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Making Sense of Heidegger NEW HEIDEGGER RESEARCH Making Sense of Heidegger NEW HEIDEGGER RESEARCH Series Editors Gregory Fried, Professor of Philosophy, Suffolk University, USA Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy, Xavier University, USA The New Heidegger Research series promotes informed and critical dialogue that breaks new philosophical ground by taking into account the full range of Heidegger’s thought, as well as the enduring questions raised by his work. Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift, Thomas Sheehan After the Greeks, Laurence Paul Hemming (forthcoming) Heidegger and the Environment, Casey Rentmeester (forthcoming) Making Sense of Heidegger A Paradigm Shift Thomas Sheehan London • New York Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Sheehan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-118-7 PB 978-1-78348-119-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sheehan, Thomas. Making sense of Heidegger : a paradigm shift / Thomas Sheehan. pages cm. — (New Heidegger research) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-78348-118-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-119-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78348-120-0 (electronic) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. I. Title. B3279.H49S426 2015 193—dc23 2014021462 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America FOR WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J. Gentleman and scholar sans pareil In respect and gratitude ἀπὸ τῆς ἀληϑινῆς σοϕίας, ἣν ϕιλοσόφως τε καὶ ὑγιῶς ἐπήσκησεν Contents Frequently Cited German Texts and Their Abbreviated English Translations ix Foreword xi Introduction Chapter 1. Getting to the Topic 3 Part One: Aristotelian Beginnings Chapter 2. Being in Aristotle 31 Chapter 3. Heidegger beyond Aristotle 67 Part Two: The Early Heidegger Chapter 4. Phenomenology and the Formulation of the Question 111 Chapter 5. Ex-sistence as Openness 133 Chapter 6. Becoming Our Openness 155 Part Three: The Later Heidegger Chapter 7. Transition: From Being and Time to the Hidden Clearing 189 Chapter 8. Appropriation and the Turn 231 Chapter 9. The History of Being 249 Conclusion Chapter 10. Critical Reflections 271 Appendices 1. The Existential Components of Openness and Care 297 2. ψυχή, νοῦς ποιητικός, and lumen naturale in Aristotle and Aquinas 301 3. Greek Grammar and “Is-as-Having-Been” 305 Bibliographies 1. Heidegger’s German Texts and Their English Translations 307 A. Texts within the Gesamtausgabe 307 B. Texts outside the Gesamtausgabe 328 2. Other Texts Cited 330 Index of German, English, and Latin Terms 337 Index of Greek Terms 347 vii Frequently Cited German Texts and Their Abbreviated English Translations (For a complete list, see “Bibliographies: Heidegger’s German Texts and Their English Translations”) SZ = Being and Time (Macquarrie-Robinson) GA 2 = Being and Time (Stambaugh) GA 3 = Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics GA 4 = Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry GA 5 = Off the Beaten Track GA 6 = Pathmarks GA 8 = What Is Called Thinking? GA 9 = Pathmarks GA 10 = The Principle of Reason GA 11 = Identity and Difference GA 12 = On the Way to Language GA 14 = On Time and Being GA 15 = Heraclitus Seminar 1966/67 and Four Seminars GA 17 = Introduction to Phenomenological Research GA 18 = Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy GA 19 = Plato’s Sophist GA 20 = History of the Concept of Time GA 21 = Logic: The Question of Truth GA 22 = Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy GA 24 = The Basic Problems of Phenomenology GA 25 = Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason GA 26 = The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic GA 27 = Introduction to Philosophy GA 29/30 = The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics GA 31 = The Essence of Human Freedom GA 32 = Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit GA 33 = Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3 GA 34 = The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and the Theaetetus GA 36/37 = Being and Truth ix x Frequently Cited German Texts GA 38 = Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language GA 39 = Hölderlin’s Hymn “Germanien” and “Der Rhein” GA 40 = Introduction to Metaphysics GA 41 = What Is a Thing? GA 42 = Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom GA 45 = Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” GA 50 = Introduction to Philosophy—Thinking and Poetizing GA 51 = Basic Concepts GA 53 = Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister GA 54 = Parmenides GA 56/57 = Towards the Definition of Philosophy GA 58 = Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Winter Semester 1919/20 GA 59 = Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression GA 60 = Phenomenology of Religious Life GA 61 = Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle GA 63 = Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity GA 64 = The Concept of Time: The First Draft of Being and Time GA 65 = Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event GA 66 = Mindfulness GA 71 = The Event GA 77 = Country Path Conversations GA 79 = Bremen and Freiburg Lectures GA 85 = On the Essence of Language Foreword he following effort at a paradigm shift in interpreting Heidegger is deeply Tindebted to the work and guidance of my lifelong teacher, mentor, and friend, William J. Richardson, S.J., whose monumental achievement, Heideg- ger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first opened my eyes to the signifi- cance of Heidegger some fifty years ago. I still remember the effect of reading, as a fourth-year philosophy undergraduate, his first article on Heidegger, which appeared in 1963 in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain under the title “Hei- degger and the Problem of Thought.” This was a separate publication of what would appear later that year as the introduction to his book. I had wrestled for two years with the few Heidegger texts available at the time, including the new translation of Being and Time (1962) and all the English and French secondary sources I could get my hands on. It was all very exciting—and very dark. Then suddenly, with this article the clouds parted. To adapt Alexander Pope: Heidegger and all his works lay hid in night. God said “Let Richardson be!” and all was light. A thorough reading of his book in the summer of 1964 set my path to Fordham University, where he was then teaching, and to the extraordinary experience of studying under him. For that, and for the years of friendship, support, and collegial exchange since then, I am forever grateful. The present effort would not be possible without Fr. Richardson’s lucid, incisive, and richly documented masterwork, the first text to make sense of the whole of Heidegger as it was then known and to render that accessible to non-German readers. Drawing on his vast erudition and critical penetration while coming to Heidegger at a later date and from a different starting point, I conceive of the present effort as building on his immense accomplishments. That said, I make no claim that he agrees with what I have written here. The dedication of this book to him is simply an expression of how much I owe him by way of philosophical insight and wholehearted encouragement in the execution of a project about which he has expressed occasional—and seri- ous—reservations. As regards the title of the book: I try to make sense of Heidegger by showing that his work, both early and late, was not about “being” as Western philosophy has understood that term for over twenty-five hundred years, but rather about sense itself: meaningfulness and its source. In schematic form: xi xii Foreword 1. I read his work strictly as what he himself declared it to be—namely, phenomenology, which means that it is about one thing only: sense or meaning (I take them as the same), both in itself and in terms of its source. 2. Heidegger understands both “beingness” (Seiendheit) in traditional metaphysics and “being” (Sein) in his own work as formally the same.1 Both of these terms are formal indications of the “realness” of things, however that realness might be read.2 But as a phenomenologist Heideg- ger argues that both of these co-equal expressions, whether implicitly (in metaphysics) or explicitly (in Heidegger’s own work) bespeak the Anwesen of things—that is, their meaningful presence within the worlds of human interests and concerns, whether those be theoretical, practical, aesthetic, religious, or whatever. 3. However, Heidegger’s project finally makes sense only when we realize that he was after the source of such meaningful presence, whatever that source might turn out to be. To put it in formally indicative terms, that source would be whatever makes it necessary and possible for us to un- derstand things only discursively—that is, only in terms of their mean- ingful presence, whatever form that presence might take. Heidegger argued that this source turns out to be what he called “the appropriated clearing” (die ereignete Lichtung),3 which is the same as thrown-open/ appropriated human ex-sistence (das geworfene/ereignete Da-sein). I argue that the “being” discourse, the Sein-ology that has dominated Hei- degger research for the last half-century, has hit the wall.
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