Musing with Kierkegaard: Heidegger's Besinnung

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 34, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 403-418

  Seidel, George J ^a  

^a SAINT MARTIN'S UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 51449091360     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1013169623934     Document Type: Review

References (60)

1. Gesamtausgabe 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989). Very special thanks are due to J. and K. Byron for their assistance in checking the typescript and page proofs.
2. Besinnung, Gesamtausgabe 66 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 429.
3. In Die Geschichte des Seyns, Gesamtausgabe 69 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1998), 5, Heidegger speaks of the Beiträge as a framework, not a completed structure.
4. Beiträge, 5.
5. Metaphysik und Nihilismus, Gesamtausgabe 67 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999), dating from 1938-1939, and Die Geschichte des Seyns, which dates from 1938-1940.
6. Cf. G.J. Seidel, "A Key to Heidegger's Beiträge," Gregorianum 76/2 (1995): 363-372;
7. as also by the same author "Heidegger's Last God and the Schelling Connection," Laval Théologique et Philosophique 55 (1999): 85-98.
8. There is a background in German idealism for the choice of words that Heidegger uses in this, and other works, of the same period. Fichte gives a Christological meaning to Daseyn, determinate being or actual existence, as distinguished from Seyn, absolute being. Thus, in his exegesis of the prologue to John's gospel, in Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder auch die Religionslehre, he says, "...the consciousness of being (Seyn), the Is relative to being, is immediately Daseyn." Fichte's sämmtliche Werke, I. H. Fichte, ed. (Berlin: Veit, 1845), V, 439-441; the Logos is the image of the absolute being (Wesen) in the actual world (V, 526).
9. Fichte gets this distinction between Seyn and Daseyn from Schelling; cf. Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795),
10. Schellings Werke, M. Schröter, ed. (München: Beck, 1958), I, 133-134.
11. Cf. Seidel, "Heidegger's Last God and the Schelling Connection," n. 26. Heidegger will use this older spelling of Seyn (with an upsilon) to refer to the Logos, distinguishing it from being (Sein, with an iota). He will use the hyphenated Da-sein to refer to the Christ, to distinguish this from the Dasein of Being and Time, which is essentially relation to Sein. Da-sein in Heidegger's Beiträge and in Besinnung is "the last God" (der letzte Gott), the Christ, as it is in Schelling as well (Schellings Werke, III, 452). Indeed, according to Heidegger, Schelling provides the most profound picture of Spirit in German metaphysics (B, 264). 7. For example, he refers to Kitsch (Nazi "art"?) not as bad art but as symbol-rich propaganda (B, 31). He also takes a then recent statement by Hitler, deconstructing it with a series of questions (B, 122). Such criticisms of the Fuehrer, for obvious reasons, were not meant for publication, certainly not at the time. Or the statement made at the end of Besinnung, namely that the overcoming of the powers that be is possible only with the other beginning (B, 400), may also be meant to refer to then current events.
12. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 71-115, esp. 78, while at the same time indicating, in a letter to Pfarrer Krebs (1919), that he found the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable, though not Christianity and metaphysics (these, however, in a new sense), Genesis, 74.
13. Genesis, 316.
14. "Kierkegaard can be truly exposed only theologically (as I understand theology and will develop in the Winter Semester)" (Genesis, 150), which, at the time, he did not do.
15. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe 29/30 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 225.
16. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophische Brocken: De Omnibus Dubitandum est, trans. E. Hirsch (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1952), 35, 55. "This man is, at the same time, God"; but God and man are different; hence, the Paradox. When the moment is posited, the Paradox, which is also the moment, is there (48-49).
17. Grundfragen der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe 45 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1984), 208 (lectures from 1937-1938). In this work, Kierkegaard is numbered among the "watchers" for the revelation of Seyn (190).
18. Grundfragen, 193-194.
19. Grundfragen, 213. "Das Seiende ist, aber das Sein des Seienden und die Wahrheit des Seyns und damit das Seyn der Wahrheit ist ihm verweigert" (185). And with this, Lichtung in the midst of beings, he asks rhetorically, should there not also be the self-hiding of Seyn? (189).
20. Grundfragen, 35-36. Needless to say, this sort of "historical" Besinnung is basically different from any historical treatment. Again, Heidegger's fundamental distinction, following Kierkegaard, between Geschichte and Historie.
21. "Die onto-theologisches Verfassung der Metaphysik," Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 51.
22. "...das Seiende is grounded in the Wesung des Seyns and has its origin therein" (Beiträge, 465).
23. In Hegel: Die Negativität, Gesamtausgabe 68 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), dating from the same period as Besinnung and Metaphysik und Nihilismus, Heidegger says that Sein is the thrown; the thrower is Da-sein (15). One may suspect that this is the "All things came into being through him [the Word]" of the Prologue to the gospel of John (1:3). This interest in the fourth gospel should not be surprising. When at Marburg, on Saturday afternoons during 1924, Heidegger read the gospel of John, along with Friedrich Gogarten and his friend Rudolf Bultmann, in the period before the latter produced his famous commentary on the gospel.
24. Cf. Otto Pöggeler, Neue Wege mit Heidegger (Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, 1992), 404, 467.
25. Beiträge, 472.
26. Beiträge, 75.
27. In a seminar from 1939, Vom Wesen der Sprache, Heidegger says, "Freedom is not the 'condition of the possibility' of words, but in itself belongs to the one who comes into his own-the 'Word,' the silence of Seyn" (Gesamtausgabe 85 [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999], 76).
28. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). "He came unto his own (Eigentum), but his own received him not" (John 1:11).
29. Hegel: Die Negativität, 43.
30. Hegel: Die Negativität, 44. Or in the Beiträge (411), Heidegger speaks of the last God as something totally different, as absolutely unique (einzigste Einzigkeit).
31. Grundfragen, 90.
32. Beiträge, 163, 311, 477.
33. Hegel: Die Negativität, 53.
34. Given Heidegger's animadversions toward technology, it may seem surprising that he would consider modern technology as the "truth" of Seyn. However, this is because the "truth" that technology is "God" is revealed as untrue (MN, 37). The fact that Hitler could argue, in Mein Kampf (München: Hanser, 1935), that Technik and a triumphant German industry is possible only with a strong German state (160-161, 164), throws an entirely different light upon Heidegger's position relative to technology, as also upon all the nasty things he has to say about Machenschaft in Beiträge.
35. Perhaps, this is the question "Whom do people say that the Son of Man is?" (Mt 16:13).
36. "Die Uberwindung der Vorklang des anderen Anfangs" (MN, 99). The word Vorklang does not exist in ordinary German. Klang is the clang of a bell; a Vorklang would be the unheard cling before the awaited clang.
37. Gesamtausgabe 67 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999), 217-218 .
38. In his article "Negative theology in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophic," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000): 139-156, D. R. Law rightly concludes that Heidegger does not employ negative theology relative to the meaning of God or the last God. This would represent simply metaphysical thinking. But as the author did not have available works after the Beiträge, he was unable to distinguish between the different kinds of thinking involved in approaching the God of metaphysics (the Supreme Being), Seyn (the Logos) and Da-sein (the last God).
39. Law, 219, 244.
40. Law, 265.
41. God is not to be identified with Seyn; rather, Seyn reveals itself temporal-spatially (zeiträumlich) as the Between; which Inbetween is not grounded in God, nor in the human, as something living and at hand, but instead in Da-sein (Beiträge, 263).
42. Philosophische Brocken, 55, 59.
43. Beiträge, 494, 479.
44. Schellings Werke, VI, 617, as also, 577-578.
45. Beiträge, 311. Seyn is the "inbetween" between the divine and the human (470-471). Seyn is the Between in the midst of beings and the Gods, and, from that perspective, incomparable, "needed" by the latter, hidden from the former (244).
46. Beiträge, 477.
47. Indeed, in Das Wesen des Nihilismus, Heidegger says that Nietzsche's ewige Wiederkehr, the eternal return, is theology (MN, 215). According to Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche the "God" that is dead is Plato's world of ideas. "God" may be dead, but the Übermensch lives! (181).
48. The subtitle to the section on "The Last God" says that this notion is "quite other than those that have been [proposed], particularly the Christian one" (Beiträge, 403).
49. Cf. Françoise Dastur, "Le 'dieu extrême' de la phenomenologie. Husserl et Heidegger," Archives de Philosophie 63 (2000): 195-204. She maintains, rightly I think, that Heidegger's last God is not the God of morality but that of revelation.
50. Similarly, Eric Gaziaux, "Pour une approche heideggerienne du Sacre," Revue théologique de Louvain 31 (2000): 530.
51. Beiträge, 410. In Hegel: Die Negativität, he says that Seyn in its unique reality is the finitude of Seyn (15).
52. In Hegel, for example, Sein is in opposition to becoming, indeed its essence; Seyn is the same as nothing (B, 282), from the perspective of Hegelian subjectivity (284). This is the meaning of "negativity" in Hegel, which is the same as Plato's mç on (293). "Nothing is the first and highest gift of Seyn.... the lightsome clearing of the original leap as from the ground (Lichtung des Ur-sprungs als Ab-grund), the revelation of the need of a ground" (295).
53. "um des Seyns willen" (B, 269). "Um Gottes willen!" is a cry from the depths, heard in a situation of fear or dread, used in relation to Christ it has a more benign sense.
54. Beiträge, 509.
55. Earlier, referring to Parmenides, Heidegger says: "Seyn und Lichtung ist dasselbe; so lautet der anfängliche Spruch des Parmenides im anderen Anfang" (B, 313). "Seyn" here may refer to the unnamed Goddess who reveals the way of truth to Parmenides. The "other beginning" mentioned here may be the other first beginning, namely that of metaphysics.
56. Cf. Philosophische Brocken, 35. Again, for Heidegger it is not Da-sein that does not get thought; it can be thought through to only with Logos historical thinking. Rather, it is the Seyn, the Logos of Da-sein, that does not get thought, and with it Sein.
57. Soren Kierkegaard, Abschliessende Unwissenschaftsliche Nachschrift zu den Philosophischen Brocken, tr. H. M. Junghans (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1957), 19.
58. Pöggeler, Neue Wege mit Heidegger, 387.
59. According to Grimm's Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, vol. 14, 507 ff., the German verb wesen, as in leben und weben, da sein, has the meaning of being active, showing or revealing itself; the indogermanic root ues- means verweilen (stay, linger), wohnen (dwell); related also to bheu (am, are), Cf. the Greekphysis. Sixteenth and seventeenth century religious authors use the word in relation to God, perhaps, because its connection with life is prominent.
60. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, 310.