Heidegger's Question of Being: Dasein, Truth, and History (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy)

The number of open and controversial questions in contemporary Heidegger research continues to be a source of scholarly dialogue. There are important questions that concern the development, as it were, of his thought and the differences and similarities between his early main work Being and Time and his later so-called being-historical thought, the thinking of the event, or appropriation, of Being. There are questions that focus on his relation to important figures in the history of ideas such as the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, the German idealists, and Nietzsche. Other questions focus on his biography, on his rectorate and on his relation to politics in general and to National Socialism in particular or on his influence on subsequent philosophers. The contributions to this volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Heidegger research, address many of these questions in close readings of Heidegger's texts and thus provide sound orientation in the field of contemporary Heidegger research. They show how the different trajectories of Heidegger's thought―his early interest in the meaning of Being and in Dasein, his discussion of, and involvement with, politics, his understanding of art, poetry, and technology, his concept of truth and the idea of a history of Being―all converge at one point: the question of Being. It thus becomes clear that, all differences notwithstanding, Heidegger followed one very consistent path of thinking. Heidegger’s Question of Being: Dasein, Truth, and History 4 Contents 6 Abbreviations 8 Holger Zaborowski: Introduction 12 1 Daniel Dahlstrom: Rethinking Difference 19 The Ontological Difference 19 From the Ontological Difference to the Primordial Difference 27 Conclusion 33 2 Richard Capobianco: Reaffirming Heidegger’s “The Truth of Being” 37 An Early Clue 38 Being Is Truth in the First Place 40 The Priority and Primacy of Being 45 Being as Ereignis 52 Being as Lichtung 55 Concluding Thought 58 3 Rudolf Bernet: Heidegger on Aristotle: dunamis as Force and Drive 60 The Structure of Movement and the Particularity of Natural Movements 61 Dunamis as the Double Force of the Living Being 68 Human Life in the Opposition of Drives: Their Restriction and Disinhibition 74 4 William McNeill: Tracing technē: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Legacy of Philosophy 82 The Early Critique of technē as Horizon for the Understanding of Being in General 84 The Phenomenological Retrieval of phronēsis as Disclosive of a More Original Horizon 90 Rethinking the Phenomenon of World 95 5 Rudolf A. Makkreel: Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading of Kant: A Kehre about Judgment 101 Ontological Schematization and the Meaning of Objectivity 102 Judgment as Taking the Measure of Things 108 The Contextualizing and Orientational Nature of Reflective Judgment as a Mode of Access to Our Being-in-the-World 112 6 Richard Polt: Drawing the Line: Political Thought in Heidegger’s Lecture Courses and Seminars of 1933–35 117 Drawing the Line 119 Landmarks 122 “The Fundamental Question of Philosophy” 125 “On the Essence of Truth” 127 The Seminar on “The Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State” 138 Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language 143 The Hegel Seminar of 1934–35 144 Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine” 147 Open Questions and Dead Ends 149 7 Richard Velkley: Political Philosophy and the Ontological Question: Preliminary Remarks on Heidegger and Strauss 154 8 Holger Zaborowski: Technology, Truth, and Thinking: Martin Heidegger’s Reading of Ernst Jünger’s The Worker 176 From the Citizen to the Worker: Ernst Jünger’s Phenomenology of the Superman 176 Heidegger’s Initial Interest in Jünger’s The Worker as a Retrieval of Nietzsche’s Philosophy 179 Heidegger’s “Question Concerning the Essence of Technology”: Thinking with and against Jünger 183 The Task of Thinking Truth vis-à-vis the Task of Working 190 9 Theodore Kisiel: How Heidegger Resolved the Tension between Technological Globalization and Indigenous Localization: A Twenty-First-Century Retrieval 195 Heidegger’s First Attempt at a Resolution of the Global and the Local 208 Bodenständigkeit 211 How the Artwork Works in Historical Context: How Can a Global Ge-Stell be Transformed into a Local Gestell? 214 Concluding Diminuendo 217 10 Charles Bambach: Heidegger’s Poetic Measure: An Ethics of Haunting 218 Measuring the Poetic Measure of Justice 218 Heidegger’s Poetic Measure 224 Concluding Remarks 233 Selected Bibliography 236 Contributors 244 Index of Names 246 Index of Subjects 248 The contributions to this volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Heidegger research, offer close readings of Heidegger's texts and provide sound orientation in the field of contemporary Heidegger research. They show how the different trajectories of Heidegger's thought all converge at one point: the question of Being.