PART ONE

Essays on the Early Heidegger, the Late Heidegger, Heidegger 1/II, the Beitriige

The authors of this first set of essays trace the turning from phenomenology to thought as a turn which includes thinking through (beyond) and in (by way of) phenomenology on such traditional topics as theology, ethics, the essence of philosophical style, and issues of event and translation. As a whole, these essays set the tone for the contributions ranged under the rubrics that follow. Graeme Nicholson, reviewing the move Through Phenomenology to Concealment, highlights the essence of Heidegger's Kehre, not as a turn in Heidegger's thinking but as Heidegger's thinking of thought as a passage through phenomenology. Instead of locating the origin of philosophy in the accustomed wonder that is astonishment, Nicholson finds it in an unease in our understanding and hence our existence. Thus radicalized, epistemology leads to the suspension of the phenomenological method. Between uncon• cealment and concealment, Nicholson's phenomenological reading of (particularly: visual) perception shows phenomenology at its limit. In Authenticity, Poetry, God, Karsten Harries draws us first to Heidegger's notion of authenticity via the bond with authorship, which he reads in terms of involvement and responsibility. In a beautiful formulation of the proxi• mate routine of being not authentic but inauthentic, Harries notes that we are caught up in a social world that has already assigned us place and defin• ition. By contrast, authenticity surrenders all claims to something like a firm foundation, all assurances of a secure dwelling. In this way, any authentic decision is made keen against a background of doubt. Holderlin's question of measure and merit matched to and under the pure shade of the sky recalls the highest possibility (and rarity) of poetic dwelling. Thus poetically, Harries finds the genuine aspect of the sky in time, where poetic dwelling demands a preservation of the seasons of the earth. If Holderlin catches the crucial importance of observance for the poet or singer, observance for Harries expresses the sacred as material transcendence, not via a multiplicity but by way of the singularity of God and the sacred: a claim only to be answered by a pure heart. George Kovacs' The Power of Essential Thinking in Heidegger's Beitrage

B. E. Babich (ed.). From Phenomenology to Thought. Errancy. and Desire, 1-3. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2 Part I zur Philosophie (Yom Ereignis) emphasizes the necessity of the individual thinker's own contribution to an understanding of essential thinking. This means that the risk of misunderstanding is part of the historical thinking of Being which thinks Being in its (aletheic) truth as event or appropriation. In Raising Atlantis: Later Heidegger and Contemporary Philosophy, David Kolb sees his task as that of bridge building. He thus provides not merely a set of translations between the different terminological registers employed by Heidegger, Heideggerian and classically continental philosophers and analytic or pragmatic styles of philosophic expression, but also a map for identifying shared concerns and likely loci for further reference. Observing with Heidegger that there is more to thinking than attacking and defending positions, Kolb's most salient reflection suggests that hearing or listening to what addresses us rather than questioning will be the proper gesture of thought. Richard Kearney in Surplus Being: The Kantian Legacy, traces the genealogy of the modem philosophy of being from Kant to Heidegger. Kearney focusses on Heidegger's original reading of the Kantian maxim in the light of his existential ontology of Dasein and his hermeneutic retrieval of Kant's transcendental imagination in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. From this perspective, Heidegger's pioneering interpretation of the Kantian maxim of the "unreality" of being in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology prefigures the revolutionary insights of Being and Time. Theodore Kisiel, Existenz in Incubation toward Being and Time, traces the step-by-step transformation in the early Heidegger of the formal indica• tion of Existenz. First understood as the facticity of the "I am" that has itself (1920), it becomes ex-sistence as dispossessed expropriation exposed to its finite limits in an ek-stasis that can never claim to have itself. The latter sense of Existenz as presence involves a radical break with traditional ousio• logical thinking centered on the constant of property. This then becomes the formal indication which guides the concept formation of the existentials in the very last draft of Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) in the direction of a kairological sense of human time as ek-static temporality. In "Gelassenheit" bei Heidegger und Meister Eckhart, Friedrich-W. von Herrmann begins with the theme of a tum away from representation conceived as will. At its height, Heidegger's critique of Western European thought can be articulated within the "formal structure" of the mystical notion of Gelassenheit. Not identical with the essentially stoic disposition of equanimity, Gelassenheit may figure beyond Eckhart as a structure of Ereignis as such: as what von Herrmann, following Heidegger, names the Open of what en• counters ("Gegnet"). As a result, an originally mystical experience is comprised within the event-constellation (Ereignis) of Gelassenheit. In his essay, Heidegger I, Heidegger II, and Beitriige zur Philosophie (Yom Ereignis), Parvis Emad poses the distinction between Heidegger I and Heidegger II as one which may be held within Richardson's claim that the latter enables a specific "re-trieve of Heidegger I" in terms of Heidegger's notion of ingrained/contained possibility. At issue is not a contrast between Essays on the Early Heidegger, the Late Heidegger, Heidegger 1!11 3 simple continuity or break but an Ubergang or passage back and forth, rendered by Emad as sway/countersway. Kenneth Maly discusses Reticence and Resonance in the Work of Translating. For Maly, the persistence of German terms in Heidegger studies, particularly when included alongside an English rendering, has nothing to do with questions of accuracy but everything to do with the essence of language. Likewise, where thinking is at its core en-ergeia, one must radi• cally think (or think oneself into) the work of translation as what calls for reticence rather than literality. In Das Gewesen: Remembering the Fordham Years, Tom Sheehan considers the complexity of rendering Heidegger's articulations of time and tempo• rality or Zeitlichkeit. For Sheehan, the problem corresponds to the essential historical provenance and therewith the project of Heidegger's Being and Time. Translating das Gewesen becomes a matter of reticent regard not only for the German but also for original Greek texts such as Aristotle's Metaphysics as well as for the Latin renderings of and commentaries on these texts. We thus get an illustrative Wirkungsgeschichte of contemporary English transla• tions, including Sheehan's own suggestions. Represented in this fashion beyond the fore and aft (present/future) of ordinary time, as deriving from an expe• rience beyond the issue of complete and incomplete activity and other aspectual features of verbs, Sheehan means his reflection to force a redefinition of "time."