Heidegger's Postwar Turn

Abstract

THE EMERGENCE OF THE HERMENEUTIC VIEWPOINT OF HIS PHILOSOPHY AND THE IDEA OF DESTRUKTION ON THE WAY TO BEING AND TIME For a long time it had been customary within scholarship to speak about a Heidegger and a Heidegger II, divided by the famous turn [Kehre]la distinction which found ample justification in writings and moreover was to some extent approved of even by himself. I With the on-going publication of Complete Works, including the great manuscript from the thirties with the title Contributions to Philosophy, and the texts of some of the highly important early Freiburg lecture courses (GA 56/57, GA 58, GA 61, GA 63),2 as well as of related manuscripts, published outside of the Gesamtausgabe, such as the essay (PIA) and the lecture on the concept of time (BZ), we have been put in a better position to understand philosophical path, leading up to Being and Time, and even after. As a result, in contradistinction to the tendency of the former scholarship to speak about two Heideggers, it has become more and more customary and even fashionable (though not at all unjustified) to speak about more periods or more turns on path of thinking. Thereby the concept of the turn has been taking on ever more complex and differentiated meanings, undergoing, as it were, a certain proliferation.3 In the following essay, however, I do not wish to contribute to the discussion of problems of this sort-problems pertaining to what might be called the periodization of life work. Heidegger's Postwar Turn (the title of my essay) is taken to mean just one turn among several possible others-it designates the turn that took place in thinking right after World War One. This turn is at the same time, as I hope to show, a decisive one; in a sense, it may be claimed to be the fundamental turn, preceding as well as underlying, that is, making possible-all subsequent turns or reversals which scholarship has hitherto come to detect, or is yet to detect, on path of thinking. turn following World War One is taken to mean the turn through which Heidegger, a talented student of Husserl, Rickert, Kulpe, or others, became himself, i.e., the thinker we know and appreciate today, using a distinct language and conceptuality, one all his own. Indeed, to speak about anticipations of postwar hermeneutic perspective--such as, for example, the presence of several proto-hermeneutic elements in his student and academic writings 4-or about various other anticipations of several of his later positions, significant as they may be, is not to speak about the adoption of an autonomous philosophical stance-and it is still less to speak about, say, carrying out the hermeneutic transformation of Husserl's phenomenology. Although the young seems to have been fairly familiar with Neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy as well as with Husserl's phenomenology, and to have adhered to their basic antipsychologism without reservations, it is unclear how far he worked himself through these trends in their complexity by the end of the war. We know from a 1917 letter of Husserl's to Natorp (October 8) that first in-depth confrontation with phenomenology (seeking to come to grips with [it] from within) took place near the end of the war.5 Still, in spite of the numerous and indeed remarkable early writings between 1912 and the end of the war, the young can in no way be said to have had a philosophical outlook of his own. Had he not published a work with the title Being and Time in 1927, the student and academic writings would presumably have no importance today. In other words, the importance they have is hardly on their own: they are, to be sure, the work of a talented young student who knows his way fairly well in the leading trends of contemporary philosophy, seems to have a solid knowledge and well argued preferences, and is able to apply them in an autonomous way; but in no way do these writings display a tendency toward originality. …