What Does It All Come To? A Response to Reviews of The Young Heidegger

Abstract

Heidegger often said that Auseinandersetzung, debate, is essence of thinking, and accordingly fitting way to appropriate his own thinking.' This has certainly come true in case of longstanding debate over importance of Heidegger's youthful writings before his 1927 and Time, a debate which is perhaps analogous to debate about significance or Hegel's theological writings,2 or about relation of early Socratic Dialogues to Plato's middle and late Dialogues. According to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's youthful writings gained a legendary status already in early twenties.3 They were continually praised thereafter in publications of students such as Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Oskar Becker, Karl Lowith, and Leo Strauss.4 Student transcripts of Heidegger's early lecture courses have circulated for decades in a kind of philosophical underground spanning continents. But it is only in last decade that these courses and other writings have begun to be published5 and now translated into English.6 The debate over importance of these writings was at first restricted to private circles when repeated requests by Heidegger's students for publication of some of legendary early texts fell on deaf ears of master. It was not until 1973 that he finally published one of them, namely, his 1920 review of Karl Jaspers's Psychologie der Weltanschauungen.7 The debate became public appearance in late fifties of Heidegger's 1953-54 A Dialogue on Language. Here Heidegger discouraged his interlocutor's dogged interest in his 1920 lecture course, Phanomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks (Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung), expressing impatience continual hunt after muddy of student transcripts of his youthful courses, and preferring to direct conversation to themes of his later thought. Heidegger's unfavorable judgment of his youthful writings was summed up in statement that with such youthful leaps one easily becomes unjust.8 Thus he did not make plans for his early Freiburg lectures between 1919 and 1923 to be included in his Collected Edition, which began to be published in 1975.9 For him, these lecture course manuscripts were at most simply inferior anticipations of his 1927 and Time. However, Oskar Becker, who began attending Heidegger's courses in 1919, preferred to look at things in reverse, maintaining that Being and Time is no longer original Heidegger, but rather repeats his original breakthrough only in a scholastically hardened form.10 The debate entered a new phase in sixties when Otto Poggeler published his monumental study of Heidegger, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, which was based to a great extent on manuscripts of unpublished youthful lecture courses, and argued that Heidegger's critique of western metaphysics and his new historical manner of asking the question of being was originally initiated by influence of Christian sources and especially Martin Luther. The claim was dismissed among some Heidegger circles in Germany as a fabrication.11 It was Heidegger himself who had made unpublished lecture course manuscripts available to Poggeler, but, according to Poggeler, in conversations Heidegger only tolerated my treating his early courses like Hegel's youthful writings (thus even dreaming of a future discovery of finest thing he had worked out).12 The debate was carried forward into seventies and eighties a series of essays by American scholar Thomas Sheehan, who ignored Heidegger's dismissal of his youthful writings, and accordingly reported contents of many of these unpublished writings. But debate has recently reached a higher pitch long-awaited publication of these writings, in wake of which some have maintained Heidegger's old opinion of them,'3 while first two systematic studies of Heidegger's youthful period in any language, namely, my The Young Heidegger: Rumor of Hidden King (1994) and Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's and Time (1993), have recently argued adamantly against it,'4 as have John Caputo, David Krell, and a number of other scholars appearing in a recent anthology devoted to Heidegger's youthful period: Reading Heidegger From Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (1994). …