Heidegger's relationalism

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 109-122

  Weberman, David ^a  

^a GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 36248999158     PISSN: 09608788     EISSN: 14693526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09608780010012710     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Yet see Charles Guignon's discussion of internal relations in Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis, Hackett. 1983), pp. 47-8, 99-100 as well as Richard Rorty's reference to the young Heidegger as 'the philosopherof inescapable relationality (Bezüglichkeit)' in 'Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reification of Language', The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 337-57, here p. 339
2. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 15th ed. (Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979). References to this work are indicated by 'SZ' and the page number. Pagination of the German edition is included in the margins of both English translations. My translations follow the translation of Macquarrie and Robinson's Being and Time with small modifications
3. See Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger, (Berlin, de Gruyter, 1970), 292: 'Was in SZ zur Aufklärung des Begriffs der Vorhandenheit gesagt wild, ist freilich ziemlich dürftig'
4. Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 24 (Frankfurt a. M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1975). References to this work are indicated by 'GA 24' and the page number
5. For evidence in Aristotle of an ontology oriented on self-containment, see Aristotle, Categories, 1-5 and Metaphysics, Book VII, 1-3. For such evidence in Locke, see An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XII, section 6: '[S]ubstances .. . are taken to represent distinct particular things subsisting by themselves'. Leibniz, however, stands in stark opposition to this tradition
6. For a more detailed argument along these lines, see David Weberman. 'Cambridge Changes Revisited: Why Certain Relational Changes are Indispensable', Dialectica 53 (1999): 139-19
7. Heidegger's thinking here is much indebted to Husserl's earlier analysis of inner time consciousness, in particular of 'protention' and 'retention'. See Husserliana, vol. X, Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewnβtseins (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1966)
8. For more on this point, see Pierre Keller and David Weberman, 'Heidegger and the source(s) of intelligibility', Continental Philosophy Review 31 (1998): 369-86
9. Heidegger's opposition to ontological self-containment continues to characterize his later thought. For example, in the following passage from Heidegger's 1951 lecture 'Building Dwelling Thinking,' we can fruitfully understand Heidegger's evocative notion of 'gathering' as a different, perhaps more poetic, expression of what I have called 'relationality'.Our thinking has of course long been accustomed to posit the thing in a manner that is too paltry. In the course of Western thought, the consequence has been that the thing is conceived as an unknown X to which observable properties are attached. Seen in this way, everything that already belongs to the gathering essence of the thing appears as a mere addon (als nachträglich hineingedeutete Zutat). .. . The bridge is a thing; it gathers .. . As such a thing, it allows a space into which earth and sky, divinities and mortals are admitted. The space allowed by the bridge contains many places variously near or far from the bridge. See Vorträge und Aufsätze (Neske: Pfullingen, 1954), p. 148ff; English translation in Basic Writings, .ed. by David Farrell Krell (Harper: San Francisco, 1993), p. 355ff