Reading Heidegger's Turn

Abstract

In chapter 2 I indicated how, for Heidegger, the question of being only opens up as a question if it brings Dasein before itself as a being within being. This is the same as saying that Dasein discovers itself as the place of the ontological difference. Already in a preliminary way I indicated that something which was named as die Umkippung, tipping-over, is at work in Heidegger's thought from as early as 1919. 1 1 have suggested that tipping-over is prescient of die Kehre, the turn. Robert Bernasconi argues that in Heidegger there are 'sayings of a turning (Kehre)'. Kehre here does not refer to an ostensible shift in Heidegger's own intellectual development, but to an event in the history of being... the Kehre is the turning from metaphysics to another beginning. 2 I examine in detail what he means by this in the next two chapters by unfolding the structure of the turn through the various ways in which it is brought to light. Before I do this, however, it is necessary to gain an understanding of how the 272turn has been understood by Heidegger's interpreters. It will become clear that what Heidegger means by the turn and how it is understood by his commentators is marked by a disjuncture, which is itself the mark of the failure of many of Heidegger's commentators to take seriously the radicality of the understanding of being he announces and the parallel failure to interpret how he brings that understanding to light. It is the methodological atheism that Heidegger develops that brings this understanding to light, an atheism which he finds connected with Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God. In this way talk of method gives way to an event he discovers to be taking place.