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ABSTRACT
This paper is concerned with the turning that occurs within the work of Martin Heidegger. In particular it seeks to reveal it as a turning that takes place within the notion of history as it is elaborated by Heidegger in the difference between Nietzsche and Hölderlin, that is, in the difference between philosophy and poetizing. It locates the necessity for such a turning in Heidegger's dissatisfaction with his own thinking up to the early 1930s (as suggested in his Black Notebooks). In particular the paper focuses on Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche over the question of nihilism in the hope of drawing out the different approaches of each thinker in trying to think this problem historically, and how this confrontation helps move Heidegger's thought towards a more poietical way of thinking. The paper concludes that Heidegger, in seeking to distinguish his thought from that of Nietzsche's, not only owes a debt to Nietzsche but that Heidegger's non-public texts of the late 1930s and early 1940s are also formally indebted to him.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Specifically, I shall refer to Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II-VI translated by Richard Rojcewicz into English as Ponderings II-VI.
2 For practical reasons, the essay will be mainly focused on Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung with Nietzsche at the expense of his engagement with Hölderlin.
3 Seinsvergessenheit is how Heidegger understands the nature of nihilism. He describes it in the following way in GA 45, translated into English by R. Rojcewicz and A Schuwer as BQP 159:
Beings are, but the being of beings and the truth of being and consequently the being of truth are denied to beings. Beings are, and yet they remain abandoned by being and left to themselves so as to be mere objects of our contrivance. All goals beyond men and peoples are gone, and, above all, what is lacking is the creative power to create something beyond oneself. The epoch of the highest abandonment of beings by being is the age of the total questionlessness of being.
4 This is to say that language speaks out of silence and is grasped only insofar as it illuminates that which it is not. To undergo an authentic experience of language is therefore to be able to hear what language has to say in bringing being to light, in bringing into the truth of the word that which is. For the human being to undergo such an experience of language it must be given over to language as that through which being happens, to experience what Heidegger terms Ereignis. In ‘On the Way to Language’ Heidegger deals in detail with this idea of authentic thinking, leading the reader from the view that the human being is that being who is distinguished by language (the zoon logon echon as it is traditionally rendered), to that being who finds herself at home within language, that is, within the unfolding coming-to-presence of being in the saying of the word. In other words, the human being does not possess language as an attribute but rather ‘is’ through language. For a thorough explication of Heidegger on language see GA 12 translated into English as by Peter D. Hertz as OWL.
5 Gosetti-Ferencei, HHSPL 31.
6 Heidegger says of the notion of aletheia in The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking that: Alētheia, unconcealment as the clearing of presence, is not yet truth. Is alētheia then less than truth? Or is it more, because it first grants truth as adequatio and certitudo, because there can be no presence and presenting outside the realm of the clearing’? Martin Heidegger, BW 446. Heidegger is here stating that whilst any claim that for the Greeks truth was understood aletheically would be erroneous (a claim Heidegger maintained for much of his philosophical life), it is only out of an experience of unconcealment that the Greek notion of truth can take hold. Thus it would be untenable to claim that there was a transformation in the Greek notion of truth from unconcealment to truth thought as correctness (orthotēs) of statements or representations.
7 Nietzsche, UM 59.
8 For the sake of clarity it should be noted what Nietzsche means by ‘effective history’. For the Germans history can be thought in two ways. History thought as Historie is what we generally think of as the content of historiology, that is, the actual events that happen in historical time. Effective history, that is, history thought as Geschichte, on the other hand, is the actual happening of history that allows these events to take place.
9 Nietzsche, TI 171.
10 This statement is revelatory of something essential to Nietzsche’s thinking on nihilism. Plato, in stamping being onto becoming, is the embodiment of the kind of person who – rather than merely passively standing by on the look-out for truth – is actively involved in creating it, in bestowing it as a value upon the world by positing it as the meaning of human existence. Thus Plato is a prime example of what could be argued is the central thought (alongside The Eternal Return of the Same) of Nietzsche’s work, namely, (the) Will to Power, a prime example of what Nietzsche means when he says that ‘to impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme Will to Power’. TWP § 617.
11 TI 167.
12 TI 223.
13 Nietzsche, TGS § 125.
14 In Being and Time Heidegger uses Dasein to refer to what we would normally call the ‘I’ and which the philosophical tradition calls the ‘soul’ or ‘ego’ or ‘self’. In doing so, Heidegger seeks to overcome the tendency to reify the being of the human being that comes from thinking of it in ontic terms, that is, from thinking of it in terms of the categorial determinations of entities by which they are traditionally distinguished from each other. This allows Heidegger to bring out the ontological nature of the human being and beings in general. Cf. for example, B&T 32.
15 Cf. Brief über den Humanismus translated by Frank A. Capuzzi in BW.
16 GA 94, 15.
17 Ibid., 39.
18 Ibid., 48.
19 To this end Heidegger says:
Beings are, but the being of beings and the truth of being and consequently the being of truth are denied to beings. Beings are, and yet they remain abandoned by being and left to themselves so as to be mere objects of our contrivance. All goals beyond men and peoples are gone, and, above all, what is lacking is the creative power to create something beyond oneself. The epoch of the highest abandonment of beings by being is the age of the total questionlessness of being. [BQP 159]
20 Martin Heidegger GA 65 translated into English by P. Emad and K. Maly as CP (From Enowning), 298.
21 Ibid., 510.