Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gail Stenstad is professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at East Tennessee State University, associate editor of Heidegger Studies, and a member of the board of directors of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy.

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Transformations

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Contents

Preface.................................................................xiAbbreviations of Selected Works by Martin Heidegger.....................xiiiIntroduction............................................................31. Opening a Way: The Question of Being................................112. Thinking: Engaging Language's Way-making............................413. Timing-Spacing-Thinging.............................................834. Thinking as Dwelling................................................1135. The Radiant Emptiness of Be-ing.....................................1466. Staying with Opening................................................172Notes...................................................................207Selected Bibliography...................................................217Index...................................................................221

Chapter One

The Question of Being

"Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being'? Not at all. So it is fitting that we raise anew the question of the meaning of being.... Our provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being" (GA 2: 1/BT 21). Every student or serious reader of Heidegger, from undergraduates studying the material in Basic Writings, to graduate students and scholars, as well as many among the well-read general public, knows the beginning of Being and Time. What is not so well known or understood is what this reawakening of the question of the meaning of being is supposed to be for and what becomes of the "question of being" after Being and Time rather abruptly ends without ever arriving at its provisional aim of the interpretation of time as the horizon for being. Being and Time was never meant to be a theory of human nature, as in the mistaken "existentialist" interpretation of Heidegger. "Being and Time is the crossing to the leap (asking the grounding question). As long as one accounts for this attempt as 'philosophy of existence,' everything remains uncomprehended" (GA 65: 233/CP 165). The key is, as Heidegger later tells us, that Being and Time opens up a dynamic path of thinking on which everything is transformed. Everything. Being and Time is, for Heidegger, the necessary opening into a multifaceted region of transformative possibility (GA 65: 475/CP 334).

Throughout Heidegger's long career as a teacher and writer nearly everything he spoke on and wrote touched on the matter of transformation, either lightly and almost as a reminder or explicitly and at length. In fact, it is rather remarkable, when stepping back to get a broad view of the material, that so many of the "key texts" of Heidegger not only do this but also touch on the particular areas of thinking or acting that are at stake for transformation: language, thinking, traditional ideas of "being," "truth," earth and world, time and space, openness and opening, and our day-to-day living with technology and its way of shaping our thoughts and actions. Furthermore, it is not that you will find a lecture here that discusses technology and an essay over there that deals with language and a book farther down the shelf that delves deeply into the nature of thinking. We do, of course, find those things (in "The Question Concerning Technology," "The Way to Language," and What Is Called Thinking?), but each of these works does much more. In looking carefully at many of the texts I consulted in writing this book, I noticed something significant in terms of their contents. Not counting Being and Time and Contributions to Philosophy ([From Enowning), which are long and comprehensive books fundamental to Heidegger's entire long work of thinking (and thus would be expected to contain references to all the "key issues"), I looked at the fourteen other texts I would be referring to most often. Of the fourteen, each of which had its own particular focus, I found that most of them also discussed not just one or two of the other issues but several. Twelve discuss language, transformation, the dominance of techno-calculative thinking, and either space, time, or time-space. Eleven mention opening (or the closely linked clearing or lighting), thinking, and "being" as it is thought metaphysically. Ten explicitly refer to overcoming the subject-object distinction, and to enowning (Ereignis). A good half of them discuss earth (and world) and the nature of "the thing." This is even more remarkable in that only one of the fourteen texts is of book length.

What does this mean? Why is it significant? Heidegger's "one question" has many facets. In a way, that comment seems almost trivial. We take "being" to refer to anything that exists in any way at all. So, of course, that includes everything! That seemingly trivial obviousness, however, only covers over what is really going on here. Because being "includes everything," a transformation in the way we think "being" is going to bring a change in, at the very least, thinking and language (the "is"). But thinking and language shape our understanding of time, space, things, and ourselves. In the contemporary world our understanding of all of these things is also shaped by science and technology. So it is not just the fact that Heidegger questions the meaning of being that results in his ongoing concern with all these other areas but that his way of thinking and questioning concerning being is already in and of itself radically transformative. One of the ways it transforms thinking is in the direction of a much clearer idea of the dynamic relationality of everything that is. At the moment, this early on, I can only assert this: change one key thing, and everything else changes, too. For Western philosophy the "meaning of being" is the keystone. Move it, change it, and everything else changes; remove it, and the whole metaphysical edifice falls. And, as will gradually become more and more clear, all these crucial matters (being, time, space, language, thinking, mind, technology's dominance, things, earth, world, us) resonate and dance with one another in a complex and dynamic intertwining. Again: change one thing, change everything. Not, however, in the way we usually think of change, in terms of linear cause and effect. How, then? This must emerge as we go on.

Conceivably, we could enter this web of gems at any point, any facet. As Heidegger said more than once, genuine thinking is not just following a track predetermined by someone else (whether the bland but powerful "they" of Being and Time or a great thinker like Heidegger himself); rather, "it is enough if we dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now" (DT 47). In the long run that becomes necessary, unless this work of thinking is Heidegger's and his alone. But to jump immediately there would perhaps be premature. We are so strongly shaped and constrained by our linguistic, intellectual, and cultural inheritance that "thinking" and "thinking" are not the same! That is, we think we are thinking, but we may well be running along in the same old rut, the gerbil-wheel that society gives us to play with in our cages. This is not, on the other hand, to assert that "following Heidegger" is the only way to go. In fact, following as in copying or repeating or shuffling apparent facts and propositions into some kind of cohesive theoretical structure is precisely not the way to go. In his most extended discussion of the nature of thinking Heidegger told the students attending the lecture course that if that is all any of them wanted to do, "in that case, burn your lecture notes, however precise they may be-and the sooner the better" (WHD 160; WCT 158). There are other ways into transformative thinking, starting from other questions. In chapter 5, for instance, I bring the Tibetan thinker Longchenpa into dialogue with this thinking; he has a different starting point but thinks into a similar region of transformation. But the work of thinking that we call "Heidegger" is deep and powerful and filled with openings into thinking that-and this is vitally important-start from where we are now, in the contemporary Western world. It is, therefore, an excellent and perhaps even necessary place to start.

The way that will be taken here is, first, to situate Heidegger's one question (and its first major elaboration in Being and Time) in the context of transformative thinking or, as it is called in one of its major arenas, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), "being-historical thinking." So I discuss the historically situated transformation of thinking concerning "being" as laid out in that book first and then return to Being and Time to examine it in the light of its place in that region of thinking.

The First and Other Beginning: A Preliminary Sketch

Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (which I will usually refer to simply as Contributions) was held back by Heidegger and not published until several years after his death (it was written during 1936-38 but only published in 1988). Why? Heidegger himself said that the book did not have the finished academic form that would constitute a publishable work. In hindsight we also see that Heidegger meant to first give us a context within which this work could be understood, particularly, the many lectures in the history of philosophy. It is a record of creative thinking in progress. By that I do not mean it is a lengthy series of notes that could have been revised into an academic book. "Thinking in progress" here means thinking, which is always on the way and brings to language what arises on the unfolding, shifting path of thinking. Chapter 2 discusses this on-the-way nature of thinking in much more detail. For now, we need to be aware that in Contributions, perhaps more than in anything else he wrote, Heidegger made an extended attempt for the language to show not just the thoughts but at the same time the dynamic "structure" of the thinking. The book is made up not of chapters but of "joinings." What is the significance of this? Books ordinarily have chapters ordered and numbered in sequence. Of course, due to the nature of written language, the joinings of Contributions have this apparent sequence, but they do not constitute a step-by-step, ordered, and systematic discussion of the apparently given theme (enowning). The book does not follow any philosophical method, nor does it construct a system. On the other hand, the joinings are not just a series of random epigraphs. There is something altogether other going on here. The joinings echo (in fact, "Echo" is the title of one of them), mirror, and play forth (the title of another) with each other as they resonate within the dance of thinking. Any one of them opens ways into all the others, like many multifaceted jewels, each of which reflects all the others. To extend the image, they are not jewels set in solid silver but jewels hanging on a very large but delicate wind chime, responding to each nuance of the breeze of thinking. Each of the nonsequential joinings says the matter in a different way, with a somewhat different bearing, but at the same time they resonate as a conjoined questioning-thinking, "saying the same about the same," in the sense that that phrase carries in Heidegger's work. Though there is some repetition, the joinings do not merely repeat each other or say something identical; they say what intrinsically belongs together within the same region of thinking, moving -thinking along through the resonance of the nuances of their differing ways of bringing the matter to language (GA 65: 82/CP 57).

What is the place or role of Contributions in the large work of thinking that we call by the name of Heidegger? It is certainly not a hidden system that organizes all the later lectures and published works. We could say, though, that it serves as a touchstone for them. It is helpful to think of Heidegger's later lectures and publications as joinings, too, interrelating with Contributions and with each other in a manner similar to the way that the joinings of Contributions function internally. As I have already pointed out, most of Heidegger's works at least touch on all of the key "themes" to be taken up by thinking, just as the joinings of Contributions all echo different facets of one overarching matter: the possible transformation of thinking in the leap into the interplay of the first and other beginning of Western philosophy. The different works of Heidegger, whether they are in dialogue with the great thinkers of the tradition (which will not be a focus of this book) or are among the fourteen I mentioned above, can be seen as joinings with each other and with Contributions, with Contributions serving as a touchstone but not the last word. That is, at times the others carry thinking farther than does Contributions. Well, of course! It would be very odd if Heidegger's thinking stagnated after 1938 and all he did was mine Contributions for publications and lecture material. However, the main thing to be aware of is that all of Heidegger's lectures, published essays, and books are "thinking in the crossing" of the first and other beginning, with some of them having more of an obviously preparatory character and others being more clearly bearers of a leap into the heart of the matter. One thing that is discussed more explicitly and at length and in more varied dimensions in Contributions than anywhere else is the larger context of this opening to a radical transformation of thinking and being.

The context for this transformative opening is our situation in the history of Western thinking. However, the word "history" here could mislead us if we are not aware of the distinction Heidegger makes between historiography (Historie) as the historical examination (historische Betrachtung) of a datable sequence of past events and historical mindfulness (geschichtliche Besinnung) of the future as what comes to us through the ongoing unfolding of what has taken place in an originary-that is, a dynamically formative-way ("history" as Geschichte). Historiography, in its examination of the past, tends to create the illusion of objective distance. But in Heidegger's reflection on the history of Western thinking not only is the whole notion of objectivity put into question (along with subjectivity) but it also becomes quite clear that who, what, and how we are unfolds within the dynamic of this history, which "we ourselves are" (GA 45: 188, my translation).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Transformationsby GAIL STENSTAD Copyright © 2006 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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