Abstract
Among commentators on Heidegger a consensus has arisen that his later thought involved ‘a turn’ (Kehre), a rejection of and movement away from his philosophical project in Being and Time (1927). In that work, Heidegger’s existential analytic involved a discussion of authenticity, culminating in an appeal for us to listen to ‘the call of conscience’, a call ‘from afar unto afar’ (p. 38; cf. Being and Time, §54–§55). (This call is related to the sense of Unheimlichkeit, or ‘uncanniness’, a feeling of ‘being not-at-home … of being lost in a barren world where the network of quotidian significance and concern seems to have evaporated or dissolved’ (p. 39)). Even though Habermas, for example, in a famous review essay of 1953, suggested that Heidegger’s work of the 1930s recapitulated this account of authenticity (p. 73), in 1984 he argued that the later philosophy – after An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935, pub. 1953) and ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1946) – dissembled, with its history of being, an earlier transposition of authenticity onto a political (and specifically national) scale (p. 75). (Heidegger’s provocative remark about the ‘inner truth and greatness’ (cf. pp. 63, 72) of National Socialism has caused havoc among his interpreters.) In Eclipse of the Self (1986), Michael Zimmerman juxtaposed the earlier conception of authenticity as resoluteness with its later characterization as releasement (Gelassenheit) (pp. 78–81), and in Heidegger and the Will (2007), Bret Davis argued that ‘the ambiguous role of the will in Being and Time gave way in the first half of the 1930s to a philosophical and then political voluntarism’ (cf. p. 82). Instead, in this study Mahon O’Brien offers an interpretation that foregrounds the ‘fascinating levels of continuity running through Heidegger’s ever-evolving thought’ (p. 2).
If Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics evinces his preoccupation with ‘the transformative, almost epiphanic effect’ (p. 61) of intensely reflective moments in our life, then ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1955) explores further a recurring motif in Heidegger’s thought: how, in the words of his letter to Jaspers of 19 November 1922, ‘world and life are unhomely [unheimlich] for the philosopher’ (cf. p. 93). Around an ‘innovative’ reading of a passage from Diotima’s disquisition on love (Symposium, 205b), Heidegger expounded his understanding of ‘occasioning’ (aitia), ‘bringing-forth’ or Her-vor-bringen, ‘poetry’ (poiesis), ‘nature’ (physis), ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia) and ‘technology’ (techne). The latter he glossed with the term Gestell, variously translated as ‘enframing’ and related to the idea of Bestand or ‘standing-reserve’ (cf. p. 107). (In this context, he famously contrasted the view of the Rhine taken by those who built a hydroelectric plant in the water, and Hölderlin’s address to the river: ‘For as you began, so you will remain’ (Wie du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben) (p. 104; cf. p. 1).) In his essay, Heidegger uncovered modern humankind’s central delusion (embraced by Heisenberg): ‘It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself … In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence’ (cf. p. 111). While citing Hölderlin’s line from ‘Patmos’, ‘But where danger is, grows / The saving power also’ (cf. p. 113), Heidegger tellingly anchored his notion of ‘permanent enduring’ (fortwähren, das Fortwährende) in a ‘mysterious’ word (i.e., fortgewähren) found in the novella contained in Goethe’s Elective Affinities. From this combined phonetic echo of währen (to endure) and gewähren (to grant) Heidegger derived the following insight: ‘Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants’ (cf. p. 115).
Thus the very notion of the turn or Kehre, found as early as 1930 in ‘The Essence of Truth’ (in which he declared that ‘the human being’s flight from the mystery toward what is readily available, onward from one current thing to the next, passing the mystery by – this is erring’ (cf. p. 141)) and later in ‘The Turning’ (1956), turns out (so to speak) to be the central theme throughout Heidegger’s writings as a whole. In this book, O’Brien cogently and persuasively underscores how this ‘revolution’ of our understanding is ‘achieved’ by ‘remaining true and fast to our human vocation (vocare), the calling we all have as humans’ (p. 117).