Prior to the “what” and within the “what” as the manner of inquiry [Anfrage], that which comes to presence itself already stands in its (root-bearing) emergence standing back within itself – φύσις.
In the saying of the being of beings, φύσις already says itself, so that ἀλήθεια itself cannot be distinguished from it.
And this pro-clamation and pro-position emerging out of ἀλήθεια, which is φύσις itself, is the first saying [,]1 the gathering into presencing and hence the saying of the one, and thus the one is a preliminary name for beings as a whole – ἕν καὶ πᾶν – the one as unity and thus all in its allness.
The question of being is recognized in its ambiguity by distinguishing the question concerning the being of beings (or concerning beingness) from the question concerning the truth of being.
Even if this other form of questioning is admitted, it still appears as nothing more than a reflected supplement to the determination of the being of beings; a supplement which only asks how “we” are capable of understanding (of projecting) being? Thus all that remains is nothing more than some arbitrary form of the conditional or unconditional transcendental question.
What is the decisive twist here?
In the essence of truth and of the mode of relation to it: not νοεῖν and re-presentation of that which appears, rather Da-sein in the clearing; but Da-sein at the same time as the essential prevailing of beyng and being human is otherwise, due to thrownness into Da-sein.
None of this can be achieved through “views” and “doctrines,” for it can only be experienced as the history of being and in the first place in the plight of the abandonment of beings by beings.
But whether this plight compels?
Yet to what extent is the attempt to dispel the ambiguity through phrases such as “Being and Thinking” and “Being and Time” already misleading? For it insinuates that “being” is ultimately being thought in the same way here, albeit simply from a different perspective of projection. But in “Being and Thinking,” being is the beingness of beings, and is experienced from out of beings; in “Being and Time,” in contrast, being takes its definitive force from the truth of beyng.
“Time” is not only, as it initially seems, the prior condition of projection for thinking as the re-presentation and making present of that which is present as such; that is only the metaphysical-historical impetus for the transition into beyng-historical thinking, but not the essential apprehension of beyng itself.
The characterization of the distinctiveness of the question of being in terms of the differentiation between the guiding question and the fundamental question (1935ff.)2 always has a merely propaedeutic character, and in truth it drags beyng-historical thinking back into metaphysics. But this danger looms over all transitional thinking.
The first leap (“Being and Time” and everything else written before 1931) is within the domain of traditional metaphysics, with metaphysics understood as the question concerning the being of beings as such as a whole. Here the task is to inquire into the meaning (the realm of projection) of being by reaching beyond the question of the being of beings, and thus to establish the foundation of metaphysics in a repetition. The inquiry into the question of being thereby understood itself to be more originary; consequently, the mode of questioning was still that of metaphysics: inquiring into the grounds of the conditions of possibility of the truth of being. Admittedly, the relation to being is already what is decisive here, and with it being itself; yet this remains and remained obscured.
The second leap is the crucial insight that the questioning involved here is already not only more originary, but also completely different, arising from another inception, and that it must now be asked in its own manner – developed from beyng itself; no longer from beings and directed toward them. Now, indeed, everything relating to the first leap remains essential; yet it is all transformed. The overcoming of metaphysics is revealed. The saying itself is distinct and is now above all merely preparatory – it is no longer philosophy (metaphysics).
Even when one knows and believes that he knows where his thinking is heading, he does not know it after all; the one single task that is to be thought is at once so concealed and yet so near: beyng.
The insight awakens:
Being essences in the clearing of time.
For this something quite unique, though hitherto concealed, must also essence: Da-sein.
The truth of being, for which “time” is a first name, gives metaphysics not only a more originary ground.
Knowledge is bestowed:
Beyng brings forth the essence of [
erwest
] truth.
Truth attunes the “essence” through the voice of beyng.
Beyng is what essentially prevails and yet is not what is highest – indeed it is utterly beyond measure.
Truth is in beyng and as beyng in the sense of the clearing and is thus the possible essential prevailing of Da-sein, which becomes a necessity if beyng demands the grounding of its truth.
Cognition arises neither from spirit nor from the “subject,” nor does “consciousness” arise from “nature.”
Truth and hence the possibility of cognition are appropriated solely within beyng.
It is only for metaphysics that all of this looks different, so that even the explanation of cognition is relegated to “psychology.”
Beyng, however, is nothing spiritual, nothing material, is neither “real” nor “ideal,” neither conditioned nor unconditioned.
The saga is the history of beyng bound to the word in the word of thinking. The saga names beyng, decided inceptually out of its essence, but, in contrast to metaphysics, it does not reach beyng subsequently and derivatively on the basis of some being that has already been posited, and then in turn, offer it up to beings once again as the explanatory condition of beings.
On its face, the saga encompasses “thinking” in such a way that thinking first determines itself as the steadfast naming of beyng and everywhere accomplishes this and only this, namely to remain an occasion for the essential transformation of the relation of the human to beyng, a transformation which is nonetheless the appropriative event and is never something accomplished by humans.
The saga of the history of beyng even belongs in this history because the saga bespeaks the word of being.
Saga here is not some kind of subsequent report and is not narration.
But the saga is also not the poetic word, but rather the history of beyng and specifically the pre-history of its other inception where that which is inceptual is first revealed as such.
The overcoming of metaphysics belongs at the same time to the “history of beyng”: the undoing of the beingness of beings and thereby of the power of beings through beyng out of its self-withholding.
The overcoming of metaphysics
The history of beyng
The saga
We are still without the inner law of the mantra for the saga of the history of beyng. But the mantras have as their only master [Meisterin]3 the necessity to say the selfsame evermore inceptually each time, until at last, without even remotely trying to calculate this through comparisons, one word finally hits the mark, a word in which the voice of beyng becomes attunement.
What is necessary is to remain untouched by the past, i.e. by the truth of beings as metaphysics, which, in its overcoming, lets the corrupted essence play out all the more, and simultaneously it leads astray into historicism (searching for influences and things to borrow from the past).
Such untouchability is the pure guarantee of the unassailability, which, to be sure, is not enough to vouchsafe the truth of beyng, but rather the stillness of the paths into abyssal ground of being, which are never to be counted.
Admittedly, untouchability by that which is past binds us into what has been and enables the experience of harkening to what, in the history of metaphysics, belongs to the intrinsic character and inception of the history of beyng.
Who decides about the essence of beyng?
Who determines the truth of this decision?
Who says what is essential and what the essence supposedly “is [sei]?”
Who names the essence of truth?
Why must a decision transpire here?
Is there something undecided here?
And how is such a thing able to be at all?
Within what realm are we questioning when we question in this way?
Is there such a realm, then, and how does it persist?
Where do we belong as those who question in this way?
No longer does a bridge span from there to beings,
no recourse to beings can help here.
Or has everything failed us here?
Or is failure the most concealed word?
Are we attuned by the voice of this word?
And yet we stand upon the bridge to beings.
And yet we are the bridge itself between beings and beyng.
Uninitiated, the more inceptual inception awaits; it first returns to itself in a grounded way in that truth – which belongs to beyng – is itself appropriated by beyng so that beyng, which is only now the event of appropriation in its fullness, is inceptual.
But, as a result, it is already decided – within what belongs more thoroughly to the essential past [Ge-weseneren] and within what belongs even more thoroughly to a more inceptual inception [Anfänglicheren] – that all beings must conjoin themselves differently out of their ground, but also what is undecided for it prepares itself over a long duration out of the more inceptual inception, indecipherable and always intermingled with the established end of the forgotten first inception.
It is hard to know this undecided element of beings within beyng as it is already essentially prevailing, since this belongs to it: an abundant self-sufficiency [Unbedürftigkeit] in contrast to the machination which continues to dominate everything around it.
The inception usually appears to us as what precedes and approaches the end; we take the inception for the commencement of something.
But the inception essences prior to this and essences authentically by returning back into itself, grounding itself abyssally [ab-gründet] and spurning [ab-weist] any recourse to beings, but also any recourse to being as something already decided, out of a renunciation which alone emerges from the in-clination into the appropriative event of the clearing. The inception knows no haste, its “patience” also does not arise from a calculation, it is not a form of a-waiting things as the unfettered unrest of the rest-less, rather it is the quiet of restfulness itself, which bears all the bearing-out [Aus-trag] of possible beings.
And yet the inception cannot be thought within the concept of the unconditioned; for it is what is most conditioned of all, for it is dependent upon and affixed only within thinking according to conditions, with what makes things possible, with processes of pro-duction.