Early Heidegger Research Articles

Living in the Moment

Abstract It was not only in his infamous speeches as NSDAP-approved Führer- Rektor of Freiburg University that Heidegger advocated what can be seen as an ‘activist’ understanding of human existence. To exist, according to this approach, means to be called upon to take charge of one’s life - actively, responsibly, authentically - whether mandated by Volk and Führer or not. Heideggerian resoluteness amounts to being active in a deep sense, a view articulated during the Rektoratszeit in the form of an outright equation of dasein and work. I will revisit Heidegger’s phenomenology of boredom in Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, and contrast it with passages from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Pessoa presents a radical counterpoint to Heidegger, utterly at odds with his intellectual and political persona. Insofar as the early Heidegger still represents the sinister forces ruling on the death star of western metaphysics, Pessoa carries the light that can set us on a path toward very different horizons for thinking being.

Bearers of Transience: Simmel and Heidegger on Death and Immortality

This article reconsiders the relationship between Simmel and Heidegger. Scholars commonly argue that Simmel’s work on the topic of death and mortality influenced the early Heidegger’s work on the same topic, as evidenced in Being and Time. I argue however that Simmel’s work particularly in the Lebensanschauung should be read as challenging the basic presuppositions of Heidegger on death. I then compare the two on the issue of immortality in order to show that Simmel is much closer to the subsequent critics of Heidegger than he is to Heidegger himself.

Beholdenness to Entities and the Concept of ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology, Ontology and Idealism in the early Heidegger

The fear that Heidegger's early philosophy cannot ultimately be distinguished from a problematic idealism has a number of sources in his work. For example, Christina Lafont maintains—I think rightly—that the fact that ‘[w]e always move about in an understanding of being’ (SZ 5)1 lies ‘at the basis of Heidegger's philosophy as a whole’ (Lafont 2000: xiii). But she sees this as trapping us within that understanding such that ‘[t]here is no way to step outside of [it] in order to check its validity, to test whether or not our understanding of being coincides with the being of the things themselves’ (Lafont 2000: xiv); and the only way to escape the scepticism to which such trapping would seem to lead is to embrace the idealistic notion that, in some sense, that understanding determines the being of such things.

Metaphysics and the Existential Problematic of Human Finitude

Rather than being of little practical importance, the metaphysical underpinnings of a given horizon determine the character of its existential problematic. With the breakdown of classical metaphysics concomitant with the modern turn to the subjective, the existential problematic of finitude as ultimate horizon arose. According to this subjective turn, the human person can no longer engage the world as though it were in itself constituted by transcendently grounded meaning and value. Standing within this genealogical lineage, Martin Heidegger undertook a phenomenological investigation into the existential constitution of the human person which defines authenticity in terms of finitude. For the early Heidegger, human life is essentially ‘guilty’. This guilt, however, is not the traditional cognizance of one’s sinfulness, but the foundational Nichtigkeit (‘nullity’) of life and its attendant possibilities in the light of the ultimate finality of death. Authenticity, then, consists of a resolute working out of one’s life in the face of such inevitable finality. For the later Heidegger, the finite horizon of a particular epochal disclosure gifts Being to thought and determines it thereby. Authenticity in this case consists of giving oneself over to be appropriated by an event of Being. In contrast, Lonergan understands authenticity as being true to that primordial love which beckons us to intellectual probity and responsibility in working out life’s possibilities. This essay will illustrate how Lonergan’s analysis of the intentional structure of human conscious operations stands as a corrective to Heidegger’s early existential analysis of human being-in-the-world and later thought about Being. While Lonergan defines authenticity as loving openness to transcendent Being, Heidegger, because of his forgetfulness of the subject in her conscious operations, does not allow for a transcendence which stands beyond any finite horizon.

Conceptualization of subject in Heidegger and Badiou: a search for common grounds

Heidegger and Badiou are not likely to be received as philosophical figures inheriting much in common. The only obvious ground which backs both thinkers is that of ontology as primary focus of their intellectual endeavors. However, this is divergence between their philosophies what makes an attempt to reveal some other conceptual foundations their doctrines have in common so important for a historian of the recent transformations in philosophy. The concept of subject looks as an indicator of differences between Heidegger and Badiou, since Heideggerian destruction of the metaphysics of subject is opposed by positive and affirmative indoctrination of subject developed by Badiou. Affirmative concept of the subject implies certain references to Heidegger's negative hermeneutics of the Modern subjectivity where it says about reactionary subject or dark subject. As we see Badiou skillfully attunes his conception to the profound destructivity of Heidegger's negation of subject. What these two thinkers share is certainly the need for a middle term between totality and unifying force of being and particularity and contingency of the individual human life, which would be efficient in denoting the very transition of the particular into the common. The early Heidegger of decisive Dasein can be regarded as a forerunner of the Maoist revolutionary subject of Badiou, with its prophecy of becoming a historical driving force and gathering the strength of the particular around a traumatic Event. For both Heidegger and Badiou the "movement" of truth (for Heidegger - a permanent projection of Dasein's Being in the mode of authenticity) proceeds trough a series of choices which cannot be governed by a law or "an algorithm." The indiscernible truth forces a subject to permanently find him/herself amid the "undecidable." The procedure of fidelity traverses the existent knowledge. One can scarcely know (due to a sort of epistemic technology) whether an event has taken place, one can rather bet upon its truth. For both philosophers the concept of truth is indissolubly connected with the problems of ethics (ontologically understood). Heidegger points to the "most primordial truth," which is the "truth of existence." Abiding in this truth, Dasein discloses itself to itself and discovers its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.

Rhetorical Trajectories from the Early Heidegger

ABSTRACTWith the publication in 2002 of Martin Heidegger's summer semester 1924 lectures, “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy,” a major new star appeared in the constellation that is twentieth-century rhetoric. Since then, a growing secondary literature has emerged. This article organizes that literature as a series of specifications closing in on Heidegger's critical conception of rhetoric as potentially a hermeneutic of the everydayness of being with others, and it claims that our understanding of this everydayness will remain flat or partial until we situate the concept in the sequence of Heidegger's thought in the 1920s. If we work through pre-1924, 1924, and post-1924 periods, it becomes clear that there are religious, modal, and sophistic contexts for Heidegger's evolving conceptualization of everydayness. The concept of everydayness that emerges is disheveled but rich. The article concludes by suggesting that only faint echoes of these potent rhetorical trajectories can be discerned in the late Heidegger.

At the Threshold of Ricoeur’s Concerns in La Métaphore Vive: A Spatial Discourse of Diametric and Concentric Structures of Relation Building on Lévi-Strauss

In La Métaphore Vive, spatial understandings pervade much of Ricoeur’s discussion of metaphor in terms of proximity and distance, tension, substitution, displacement, change of location, image, the ‘open’ structure of words, closure, transparency and opaqueness. Yet this is usually where space is discussed within metaphor, and as a metaphor itself, rather than as a precondition or prior system of relations to language interacting with language. Based on reinterpretation of an aspect of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology, diametric and concentric spaces are argued to be such a prior system of relations to language, actively framing metaphor. This article examines the relevance of this prelinguistic spatial discourse to Ricoeur’s framework of metaphor and interrogation of the copula, influenced centrally by Heidegger . Concentric spatial assumed connection and diametric spatial assumed separation offer a framework for understanding, in Ricoeur’s words, the “conflict between identity and difference” in metaphor and early Heidegger’s existential spatiality.

Daseinsanalyse and the question of being in the early Heidegger. Destruction of Husserl‘s concept of consciousness as the absolute being in the sense of the absolute givenness

The text deals with a certain phase of the Heideggerian way of thinking, which had precedes the emergence of ?Being and Time? (1927). Heidegger?s reception, criticism, and transformation of some of the central concepts of Husserlian phenomenology (intentionality, a priori, categorial intuition) is the focus of the reflections. This article shows how this radical transformation of Husserlian phenomenology goes beyond the formal coincidence of the phenomenological principle ?to the things themselves? and points to the essential connection of the question of being and its phenomenological demetalization.

Rouse’s Conception of Practice Theory and Existential Phenomenology

Joseph Rouse is one of the most distinctive and innovative proponents of practice theory today. This article focuses in section I on two extended elaborations with systematic intent from Rouse’s corpus over the last two decades regarding the nature of practices, highlighting in particular the concept of normativity. Toward this end, this article explains why Rouse argues that we need to bring about something like a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the intrinsic normativity of practices as an essentially interactive, temporal, contestable, and open-ended process. In section II, this article then examines some commonalities and apparent divergences of Rouse’s practice theory from the existential phenomenology of the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The article draws to a close by considering two apparent divergences between Rouse’s conception of practices and existential phenomenology: (1) the degree of compatibility between the claim of existential phenomenology to reveal necessary enabling background conditions of our lived experience and Rouse’s normative conception of practices; and (2) the compatibility of “quasi-transcendental” constitution, as this is at work according to existential phenomenology, and Rouse’s argument that it is wrong to understand practices as exclusively centered on the activities of human beings.

HEIDEGGERIO TECHNIKOS SAMPRATOS UŽUOMAZGOS ANKSTYVOSIOSE SENOVĖS GRAIKŲ INTERPRETACIJOSE

Straipsnyje parodoma ankstyvųjų Martino Heideggerio senovės graikų filosofijos interpretacijų svarba jo vėlesnei moderniosios technikos sampratai. Parodoma, pirma, kaip ankstyvųjų senovės graikų tekstų interpretacijose iškylanti pagamintos būties (Hergestelltsein) samprata su joje glūdinčiu pamatiniu graikų ontologijos orientyru į pastovią esamybę atsispindi vėlesniuose moderniosios techninės būties atverties apmąstymuose, tarpstančiuose po machinacijos (Machenschaft) ir vėliau – sąstato (Gestell) vardais. Antra, parodoma vieno iš pamatinių gaminančios Dasein veiklos (herstellende Verhalten) struktūrinių elementų – priežastingumo sampratos – svarba vėlgi vėlyvajai moderniosios technikos kaip būties atverties interpretacijai. Ir trečia, parodoma, kaip ankstyvoji aristotelinės tέχνη kaip tiesos (ἀλήθεια) ar buvimo tiesoje (ἀληθεύειν) būdo samprata atsispindi moderniosios technikos kaip būties atverties būdo sampratoje.

Heidegger’s Transcendental Empiricism

Heidegger’s ‘serious idealism’ aims at capturing the realist impulses of our natural consciousness whilst avoiding a collapse into metaphysical realism. This idealism is best conceived as a form of transcendental empiricism. But we need to distinguish two varieties of transcendental empiricism, corresponding to Heidegger’s early and later work. The latter, transcendental empiricism2, is superior. Here, Heidegger’s ontology of gift gives full, conceptual shape to the two-way dependency between man and world characteristic of transcendental empiricism as a whole. In exemplary forms of inspired experience, marked by the 'animation' of our conceptually-structured natural powers, things call on us in a speech that is their very own. This moves us decisively beyond not only early Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism1 but also the picture of experience presented in McDowell’s Mind and World.

Making sense of Heidegger: a paradigm shift

Frequently Cited German Texts and their English Translations / Foreword / 1. Introduction: Getting to the Topic / Part I: Aristotelian Beginnings / 2. Being in Aristotle / 3. Heidegger Beyond Aristotle / Part II: The Early Heidegger / 4. Phenomenology and the Formulation of the Question / 5. Ex-sistence as Openness / 6. Becoming Our Openness / Part III: The Later Heidegger / 7. Transition: From Being and Time to the Hidden Clearing / 8. Appropriation and the Turn / 9. The History of Being / 10. Conclusion: Critical Reflections / Appendices / Bibliographies / Index

A phenomenological reflection on Kurosawa's Ikiru in light of the early Heidegger's concept of “distance”.

This article focuses on one of Heidegger's early lecture courses, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, in order to explore his early development of fallenness. Within this lecture it is termed ruinance and at the heart of its development is what Heidegger refers to as distance. The first half of this article is dedicated to examining the concept of distance and to following Heidegger's movement of life towards ruinance through his understanding of distance. Heidegger understands distance as the relationship between life and its possibilities and it is the variances within this relationship that cause for a natural movement towards ruinance and also allow for a return from it. The second half of this article is a phenomenological reflection upon Kurosawa's film Ikiru in light of Heidegger's observation of this movement of life. Ikiru provides a concrete example of a life that has fallen completely and unwittingly into ruinance. Heidegger's understanding ...

Early Heidegger's Methodology and Its Challenges for the Future

Abstract: This paper analyzes the phenomenological method in Heidegger's early Freiburg lectures, which distinguishes three dimensions of sense for a phenomenon (content, relation, and actualization sense). Through a specific phenomenological reduction to the original Vollzugssinn (actualization sense) of a phenomenon within concrete factical life, Heidegger literally breathes new life into static phenomena within the non-temporal, theoretical approach. However, the enormous potential in analyzing phenomena within the horizon of temporality and historicity also sets some methodological limits that still represent a challenge for the future development of hermeneutic phenomenology, especially in its dialogue—which will be considered only briefly in this article—with two important areas: theology and science.

Properties of Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time

While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to.

‘The Fullness of Life’: Death, Finitude, and Life‐Philosophy In Edith Stein's Critique of the Early Heidegger

The Heythrop JournalVolume 55, Issue 4 p. 565-575 ARTICLE ‘The Fullness of Life’: Death, Finitude, and Life-Philosophy In Edith Stein's Critique of the Early Heidegger James Orr, James Orr St. John's College, CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author James Orr, James Orr St. John's College, CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 April 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12124Citations: 4Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume55, Issue4July 2014Pages 565-575 RelatedInformation

MACINTYRE’S AFTER VIRTUE: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL READING

This essay offers a phenomenological reading of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is intended to both illustrate the similarities between MacIntyre’s mode of argumentation in this work and the early Heidegger’s method of phenomenological destruction, and to highlight the potential fruitfulness of a deeper engagement between phenomenology and MacIntyre’s work. MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral philosophy, like Heidegger’s destruction, turned upon the groundlessness of abstract concepts separated from the experiential and social context in which they were originally at home. Drawing upon Heidegger’s phenomenology allows one to better understand MacIntyre’s critique as well as the role of his notion of a practice as a corrective to these tendencies.

How is Philosophy Supposed to Engage with Religion? Heidegger's Philosophical Atheism and Its Limits

AbstractThe paper addresses two related questions: 1. the much debated issue concerning philosophy's proper way of engaging with religion, and 2. the extent to which religious concerns belong to our existence. If philosophy is understood as the hermeneutics of existence, that is, as the self‐interpretation of existence, as the early Heidegger proposes, then the way the second question is answered bears on the approach to the first issue. While endorsing Heidegger's claim in the 1920s that philosophy should be autonomous and neutral in relation to religious concerns, I reject his view that this can be achieved through a silencing attitude characteristic of a “fundamentally atheistic” philosophy. I link Heidegger's failure to offer a convincing response to the first question to the way in which he addresses the second question as to whether religious concerns essentially belong to our existence. In contrast with his views on the second question, which often seem to propose a negative answer to it (but which, I claim, are not as not as clear as it is sometimes assumed), I argue that spiritual comportment is an essential aspect of our life. How can then philosophy ‘transcend’ it and be religiously neutral without becoming silent about it? I argue that philosophy can be religiously neutral and, at the same time, speak about spirituality as an open question within a shared space.

На шляху до автентичного буття: феноменологічна деструкція Аристотеля у раннього Гайдеґера

The article investigates specific features of phenomenological destruction of Aristotle by early Heidegger. Interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy is considered in the light of his devel-oping the project of fundamental ontology and first approaches to «Being and time». Heideg-ger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s thinking, on the one hand, has considerable hermeneutics potential, but, on the other hand, violently reinterprets the main motives and principles of Aris-totle’s philosophy. Heidegger in his interpretation of Aristotle’s texts proceeds from not quite clarified presuppositions and implicitly uses in his exegesis quasi-normativistic and quasi-personalistics conceptual schemes.

PROBLEM (HRIŠĆANSKOG) RELIGIOZNOG ISKUSTVA: HAJDEGEROVA FENOMENOLOGIJA RELIGIJE

U svojim ranim radovima Hajdeger će putem analize hrišćanskog religioznogiskustva tematizovati problem faktičkog životnog iskustva. Cilj ovog rada je da osvetli karakterovog Hajdegerovog interesa za hrišćanstvo, te da potvrdi značaj dijaloga sa hrišćanskimmisliocima za formiranje njegove fundamentalne ontologije. Hajdegerove analize hrišćanstvatumače se u svetlu doprinosa filozofiji religije kao jednoj fenomenologiji religije.