Category Archives: Heidegger

What we know now as the technology of film and television, of transportation and especially air transportation, of news reporting, and as medical technology, is presumably only a crude start. No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other—these forces have long since moved beyond his will and outgrown his capacity for decision.

— Hedeigger, ‘Gelassenheit’, 1959

It is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.

— Heidegger

Heidegger:

We do not understand philosophy as

1.       a cultural phenomenon, a realm of man’s creativity and the works that issue from it

2.       a kind of unfolding of individual personalities as spiritual creators

3.       a region of learning and teaching within a system of scientific values; a science

4.       a worldview, completion, rounding off, and model of thought; also not as

5.       philosophy of existence;

but as a questioning which in a fundamental way changes Dasein, human beings, and the understanding of being.

Who then is this man of the cave allegory? Not man in general and as such, but that particular being which comports itself to beings as the unhidden, and thereby becomes unhidden to itself. But the unhiddenness of beings, in which this being stands and holds itself, happens in the projective perceiving of being, or in Platonic terms, in the ideas. This projective perceiving occurs as liberation of its essence to itself. Man is that being which understands being and exists on the basis of this understanding, i.e. among other things, comports itself to beings as the unhidden. ‘Exist’ [Existieren] and ‘being-there’ [Dasein] are not used here in a vague faded sense, to mean happening [Vorkommen] and being present, but in a quite definite and adequately grounded sense; ex-sistere, ex-sistens: to stand out into the unhiddenness of beings, to be given over [ausgesetzt] to beings in their totality, thus to the confrontation between itself and beings, not closed in upon itself like plants, nor restricted like animals in their environment, nor simply occurring like a stone. […] Only by entering into the dangerous region of philosophy is it possible for man to realize his nature as transcending himself into the unhiddenness of beings. Man apart from philosophy is something else.

Understanding the cave allegory means grasping the history of human essence, which means grasping oneself in one’s ownmost history. This demands, when we begin to philosophize at any rate, putting out of action diverse concepts and non-concepts of man, irrespective of their obviousness or currency. At the same time it means understanding what the clarification of the essence of ἀλήθεια implies for knowledge of human essence.

The proposition that man is the being who exists in the perceiving of being has its own truth, which is quite distinctive and different from such truths as 2 + 1 = 3, that the weather is good, or that the essence of a table consists in its being an object of use. The truth of the statement about the essence of man can never be scientifically proven. It cannot be established by reference to facts, nor can it be derived from principles in a formal-logical manner. This is not a deficiency, especially when one realizes that what is essential always remains unprovable, or more precisely, lies outside the sphere of provability and unprovability. What is provable (in the sense of formal-logical reckoning, detached from the fundamental decision and stance of human existence) is already dubious in respect of essentiality. Nor is the proposition about man’s essence a matter of ‘belief’, i.e. something to be accepted simply on authority. If one took it thus, one would not understand it at all. The truth of this statement (precisely because it says something philosophical) can only be philosophically (as I say) enkindled and appropriated, that is, only when the questioning that understands being in the questionability of beings in the whole takes its standpoint from a fundamental decision, from a fundamental stance towards being and towards its limit in nothingness.

• Heidegger, The Essence of Truth (tr. Sadler)

Last autumn I went to Todtnauberg in the Black Forest with a friend to see Heidegger’s hut. What to say about it? It seems an obvious thing to write about: one those trips you think about writing about while you’re doing it. Maybe that’s why I haven’t: it puts me off. So what to say about it, now that it’s popped into my head again?

It was an ordeal to get there in a rental car from Basel Airport. We drove across the border and around a roundabout three times before we got onto the right motorway. Then on to the mountains as it got dark. By the time we got to the hotel I’d booked – which, it turned out, was half an hour’s drive from where we were supposed to be – they’d stopped serving food and we’d fallen out. The receptionist was a little scared by our argument. We ate fruit and nuts and slept in the same room.

The next day we made it. There’s no information about Heidegger in the village, not even in the tourist office: a big building with old pictures of the region. This is a tourist destination now, a skiing resort in winter. No wonder they don’t advertise him, I say.

Most of the restaurants and BnBs are closed. We walk around until we find one of those pointed pathway signs that says Heidegger-Weg. The path appears to run along the hills and around the village, which lies in a valley and doesn’t seem to have changed too much since Heidegger’s time, judging from the pictures in the tourist centre. Beautiful, imposing landscape; you can start to see where he came from. It’s not my bag exactly – I prefer flatlands.

We pass a couple of signs. We end up near what looks like the hut from the cover of a book my friend is carrying. We’ve read it’s private land, but we go up anyway. This isn’t it, I say, the cover’s wrong, it’s not the same as on Google images. For once I’m right. It turns out the hut is round the hill, more hidden. A slightly shabby cabin in a faultless location, it makes sense. How did he get his books and things up here, I wonder, it’s steep. A carpenter has put a wooden star on the top of the well, a copy of the one on his grave in Messkirch.

On the way back we stop at a Gasthaus and ask an old-timer in overalls sitting on the porch if they have a room. He shouts for the landlady, who comes out and says it’s only available for a week at a time, mostly in the winter. She seems suspicious, as Germans often do. We get talking, and it turns out this man knew Heidegger and his family well, and that this house is where Heidegger wrote part of Being and Time. He goes in and a minute later brings outs a plastic folder with old newspaper clippings and letters written in Heidegger’s hand. We make our standard middle-class noises, but the man isn’t impressed. He was all right, Heidegger, he says, polite and part of the community, but as far as his Denken went, it was null. No one cared that he was a philosopher. The only odd thing about him was that he always wore a suit and got some foreign visitors. As my friend was taking pictures of the letters, the landlady popped her head out and told the man to be careful about showing people those documents. He didn’t seem to care. We went on our way and I found a place on Airbnb, a newbuild with a sauna, designed for people on skiing holidays.