Heidegger - Bremen and Freiburg lectures: Insight into that which is and Basic principles of thinking

Studies in Continental Thought

EDITOR

JOHN SALLIS

CONSULTING EDITORS

Robert Bernasconi

William L. McBride

Rudolf Bernet

J. N. Mohanty

John D. Caputo

Mary Rawlinson

David Carr

Tom Rockmore

Edward S. Casey

Calvin O. Schrag

Hubert L. Dreyfus

Reiner Schrmann

Don Ihde

Charles E. Scott

David Farrell Krell

Thomas Sheehan

Lenore Langsdorf

Robert Sokolowski

Alphonso Lingis

Bruce W. Wilshire

David Wood

Martin Heidegger

Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking

Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

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Published in German as Martin Heidegger,

Gesamtausgabe 79: Bremer und Freiburger Vortrge

Edited by Petra Jaeger

1994 by Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main

English translation 2012 by Indiana University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heidegger, Martin, 18891976.

[Bremer und Freiburger Vortrge. English]

Bremen and Freiburg lectures: insight into that which is and basic principles of thinking / Martin Heidegger; translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. p. cm. (Studies in Continental thought)

ISBN 978-0-253-00231-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-253-00716-2 (electronic book) 1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Ding an sich. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. Reasoning. I. Title.

B3279.H48.B7413 2012

193dc23

2012008012

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

This translation brings two key lecture cycles from Heideggers later thinking to an English-language readership. Published as volume 79 of Heideggers Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition) in 1994, Insight Into That Which Is of 1949 is Heideggers first speaking engagement after the Second World War, and Basic Principles of Thinking from 1957 is his last extended lecturing engagement at Freiburg University. The texts taken together provide a panorama of the issues at stake in Heideggers late thinking.

In many respects the Bremen lectures inaugurate the late period of Heideggers thinking. It is here that he first formulates his conception of the thing as a gathering of the fourfold (das Geviert) and of technology as a matter of positionality (das Gestell). This basic tension in Heideggers thought between a singular existence and the drive to replaceability is first articulated in these pages in a manner that is uncompromising if not, at times, shockingly blunt, especially in treating recent events from the war. In no uncertain terms, Heidegger announces the era of technological circulation to be a break with that of modern metaphysics and its conception of representational objectivity. The profundity of Heideggers thinking, however, lies in his refusal to construe singularity and replacement as two separate orders of existence, but instead to understand them as mutually dependent upon each other. The thing needs the standing reserve to be what it is.

The 1957 Freiburg lectures, Basic Principles of Thinking, were the third and final installment in something of a trio of lecture courses Heidegger delivered in Freiburg on the topic of thinking (What Is Called Thinking? of 195152 and The Principle of Reason from 195556 being the earlier two). Here Heidegger traces the notions of being and thinking as operative in dialectical thought back to their roots in the Greek conception of the . From the Aristotelian conception of a and its principle of grounding, however, Heidegger proposes a leap into the abyss whereby is understood more primordially (via Homer) as saying (sagen). Heideggers concluding ruminations on the interconnection of being, language, and thinking are some of the most provocative of his career.

Both of these cycles taken together portray a world that is always arriving, a fragile world shadowed by danger, but a danger that likewise allows us to belong to that world. They present us with a vision of being as arriving, of things as dancing, and of language as an abyssal realm of appearing. Further details concerning the delivery of the lectures and the state of the manuscripts can be found in the German editors afterword below (16771).

A few of the translation choices in the lectures that follow warrant further explanation here. Additionally, full German-English and English-German glossaries are supplied after the main text. The following remarks sketch some of the conceptual considerations motivating the translations indicated, arranged here largely in order of appearance:

Das Geviert / the fourfold

The word names a gathering of four (earth, sky, divinities, mortals), the bringing together of four parties. How these elements hold together is articulated through the gathering power of the German prefix Ge- (also to be heard in Ge-Stell, positionality, the gathering or collection of all puttings and placings, of modes of stellen). Nowhere is the operative force of this Ge-ever named a fold or folding. Of a literal fourfold (Vierfalt), Heidegger here does not speak. Thus, a neutral term like foursome would be preferable to fourfold, which makes some unwarranted assumptions about the nature of the Geviert. Nevertheless, external considerations and unsavory associations lead to the retaining of fourfold to translate Geviert. To be sure, there is much mention of folding in the essay The Thing, where the term Geviert first arises, but that is due to the repeated use of the term Einfalt. One must simply bear in mind that each of the four come together in a single fold and not in any multiplicity of folds as one might wrongly hear in the term fourfold (see GA 79: 12/11).

Die Einfalt / the single fold

The word identifies the simplicity of naivete, guilelessness. The Einfalt is not complex, though the English language does not have a word like uniplex, which is what the literal sense of the word leads us to think. It is the simplicity of a fold. Earlier translations elided the distinction between Einfalt and Einfach in Heideggers work. Where the difference was remarked, it was often explained with the emphasis on the Ein as simple oneness. This attributes too much weight to the unifying force of the Ein, while Heideggers emphasis here falls much more on the fold. The term itself emerges in the text in response to an act of folding: the four are folded into a single fourfold [in