Indiana University Press
2024
Hardback
372
Reviewed by: Robert Reimer (Universität Leipzig)
In dem Methodenkapitel von Sein und Zeit schreibt Martin Heidegger, dass die Aufgabe der Phänomenologie darin besteht, „[d]as was sich zeigt, so wie es sich von ihm selbst her zeigt, von ihm selbst her sehen lassen.“ (Heidegger 2006, 34) Meistens ist es allerdings so, dass die Dinge, so wie sie sich von ihnen selbst her zeigen, nicht sehen gelassen werden. Insbesondere die Wissenschaften versuchen alles Seiende zu verobjektiviert und es einem einheitlichen materiellen Deutungsprinzip zu unterwerfen. Ein gutes Beispiel für ein solches oft unangemessen verstandenes Phänomen ist das Dasein selbst – also wir Menschen – und die uns zugehörigen Seins- und Lebensformen (ibid. 44). Genauer gesagt neigen wir selbst dazu, uns von dem Seienden her zu verstehen, was wir selbst nicht sind, was uns aber innerhalb der Welt ständig begegnet – also als einen materiellen Gegenstand unter vielen (ibid., 58). Damit wir die Dinge so sehen lassen, wie sie sich von ihnen selbst her zeigen (oder erscheinen), muss die Phänomenologie uns dabei helfen, einige der Verdeckungen zurückzuweisen, die wir als Erkennende mit unserer wissenschaftlich dominierten Begrifflichkeit an sie herantragen. Man könnte sagen, dass die phänomenologische Methode nach Heidegger eine Art mäeutisches Moment in sich trägt, das zur Selbstreflexion anregt: Mit ihrer Begrifflichkeit erschließt sie die Dinge auf eine Weise, dass wir sie (indem wir uns von unserem vorurteilsbehafteten Blick befreien) auch so sehen, wie sie sich von ihnen selbst her zeigen.
Um dieses wesentliche Moment der phänomenologischen Methode und Begrifflichkeit explizit zu machen, verwendet Heidegger vor allem in den früheren Schriften den Ausdruck ‚formale Anzeige‘. Karl Kraatz‘ Buch Das Sein zur Sprache bringen hat es sich nun zur Aufgabe gemacht, die Entwicklung der formalen Anzeige in Heideggers Werk nachzuvollziehen, ihre Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit zu begründen (Kraatz 2022, 25) sowie deren drei wesentliche Charaktere – den explikativen, den prohibitiven und den transformativen Charakter – zu bestimmen (ibid., 28-29). Explikativ ist die formale Anzeige, insofern formalanzeigende Begriffe die Zugangssituation sowie den Verstehensvollzug desjenigen ‚Ich‘ explizit macht, welches das jeweilige Phänomen verstehen will (ibid., 47, 137). Prohibitiv ist die formale Anzeige, insofern ein formal anzeigender Begriff die Einordnung des Phänomens in ein bestimmtes (wissenschaftliches) Sachgebiet abwehrt, wodurch der konkrete Bezug des Begriffs für das erkennende Ich offengehalten wird (ibid., 91; siehe auch Heidegger 1994, 141). Transformativ ist die formale Anzeige, insofern sich das Ich nach dieser negativen Abwehr in eines verwandelt, das die zuvor verdeckten Phänomene ‚eigentlich hat‘ und sieht (Kraatz, 2022, 193).
Kraatz behauptet, dass ein wesentlicher Wert seines Buches in dem Nachweis besteht, dass das Gefühl der Angst, das Heidegger in Sein und Zeit beschreibt, der Schlüssel dazu ist, um vor allem diesen dritten Charakterzug zu verstehen. Allgemeiner gesagt, sei die formale Anzeige abhängig von der Befindlichkeit der Angst, genauer: von deren spezifischen Erschließungscharakteren, in dem Sinne, dass die philosophische Sprache entsprechend ‚gestimmt‘ sein muss, um Sein formal anzuzeigen (ibid., 148). In diesem argumentativen Schritt besteht wohl das größte Wagnis des Buches, da damit Methodenanalyse (vor allem aus den früheren Schriften) und Daseinsanalye (aus Sein und Zeit) in einem konkreten Fall zusammen gedacht werden. Anders ausgedrückt liest Kraatz Sein und Zeit so, als sei eines der Phänomene, die das Dasein in seiner Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit auszeichnen – die Angst –, auch das Phänomen, das das Verstehen formal-anzeigender Begriffe im Allgemeinen kennzeichnet. Dies ist insofern zumindest ein Wagnis, als dass Heidegger, wie Kraatz selbst bemerkt, in Sein und Zeit nur sehr selten das Wort ‚formalanzeigend‘ verwendet und die formale Anzeige schon gar nicht als Methode einführt (ibid., 25, 127). Aber es ist eben auch eine Schwierigkeit, weil das Phänomen der Angst nicht so viele Parallelen zu den Charakterzügen der formalen Anzeige aufweist, wie Kraatz behauptet.
Diese Textbesprechung soll aus drei Abschnitten bestehen. Im ersten Abschnitt werde ich allgemein darauf eingehen, wie Kraatz die ersten beiden Charakterzüge der formalen Anzeige erschließt und definiert. Im zweiten Abschnitt werde ich kritisch beleuchten, wie laut Kraatz die Angst mit dem dritten Charakterzug der formalen Anzeige zusammenhängt und warum sie dem Verstehensprozess formal-anzeigender Begriffe zugrundeliegen soll. Im letzten Abschnitt werde ich noch kurz auf Teil V des Buches eingehen, worin es um die Einbettung der formalen Analyse in Heideggers allgemeine Bedeutungs- und Begriffstheorie geht.
1 Die formale Anzeige als explikative und prohibitive Methode
Das Buch beginnt mit dem wiederholten Hinweis darauf, dass die Phänomenologie einer spezifischen Mitteilungsmethode bedarf, die Heidegger ‚formale Anzeige‘ nennt. Konkret erfahren wir als Lesende zunächst, dass sie anti-wissenschaftlich verfahren muss, das heißt, alltagsnah und nicht verobjektivierend. Sie muss auf ‚das je eigene Ich‘ oder die je eigene Person und deren jeweilige Verstehenssituation aufmerksam machen (ibid., 42, 44, 47, 51). Damit soll der Tatsache entgegengekommen werden, dass bei dem Verstehensvollzug eines Begriffs schon immer ein bestimmtes alltägliches Vorverständnis des zu Begreifenden bei uns Erkennenden mitschwingt. Dieses kann den Bezug auf den Gegenstand – sein ‚Haben’ – leiten und ihm Bedeutung verleihen (ibid., 54). Während die wissenschaftliche Sprache diesen Bezug auf das Ich verdrängt, das mögliche alltägliche Vorverständnis verdeckt und so das Bedeutungshafte für das Ich zerstört (ibid. 72-74), ist es das Ziel der formalen Anzeige diesem bedeutungshaften Vorverständnis einen Raum zu geben. Daraus ergibt sich auch der Umstand, dass formal-anzeigende Begriffe Bezugsoffenheit aufweisen müssen, da sie erst „aus der jeweiligen Erfahrungs- und Interpretationsrichtung ihre konkrete faktische kategoriale Bestimmtheit“ erhalten (Heidegger 1994, 141).
So weit, so gut. Geht es bei der Explikation aber wirklich um das konkrete einzelne Subjekt und dessen spezifische Ansichten, so wie Kraatz das behauptet? Es ist gar nicht so leicht, diese Fragen zu beantworten. Kraatz selbst gibt zu, dass Heidegger scheinbar willkürlich entscheidet, ob bei dem Verstehensvollzug eines Begriffs wirklich das Ich als eigenstes mit dabei ist oder nur ein ‚idealisiertes Subjekt‘ (Kraatz 2022, 85). Eine Passage in Kraatz‘ Buch, die diese Schwierigkeit bei der Auslegung Heideggers beispielhaft aufzeigt, ist die Stelle, in der er auf Heideggers Diskussion des Begriffs ‚Geschichte‘ in Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks eingeht (ibid., 81-83; Heidegger 1993, 43-86). Heidegger unterscheidet dort zwischen verschiedenen Bezugsformen, die sich je nach Sinn des Begriffs ‚Geschichte‘ voneinander unterscheiden. So sagt Heidegger, dass in dem Satz „Mein Freund studiert Geschichte“ ein theoretischer Einstellungszusammenhang zwischen dem Studenten und der Geschichtswissenschaft zum Ausdruck kommt, worin die konkrete Bezugs- und Vollzugssituation des Freundes keine Rolle spielt. Kraatz wendet hier gegen Heidegger ein, dass auch in diesem Fall die persönliche Erfahrung, die Einstellungen und die Meinungen des Studenten für den Bezug auf die Geschichtswissenschaft bestimmend sein können (Kraatz 2022, 85). Und laut Heidegger können diese Dinge bei dem geschichtswissenschaftlichen Verstehen in der Tat mitschwingen, allerdings gehen sie in den Bezugssinn nicht mit ein (Heidegger 1993, 77). Meiner Meinung nach ergibt das durchaus Sinn, da es sich bei dem Studium der Geschichte um ein rein objektives Verhältnis handelt, da die konkreten eigenen Erfahrungen und Einstellungen (bspw. die eigene Religiosität) für das Verständnis des Forschungsgegenstandes (bspw. die religiöse Entwicklung Luthers) keine Rolle spielen. Und sie sollen auch keine Rolle spielen, aufgrund des kontextunabhängigen Charakters von Wissenschaften, wie Kraatz selbst anerkennt (Kraatz 2022, 101). Denn was hat Luthers konkrete religiöse Entwicklung schon mit meiner eigenen zu tun? Ganz anders sieht es bei der eigenen persönlichen Geschichte aus, für deren Verständnis trivialerweise die eigenen Erfahrungen und Einstellungen eine Rolle spielen.
Das zweite Moment, das laut Kraatz wesentlich die formale Anzeige kennzeichnet, ist das Moment des Prohibitiven, auf das Heidegger in der Tat explizit in mehreren Stellen, bspw. an Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, aufmerksam macht (Heidegger 1994, 141). Dort heißt es weiter: „Die formale Anzeige verwehrt jede Abdrift in […] blind dogmatische Fixation des kategorialen Sinnes von Ansichbestimmtheiten einer auf ihren Seinssinn undiskutierten Gegenständlichkeit.“ (Ibid., 142). Der Grund, warum die formale Anzeige so verfahren muss, ist, wie Kraatz richtig sagt, die Ruinanz oder, wie es in Sein und Zeit heißt, die Verfallenheit, die eine solche Abdrift in das Objektive begünstigt. Ruinant ist das Verstehen, wenn das (wissenschaftliche) Begriffssystem schon den Bezug hinreichend prädeterminiert, eine Einordnung in ein Sachgebiet vorgibt und damit das zu verstehende eigentliche Phänomen verdeckt. Stattdessen soll, wie oben bereits erwähnt, dieser Bezug für das Ich offengehalten werden, damit er durch es erneuert werden kann (Kraatz 2022, 105).
Nun bedeutet diese Bezugsoffenheit nicht, dass der Bezug ein willkürlicher wird, sodass der formal-anzeigende Begriff je nach Belieben auf alles und jeden verweisen könnte. Leider hilft Teil II von Kraatz‘ Buch allerdings nur wenig, um zu verstehen, wie genau der Bezug formal-anzeigender Begriffe funktionieren soll. Erst in Teil V, in dem es unter anderem um die Formalität der formalen Anzeige geht, gibt es dazu einige Hinweise. So schreibt Kraatz zunächst, dass die formale Anzeige inhaltlich nur die Bedingungen des Verstehensvollzugs vorgibt aber nicht den Vollzug vorwegnimmt (ibid., 213). Allerdings nimmt kein Begriff seinen Verstehensvollzug vorweg. Begriffe haben es so an sich, dass jeder Mensch sie selbst verstehen muss. Der entscheidende Punkt liegt wohl in der Vorgabe der Vollzugsrichtung, welche nur prinzipiell sein soll (ibid.). Dieses Prinzipielle wiederum wird später als das Sein des Seienden identifiziert, sodass die formale Anzeige wiederum als Anzeige des Seins des Seienden ausgewiesen wird (ibid., 225). Nun ist das Sein des Seienden in der Tat das, um das es der Phänomenologie nach Heidegger geht, allerdings scheint mit diesem Hinweis bei Kraatz eher das Was und nicht das besondere Wie des Bezugs bestimmt zu sein. Erst ein Blick in Phänomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles verrät, dass damit durchaus etwas über das Wie des Bezugs ausgesagt wird: Das Sein des Seienden, auf das der Bezug gerichtet sein soll, ist keine irgendwie geartete oberste Seinskategorie, sondern ‚formalleer‘. Das bedeutet, dass es dem jeweiligen Phänomen selbst überlassen bleibt, wie der Modus der Verstehens beschaffen sein muss, sodass er nicht durch ein spezifisches Sachgebiet vorgegeben ist (Heidegger 1994, 60f).
Eine Schwierigkeit von Das Sein zur Sprache bringen besteht darin, dass der Autor selten Beispiele für den Verstehensvollzug formal-anzeigender Begriffe gibt. Das erschwert die Lektüre. Erst in Teil V gelingt mit der Erwähnung der Funktionsweise der Begriffe ‚Sorge‘ und ‚Dasein‘ in Sein und Zeit (Kraatz, 2022, 214) sowie der Besprechung von Heideggers dreistufiger Analyse des Begriffs der Langeweile in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Kraatz 2022, 264ff) eine konkrete Veranschaulichung des Verstehensvollzugs formal-anzeigender Begriffe. Allerdings kommen diese Beispiele erstens zu spät und bleiben zweitens deutlich hinter den zweihundert Seiten vorhergehender theoretischer Analyse der drei Charakterzüge der formalen Anzeige zurück. Dass sich die Momente der formalen Anzeige durchaus recht einfach an einem Beispiel aufweisen lassen, möchte ich mit einer kurzen Betrachtung der Diskussion des Phänomens des Todes in Sein und Zeit demonstrieren.
Heidegger beginnt die Analyse des Todes direkt mit einer Abwehr: Wir sollen das eigentliche Phänomen des Todes nicht auf Basis der Beobachtung anderer verstorbener Menschen als ein Vorkommnis am Ende unseres Lebens verstehen (Heidegger 2006, 240). Stattdessen müssen wir selbst das Sein dieses Phänomens aus der uns je eigenen Vollzugs- und Erlebnisperspektive heraus begreifen, und zwar als etwas, das wir gar nicht erleben und wobei wir auch nicht vertreten werden können; der Tod, oder besser das eigentliche Sein-zum-Tode, bestimmt unser Leben vielmehr strukturell und verleiht ihm dadurch seine Ganzheit (ibid., 266). So zeigt sich an dieser Analyse des Todes zum einen das explikative Element, da Heideggers formal-anzeigendes Philosophieren die Leserinnen und Leser auf sie selbst zurückverweist und dem Vorverständnis ihrer eigenen Situation Raum gibt, denn der eigene Tod ist in der Tat ein durch Jemeinigkeit gekennzeichnetes Existenzial. Gleichzeitig verhindert Heidegger durch dieses Offenhalten des Bezuges die Abdrift des Verstehens in Fachgebiete wie die Biologie. Er beschreibt seine Methode auf diesen Seiten sogar selbst als eine sowohl positive als auch prohibitive (ibid., 260).
Die formale Anzeige ist nicht nur explikativ und prohibitiv, sondern auch transformativ. Laut Kraatz versetzt die formale Anzeige das verstehende Subjekt nicht in einen passiven Verstehensmodus, bei dem das Selbst des Subjekts in seinem Dasein unangetastet bleibt, sondern fordert es zur Verwandlung auf: „Der Verstehensvollzug ist gleichsam ein Vollzug einer Verwandlung.“ (Kraatz 2022, 181) Und in der Tat spricht Heidegger in Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik explizit davon, dass das erkennende Dasein von der formalen Anzeige aufgefordert wird, eine entsprechende Verwandlung zu vollziehen (Heidegger 2004, 421-430). Aber eine Verwandlung in was?
Heidegger diskutiert in diesen Textpassagen erneut das Phänomen des eigenen Todes und wendet sich gegen eine Verstehensweise, dergemäß dieses Phänomen ein vorhandenes Ding ist, das durch den Begriff vollumfänglich beschrieben wird. Aber der (eigene) Tod ist, wie bereits erwähnt, nicht als ein zu vorhandenes Ereignis zu verstehen. Stattdessen soll der Modus des Verstehens so sein, dass sich das erkennende Subjekt selbst in das Da-sein des jeweiligen Phänomens verwandeln muss, wie Heidegger sagt (ibid., 428). Das heißt, es muss das Phänomen selbst aus seinem zu-oder-in-diesem-Phänomen-Sein heraus verstehen. Ich habe vorhin bereits darauf hingewiesen, dass ich, wenn ich bspw. verstehen will, worin der eigene Tod besteht, mich selbst als zum-Tode-seiend verstehen muss. In diesem transformativen Moment liegt auch der Grund, warum diese Begriffe anzeigend sein müssen, da sie ja ihre Konkretion nicht von selbst mitbringen, sondern eher „in eine Konkretion des einzelnen Daseins im Menschen hineinzeigen“ (ibid., 429; siehe auch Kraatz 2022, 198).
Wie formuliert Kraatz nun den transformativen Charakter der formalen Anzeige? Teil III und IV von Das Sein zur Sprache bringen wiederholen im Prinzip die beiden vorherigen Charaktere der formalen Anzeige – nämlich den der Abwehr und den der Verweisung auf das eigene ich. Allerdings führt Kraatz durchaus einen wichtigen neuen Aspekt in seine Analyse ein, nämlich den, dass Gefühle für die formal-anzeigende Begrifflichkeit entscheidend sind und dass die philosophische Sprache auf ihren Inhalt ‚einstimmen‘ muss, weil dieser nur in einer besonderen Stimmung zugänglich wird (ibid., 148, 179). Es stimmt, dass der transformative Zug, der zu einer eigentlichen Begegnung mit dem zu verstehenden Phänomen führt, durchaus so etwas wie eine Einstimmung in das Phänomen erfordert. Allerdings beharrt Kraatz darauf, dass das entsprechende Gefühl das der Angst sein muss.
Die Angst ist laut Kraatz dasjenige Gefühl, das den Menschen die ausdrückliche Selbstbegegnung ermöglicht (ibid., 129), die alltägliche ruinante Lebenstendenz unterbricht (ibid., 135) und ihm sein Freisein für das eigentliche Selbstsein offenbart (ibid., 144). Grund genug für Kraatz zu schließen, dass das, was er über die Angst gesagt hat, zugleich für die Funktionsweise und den Vollzug der formalen Anzeige selbst gilt (ibid., 158, 191) und dass die formale Anzeige wesentlich ‚beängstigend‘ ist (ibid., 148). Diese Textausschnitte und die ausführliche Besprechung des Angstphänomens in Teil III legen den Schluss nahe, dass die Angst für Kraatz tatsächlich das zentrale Gefühl des Verstehensvollzugs der formalen Anzeige ist. Allerdings relativiert Kraatz seine Aussagen auch. So spricht er oft davon, dass die Angst nur eines der Gefühle ist, die die Erschließungsfunktion der formalen Anzeige ermöglichen (ibid., 158, 167, 183, 233) und sagt sogar, dass zum Philosophieren nicht notwendigerweise bzw. nicht im wirklichen Sinne die Angst gehört (ibid., 235f). Solche Schwankungen machen es schwierig, den Autor auf eine kohärente Position festzulegen.
Nun könnte man auf Grundlage der obigen Beschreibung des transformativen Charakters in Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik in der Tat den Schluss ziehen, dass Heidegger selbst Methoden- und Daseinsanalyse zusammenführt, denn ich verstehe ein Phänomen nur dann eigentlich, wenn ich mich in demjenigen Seinsmodus, bzw. in derjenigen Stimmung befinde, die das jeweilige Phänomen ausmacht. In der Tat sagt Heidegger in Sein und Zeit, wie Kraatz betont, dass die Angst für die existenziale Analytik eine methodische Funktion übernimmt: So fungiert die Angst als erschließende Grundbefindlichkeit des Daseins (ibid., 165, 232, 241; Heidegger 2006, 185, 190-191). Das liegt allerdings daran, dass das Dasein in seiner Eigentlichkeit wesentlich in Angst ist. Daraus folgt nicht, dass die Angst den Verstehensvollzug formal-anzeigender Begriffe im Allgemeinen leitet. Nicht nur gibt es für eine solche Diagnose keine Belege in Sein und Zeit, sie steht auch im Konflikt mit der Rolle der Angst. Wir erinnern uns: Die formale Anzeige richtet sich gegen eine vergegenständlichende, Bedeutung zerstörende und theoretische Vereinnahmung des Verstehens durch die Wissenschaften und die damit einhergehende Verdrängung des alltäglichen, bedeutungshaften Vorverständnisses des erkennenden Ich (Kraatz 2022, 37-44). Zwar beschreibt Heidegger die Angst als etwas, das das Dasein aus der Flucht vor ihm selbst (in die Verfallenheit) vor es selbst zurückholt und es mit seinem In-der-Welt-Sein und seinem eigensten, freien Seinkönnen konfrontiert (Heidegger 2006, 194-191). Allerdings ist dasjenige, an das das Dasein verfallen ist und von wo die Angst es zurückholt, ausdrücklich nicht durch Wissenschaftlichkeit, Objektivität, Unbedeutsamkeit,[1] Theorie und Unalltäglichkeit gekennzeichnet, (ibid., 67) sondern durch Nützlichkeit, Zuhandenheit (und nicht nur Vorhandenheit) und Alltäglichkeit (ibid., 68-70, 167). Die Angst befreit das Dasein zwar von einer uneigentlichen Auslegung der Welt durch das öffentliche Man, aber dieses Man ist eben nicht notwendigerweise ein wissenschaftliches.
Darüber hinaus scheint mir das Phänomen der Angst, selbst wenn es Parallelen zu dem Verstehensvollzug formal-anzeigender Begriffe aufweisen würde, nicht hinreichend zu sein. Die Angst holt das Dasein aus seinem Verfallen-Sein an die Welt zurück, vereinzelt es und offenbart ihm so Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit als Möglichkeiten seines Seins (ibid., 191). Aber sie allein enthält noch kein proaktives Moment, welches doch den Verstehensvollzug in seiner Gänze kennzeichnet. Verfolgen wir die Daseinsanalyse in Sein und Zeit weiter, werden wir sehen, dass das zentrale Moment des Daseins in seiner Eigentlichkeit die Entschlossenheit ist, bei der die Momente der Angst, des Schuldigsein-Wollens und des Seins-zum-Tode zusammenlaufen. Sie ist das „verschwiegene, angstbereite Sichentwerfen auf das eigenste Schuldigsein“ (ibid., 297). In ihr ist das Dasein also nicht nur von den ‚Zufälligkeiten des Unterhaltenwerdens‘ durch das Man befreit vor das eigenste Seinkönnen gestellt (ibid., 310), sondern auch in das selbstbewusste Handeln und Verstehen zurückgebracht (ibid., 300). Auf die Entschlossenheit geht Kraatz aber gar nicht ein. Zwar verweist er zurecht darauf, dass die Angst dasjenige Moment ist, dass sowohl das Schuldigsein-Wollen und des Seins-zum-Tode stimmt (Kraatz 2022, 162-163; Heidegger 2006, 251, 277), allerdings macht dieser Befund ebenfalls noch nicht den Schluss notwendig, dass die Angst selbst, und nicht die Entschlossenheit, im Zentrum einer Analyse der formalen Anzeige als Ganzer stehen muss.
Bevor ich mit meiner Besprechung zum Ende komme, möchte ich noch kurz auf Teil V von Das Sein zur Sprache bringen eingehen. Teil V nimmt eine eigenartige Sonderstellung ein. Es handelt sich nicht mehr um ein weiteres Puzzlestück, das wir als Leserinnen und Leser brauchen, um die formale Anzeige zu verstehen – denn die Aufzeigung der Charakterzüge der formalen Anzeige soll in Teil IV abgeschlossen sein – sondern eher um eine Neubetrachtung der formalen Anzeige aus einer ‚sprachphilosophischen und begriffs- und bedeutungstheoretischen‘ Perspektive. Darin zeigt sich allerdings ein Problem im Aufbau des Buches. Auf der einen Seite wirkt der Teil buchstäblich angestückt. Immerhin gehen die ersten vier Teile aus der ursprünglichen Abschlussarbeit des Autoren von 2015 hervor; Teil V ist deutlich später entstanden (Kraatz 2022, 200). Auf der anderen Seite finden sich erst hier Ergänzungen und Beispiele, die für das Verständnis der einzelnen argumentativen Schritte in den ersten vier Teil schon wichtig gewesen wären. Eine Integration von Teil V in die anderen Teile wäre vielleicht besser gewesen.
Auffällig ist auch, dass Kraatz die beiden Begriffe ‚Sprachphilosophie‘ und ‚Begriffs- bzw. Bedeutungstheorie‘ homonym verwendet, auch wenn er dabei das Wort ‚Sprachphilosophie‘ durchgehend vorsichtig in Anführungszeichen setzt. Besser wäre es allerdings gewesen, genau zu klären, was beide Begriffe bedeuten und wie sie sich zueinander verhalten – im Allgemeinen und bei Heidegger. Sprachphilosophie kann zum einen als philosophische Methode verstanden werden, die die Normalsprache als Quelle für philosophische Erkenntnisse nutzt. Sprachphilosophie zu betreiben bedeutet hierbei, Erkenntnisse über die Bedeutung eines Begriffes mittels der Untersuchung der grammatischen Eigenschaften des Begriffes in alltäglichen Sprachkontexten zu gewinnen. Im Unterschied dazu kann die Sprache als philosophische oder alltägliche Mitteilungsmethode aber selbst zu einem Forschungsgegenstand für die Philosophie werden: In diesem Sinne wäre Sprachphilosophie als Philosophie zu verstehen, die untersucht, inwiefern (philosophische, wissenschaftliche oder alltägliche) Ausdrücke Bedeutung haben und sich auf Gegenstände beziehen. Schließlich kann ‚Sprachphilosophie‘ drittens auch noch als eine Philosophie verstanden werden, die die Rolle der Sprache als soziale Praxis und Seinsform philosophisch untersucht.
Meiner Meinung nach lassen sich Beispiele für alle drei ‚Arten‘ von Sprachphilosophie in Heideggers Texten finden, die in ihrer Funktion klar auseinander gehalten werden müssen. Der zweite Sinn von ‚Sprachphilosophie‘ ist wohl der für Kraatz interessanteste und auch derjenige, der am ehesten mit den Begriffen ‚Begriffs- bzw. Bedeutungstheorie‘ übereinstimmt. Und in Heideggers Ausführungen zur formalen Anzeige geht es in der Tat um die Frage, wie philosophische Begriffe sich auf die Dinge beziehen (sollen). Wenn Heidegger in Sein und Zeit allerdings zum ersten Mal über die Rede, das Gerede, das Auslegen, Hören, Schweigen, etc. spricht (Heidegger 2006, 160ff), dann philosophiert er über Sprache eher in diesem dritten Sinne von ‚Sprachphilosophie‘, da es sich dabei um Seinsmodi des Dasein handelt. Beispiele für den ersten Sinn finden sich eher in anderen Texten.[2]
Wie sieht es nun konkret mit Heideggers Begriffs- bzw. Bedeutungstheorie in diesem Teil von Kraatz‘ Buch aus? Im Grunde bezieht sich Kraatz hier erneut auf den Kern der Idee der formalen Anzeige: Formal-anzeigende Begrifflichkeiten zeigen die Phänomene so an, dass das erkennende Subjekt sie erst im konkreten entsprechend gestimmten Nachvollzug erschließt. Damit sagt Kraatz im Vergleich zu den vorangegangenen Teilen nichts Neues, findet aber durchaus klarere und deutlichere Formulierungen. Interessant ist dann auch noch der Hinweis, dass es sich bei der formalen Anzeige nicht um eine Gruppe von bestimmten Begriffen handelt, sondern um eine bestimmte Haltung im Umgang mit philosophischen Begriffen (Kraatz 2022, 230) – eine Haltung, die Heidegger in seinen methodologischen und begriffs- bzw. bedeutungstheoretischen Aussagen in der Tat zum Ausdruck bringt.
Kraatz‘ Buch hilft durchaus dabei, die Leserinnen und Leser auf die formalen Anzeige, so wie sie in Heideggers Texten entwickelt wird, richtig ‚einzustimmen‘. Man mag dem Autor auch glauben wollen, dass Heidegger in der Idee der formalen Anzeige eine raffinierte und ungewöhnliche Methode entwickelt, die eng mit seiner Daseinsanalyse verbunden ist. Das ergibt auch Sinn, weil dasjenige, was wir mit Heidegger vor allem verstehen wollen – das Dasein –, wir selbst sind, also verstehende Wesen. Auch wollen wir dem Autoren glauben, dass der Nachvollzug formal-anzeigender Begrifflichkeiten von einem erfordert, sich auf eine besondere Art und Weise auf das zu verstehende Phänomen einzustellen, wie das bei wissenschaftlichen Begrifflichkeiten nicht der Fall. Allerdings gelingt die exegetische Überzeugungsarbeit nur zum Teil. Das liegt zum einen daran, dass das Buch in einigen Detailfragen meiner Meinung nach falsch liegt. Zum anderen erschweren die redundante und theorielastige Argumentationsstruktur sowie die doch allzu stark an Heideggers eigene schwierige Sprache angelehnte Ausdrucksweise vor allem Leserinnen und Lesern, die nicht sehr mit Heidegger vertraut sind, leider das Verständnis.
Literatur
Heidegger, Martin: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt- Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (Wintersemester 1929/30). Hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004.
Heidegger, Martin: Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks (Sommersemester 1920). Gesamtausgabe Band 59, hrsg. von Claudius Strube. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993.
Heidegger, Martin: Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Wintersemester 1921/22). Gesamtausgabe Band 61, hrsg. von Walter Bröcker und Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994.
Heidegger, Martin: Sein und Zeit (1927). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006.
Kraatz, Karl: Das Sein zur Sprache bringen. Die formale Anzeige als Kern der Begriffs- und Bedeutungstheorie Martin Heideggers. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann GmbH, 2022.
[1] Ganz im Gegenteil. Für das Dasein werden die innerweltlichen Dinge erst unbedeutsam, wenn es sich ängstigt, weil sich erst dadurch die Welt in ihrer Weltlichkeit aufdrängt (Heidegger 2006, 187; siehe auch Kraatz 2022, 141).
[2] In Sein und Zeit sagt Heidegger interessanterweise, dass die philosophische Forschung auf ‚Sprachphilosophie‘ verzichten muss, um den‚ Sachen selbst‘ nachzufragen (Heidegger 2006, 166). Ich vermute, dass er sich hierbei in der Tat auf Sprachphilosophie in diesem ersten Sinne bezieht, da sich seine Kritik gegen eine Philosophie richtet, die einzig in der Sprache verharrt und das Verankertsein der Sprache in der Welt selbst nicht thematisiert.
Allerdings betreibt Heidegger auch hin und wieder Sprachphilosophie in diesem ersten Sinne. So bemerkt er in Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, dass es zu dem Substantiv ‚Philosophie‘ ein passendes direktes Verb gibt (‚philosophieren‘); bei den Substantiven ‚Biologie‘ oder ‚Physik‘ ist das nicht der Fall. Daraus schließt Heidegger, dass Philosophie selbst ein Verhalten ist, während es sich bei der Biologie und der Physik eher um Sachgebiete handelt (Heidegger 1994, 42-61). Kraatz verweist auch auf diese Stelle (Kraatz 2022, 50-51)
Reviewed by: Taylor J. Green (Carleton University)
A fifty-four-year correspondence between teacher and student is what Correspondence: 1919-1973: Martin Heidegger and Karl Löwith brings to English readers. Part of a larger series of The Collected Letters of Martin Heidegger, Correspondence 1919-1973 is a compiled set of one hundred and twenty-four letters, postcards, and telegrams, seventy-six from Martin Heidegger and forty-eight by Karl Löwith, published with helpful annotations, supplementary material, and biographical information. The relationship of Heidegger and Löwith is, certainly, marked by Heidegger’s actions in 1933, but also by an enduring and distinguished bond between two philosophical giants of the twentieth century. The final two letters in 1973 of these compiled correspondences are not sent to Karl Löwith but to his wife after his passing. Heidegger, outliving his former student by three years to the exact day, remarks to Frau Löwith, “may the mercifulness of your husband’s death diminish the pain of his departure, and with time transform it into thoughtful remembrance…The circle of those awakened for thinking during the 1920s grows ever smaller. Soon, at the very most, they will only live on in the memory of a few individuals” (156).
The warmth, trust, erudition, and philosophical conversion that Heidegger and Löwith share in these correspondence exposes a past philosophical era of the previous century, one of which thinking was the central tenet. Translators Assaiante and Ewegen capture the keen philosophical wit of a young Karl Löwith navigating early adulthood through philosophical discourse with one of the greatest German philosophers. In the translation, they also capture the essence of Heidegger’s mentorship and strict academically centric mind. As the translators state upfront, references to lost letters not compiled in this edition “are not in the possession of the estate” (ix). Any shortcomings in compilation does not mean, however, that these letters, as they stand, are nothing short of enlightening for scholars to gain insight into two excellent minds of our contemporary age. The explanatory annotations, the careful translation, unabridged correspondence, and the thoughtful editor’s forward and afterward provides a book easily recommendable to those interested in either or both philosophical minds, in their own written words, as they matured through the early twentieth century.
The language of the letters is “causal and friendly” and lacks the “specialized language” of Heidegger’s lecture courses. Yet there are times when Heidegger prioritizes supervising and guiding the young Löwith by engaging in dense philosophical discourse. Löwith more than obliges and, eventually, extends Heidegger’s existential thinking to-be-with-others in his 1928 habilitation. Captured correctly in the translation is Heidegger’s radicality, his growing disregard for Husserl, his dissonance with the arid bureaucratic structure of the university, and his prescient formulation of the arguments of Being and Time (1927). The translators, attempting the difficult task of uncovering Heidegger’s own self-references, convey the meaning of Eigendestruction in English as destructuring, self-destructuring, or destructing one’s own. This concept is important as Heidegger refers to the term often in the years leading up to the publication of his first major work.
In the “Editor’s Afterward”, it is stated that the letters represent four distinct periods in the relationship between Heidegger and Löwith (288). Classifying the letters in this way is helpful: (1) 1919-1925, Löwith is a student of Heidegger’s until the time he leaves for Italy. This period by far contains the most letters between them. (2) 1925-1929, Heidegger has become a proper professor, as Löwith prepares for his habilitation (successfully habilitated in 1928). (3) In the 1930s, notably, Heidegger becomes rector of University of Freiburg. On page 165, the translators provide an “Excerpt from Karl Löwith’s Italian Diary (1934-1936)”, detailing the last encounter Löwith had with his mentor prior to the war, where Heidegger does not take off the party insignia on his lapel, translated unabridged and with a different tone from what is printed in Richard Wolin’s The Heidegger Controversy. The last phase (4) is a “reconciliation” between Heidegger and Löwith. The impact of Heidegger embracing the rectorship of Freiburg in 1933 does not heal for Löwith, as evidence in Löwith’s documentation of their last encounter and in the salient lack of correspondence. This period contains the least exchanges. One is a birthday wish to Heidegger for his sixtieth birthday in 1949. Another is Heidegger consoling Löwith on his deathbed. Heidegger attaches a poem, or rather, “a series of Thoughts”, entitled Pathways, that reads “Pathways, footsteps loosening up, echoing a humble fate. And once again the distress of dusk, hesitant, in the waiting light” (156).
I review and reconstruct much of the conflating narratives and major themes throughout the work. I analyze the letters in each phase in the chronological structure the editors have provided. In this way, we gain the most detailed insight into the correspondence, as each period builds on the previous. A distinct relation between the two thinkers further defines each period of exchange. Thematically, we read the correspondence initially as two intellectuals yearning for philosophical discourse and influencing each other in the early days of the 1920s. This relationship is strengthened through the habilitation period but is abolished and forever ruptured by 1933. As Heidegger’s later work, post-denazification trials, became as important as his early work, essays such as “The Question Concerning Technology” and “A Letter on Humanism” for example, Löwith would take up the theme of Heidegger’s political decision deriving from his philosophy in such works as “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism” and “Heidegger: Thinker in a Destitute Time”. Although the centrepiece of this volume is the teacher-student relationship, 1933 perhaps persistently looms as a shadow cast over the dialogue, as we read into the historicity of the exchange knowledge of the present.
Period 1: 1919-1925
From 1919-1922, Löwith studies with Heidegger and Husserl in Freiburg. Although Löwith received his Ph.D. in 1923 under Moritz Geiger, already in 1920, Löwith is writing to Heidegger that “I am not merely being polite when I admit to you quite readily that it is solely your lectures that I miss” (13). Löwith, in 1922, writes to Heidegger that “Geiger is familiar with every last bit of hastily published modern shit, but with nothing decent. He is interested in my dissertation. A few days ago, I gave him a fully corrected and typed copy. He is somewhat amazed by the fact that one can learn quite a bit more in Freiburg than here” (53). The four letters we have from 1919 suggest that Heidegger has an intellectual interest in the gifted student but, initially, maintains formal relations. In early 1920, Heidegger shows gratitude to Löwith for “that excellent presentation of yours, in which I detected actual intellectual spirit without adherence to a specific scholarly dogmatism (which is the death of all philosophy)” (4). From 1920 onwards, the letters grow long with philosophical discourse, criticisms of academia, criticisms of Husserl, academic gossip, and book suggestions. Heidegger often uses Löwith as a springboard for lecture course topics to pursue. According to a 1920 letter, Heidegger asserts, “I have nixed the entire summer lecture course and am now reworking it anew…Perhaps I will dare to try this experiment in the coming semesters after all. Even we in philosophy are so weighed down by tradition, so unhistorical {unhistorisch}, that we no longer know ourselves. I have again thought about the Hegel seminar, and must say that there is no way he [Jonas Cohn] could have chosen a more inappropriate text than the Encyclopedia of Logic; it is evidence of the absolute innocuousness of everything when compared to Hegel, and also of the sort of dallying with philosophy that is so often practiced here” (5).
During this period Heidegger is a Privatdozent, a lecturer, and not the “secret king of thought” he would become after 1927’s publication of Being and Time. From 1919-1923, Heidegger is an assistant to Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg. In the letters of 1920, Heidegger often advises his student on many matters of the state of philosophy in Weimar Germany, and what Löwith can do to combat this pervasive philosophical shallowness. In Document 7, Heidegger elucidates to the young Löwith that “Spenglerizing seems to be subsiding, and it is now finally time for one to engage these ideas philosophically…You are still in those pleasant years during which one has time to read; only rarely do I have occasion to do so, and when I do read, it is always ‘with a particular purpose’…for we do not practice philosophy in order to stockpile bits of knowledge and propositions, but rather to shape life” (6). We also find quips in Documents 9 and 10 where Heidegger warns “against making relativism into a standpoint”; or muses “to become a Hegelian is only half as bad as becoming a Kierkegaardian”; or advises that “chattering on about the religious based on what one has read in an encyclopedia”; or imparts that “one should not desire to create proselytizers” (7-10). Around this time of exchange, the letters become intellectually dense and engaging. Heidegger writes to Husserl about taking on Löwith as a student, where Husserl is in “heartfelt agreement” (9). Heidegger, however, hesitates soon after by saying he is overworked and that he “is too poor at the moment to buy books” (9) and that “I myself am not even seen as a ‘philosopher’ anymore, for I am in fact only still a theologian” (12).
Löwith responds a month later in a moving letter demonstrating the student’s intellectual gifts. “For as much as I agree with you,” Löwith suggests, “about the separation of philosophy and scholarship, the problem nevertheless remains unsolved, given that today one cannot allow oneself to posit philosophical claims in the manner of Schelling or even Hegel” (14). He further claims that Max Weber comes close to “lifting such a heavy burden” for philosophy as at one time Hegel did (15). But after some skepticism, matched, in the previous letter, by Heidegger’s doubts on German philosophy, Löwith affirms, “given such doubts and such hesitancies regarding scholarly activity, it is difficult to justify making philosophy into a career” (15). To comment on Heidegger’s growing disinterest but incredible academic powers, Löwith ends the letter by requesting of Heidegger if he can speak truthfully. In describing his soon-to-be mentor, Löwith boldly expounds that he understands Heidegger on a spiritual level: “One senses a certain unease and humane insecurity within you, whose consequence is a slightly overcomposed acerbity and mistrust, and one seeks in you that indefinable inner freedom and ability to be in control of oneself. I am sure you yourself are suffering the most from this, and I would never mention it if I myself were not able to empathize all too well” (15).
Due to such statements and lengthy philosophical discourse, throughout the 1920s, Heidegger’s trusts his pupil immensely. Heidegger, for example, says to Löwith that the new volume of Kant Studien is worthless in its entirety (16). Löwith frequently criticizes Husserl attempting, I believe, to impress Heidegger, and Löwith appears to approach philosophy more in line with Heidegger than any other major German philosopher. In a 1923 letter, Heidegger asserts, “never in his life, not even for a second, was Husserl a philosopher. He is becoming increasingly ridiculous” (63). One can only imagine the substantial content of their in-person philosophical diatribes, as many of the letters confirm dates to meet in various German cities, while roaming the state for invited talks and conferences. Heidegger, on occasion, invites Löwith to his hut in the Black Forest. In Supplement 5, the editors include Karl Löwith’s written entry at the Heidegger family hut in Todtnauberg (1924). Although on that day, “philosophy of language came to expression in such a way that philosophy was not discussed” (169). “And now you have a letter full of gossip,” Heidegger writes in 1922, “but this is the only way that one can write about one’s situation; to speak of other matters in between would be a shame, it’s better to do that in person” (57). During these exchanges, Heidegger must have shown his increasing irritation with Plato philosophically and Husserl personally, although still dedicating Being and Time to the latter. Löwith convinces Heidegger that he is able to “strip off all of that rationalistic Platonism” (17). Later on, Löwith cites an encounter where during his second semester he voiced to Heidegger that he had a “vehement resistance to [Husserl’s] philosophical cast of mind. Today it is absolutely clear to me that Husserl, on the deepest level, is not a great philosopher, and that it is a massive delusion to put him on the same pedestal as Kant; his whole disposition is infinitely far removed from reality—it is without life and is doctrinally logical” (21).
Aside from a shared criticism of Husserl, which persists through the decade, Heidegger’s predisposition towards a pedagogy guided by philosophy shines forth from the text. Whatever can be said about Heidegger, these letters expose Heidegger’s devotion to teaching philosophy. In Document 25, there are ambivalent statements for Löwith to unpack, such as Heidegger’s ideal of “one’s mastery of things [which] arises out of the clearest and most stringent expertise—but in the philosophy itself, one should not notice this. These days, it is particularly difficult to advance toward a vibrant and enlivened philosophizing and to accomplish what it demands. And that is why you must not work at half strength, but must rather fuse reflection into, and with, philosophizing. Philosophy is not fun—one can be destroyed by it; and he who does not risk this will never come to it” (20). Although Heidegger desires an ambitious philosophical career, he does not wish to “make the world better—even less so university philosophers; everyone should say what they want to say, and then apply themselves accordingly” (20). Moreover, in a particularly chasten letter addressed to him, Löwith, on his teacher’s request, must take philosophy more seriously. Almost challenging Löwith forward into the path of higher learning, Heidegger evaluates, “you must become more disciplined in your work—not in regard to quantity, but in regard to quality. The meaning and sense of philosophizing is itself historical {historisch}, and what matters is to find one’s own—and to leave aside all the yardsticks of earlier philosophers…One should not unduly hasten the formation of one’s thoughts” (20).
The translators have correctly captured Heidegger’s incisive play on the word existence by leaving the term existentiell untranslated. Heidegger changes the word for existence in his later works to distinguish from conventional notions of the term. Engaging with Löwith on interpretations of his work, Heidegger seeks to charm the young scholar into following “the existentell interpretation of facticity” (37). We find the use of the term Dasein (again, correctly untranslated) as early as 1921, in perhaps a set of letters that provides the deepest philosophical dialectic between the interlocutors. In Document 25, Heidegger denies a definition of philosophy proposed by Löwith in a previous letter by stating philosophy is pointless in isolation. Philosophy only matters as belonging to existentell facticity. By claiming he does not follow Kierkegaard, Heidegger notes that tailoring one’s philosophical work to suit the “cultural tasks” of the “common man” is absurd (37). Instead, university philosophers must be tied essentially to factical-existentell life; however, Heidegger is “not hereby asserting that philosophy only exists within the university, but rather that philosophizing, precisely because of its foundational purpose at the university (understood in an existentiell way), therein has the facticity of its own enactment, and with that, its own limits and restrictions” (37). Löwith’s rebuke of this claim concerning inherent limitations in facticity would become the foundation of his thought for the rest of his philosophical career.
These early letters are filled with advice for Löwith to become a scholar in his own right. Admitting that he does not wish his time as a student upon anyone, Heidegger acknowledges he is today a great thinker because of his resolve as a student (39). What Löwith shows in Document 24, his most extensive and erudite letter, is extraordinary. He receives the lessons of his mentor’s pedagogy, proving so by claiming that one cannot “exist in the proper sense within just any and all sorts of scholarly philosophical questioning…One can only exist in a true and complete way when asking questions about existence, and existence does not coincide with scholarly fanaticism” (32). The self-discovery process through philosophical rigor is the quality, it appears, Heidegger holds in the highest regard, not only for himself, but also for his most promising pupil. From these letters preceding Being and Time, we can conclude that Heidegger’s early pedagogy is one of existentiell authenticity for himself and his student.
Period 2: 1925-1929
Löwith stays in Italy in 1924-1925. In summer 1923, Heidegger informs Löwith that he has “obtained an appointment in Marburg with the rights and status of an Ordinarius Professor beginning on October 1st” (73). In the following letter, Document 74, Löwith’s warm adoration of the good news presupposes that he and Heidegger, by this point, are close friends and philosophical confidants. As early as 1922, a year before the Beer Hall Putsch, Löwith writes to Heidegger, “frighteningly, hidebound nationalism and anti-Semitism (fueled by Bavarian beer) are spreading. Campaign posters are being hung in the lecture halls…They demand, for example, that the university should only be allowed to have 1 percent Jewish professors, because this correlates to the percentage of the population at large” (57). Löwith’s letters, from 1923 forward, reflect an anxiety about a career in philosophy, an existential concern voiced in previous letters. This time, however, the reason of concern is material subsistence. Löwith writes, “the little bit of money that [I] earn here doesn’t go very far given this ever-rising inflation. There won’t be many other opportunities for money in a small city like Marburg…Please excuse these tiresome financial matters, but unfortunately, nothing is possible without them” (75). Weimar inflation, Heidegger’s new position, lack of employment opportunity, anxiety about material goods, and growing anti-Semitism in Germany are the reasons we gain by reading the correspondence for why Löwith accepts a job to work at a bookstore in Rome (87).
Indeed, despite his student residing in Italy, Heidegger accepts Löwith to habilitate under him. In Document 56, Heidegger lays out his demands, should Löwith have plans to habilitate, “then the only thing that matters is to submit a solid work; apart from that do not let the intention become explicit in any way. On this occasion, I must tell you once again that the prospects of a position as a professor in the next decades are poorer than ever, owing to the fact that chairs in philosophy will most likely be reduced…The career track is a matter of luck. If you put effort into it, you will have my help. However, beyond that, I don’t want the aggravation of having to lead you by the hand” (85).
Despite his location, Löwith wishes for the prospect of habilitation. Habilitating only depends on “(1) if I produce a work that meets your expectations and that leads you to advocate for me, and (2) on the faculty…If you share my view, I would be very happy if you could send me this in your reply…” (86). “Naturally,” Löwith continues, “I am not in good spirits right now, but I am also not without hope…for I believe myself not to be in error when I take the two weeks…to be a sign that nothing was in vain, that I have not been given a burden too heavy to shoulder, and that my philosophical—scholarly abilities have continued to grow silently along with me, despite, and because of everything” (87). Heidegger confers his student to keep his head high as things are not so bad (126), despite Löwith’s sick father and the turmoil surrounding lack of career prospects. Heidegger responds, “I come from a very poor family—all that my parents scrimped and saved, without ever understanding what I was studying or what I planned to do—all of that was still so meager that I had to endure my time as a student with far greater privation than is the case today among ‘poor’ students. And it worked out because I never gave up…You will not starve to death, but life is not pleasant; not even when one is an Ordinarius Professor” (89). In a 1928 letter, Heidegger writes that every semester he started with nothing in his pockets. He had to go into debt and go hungry; he implores Löwith to persist through the adversity (126).
After his time in Italy, Löwith interprets Heidegger’s Being and Time for his habilitation thesis. In 1927, Löwith asks Heidegger to think back to his time under Husserl in Freiburg to “recognize the thankfulness within my unevenly matched assault” (111). Löwith is now thirty years old, and ready to defend his habilitation. In his own work, he has tried to present what he understands to be a problem of Heidegger’s thought (111). Whereas Heidegger’s Being and Time is about the authenticity of the ontological against the ontic of the das Mann or the they, the inauthentic crowd, Löwith’s central focus of his thesis is that Dasein is a being-with-others [Miteinanderseins] that “lies on the same plane of conflict as one’s authentic existence, and through ‘nature’ (sensibility) it does not become unproblematic but rather concretely and specifically problematic” (117).
Heidegger accepts Löwith’s habilitation thesis. Document 77 is a technical response from Heidegger to many of Löwith’s charges that Dasein must be-with-others. Defending his own work against Löwith’s interpretation, Heidegger is unwavering in his conviction that ontology is only founded ontically, and that he is the first person to have fully articulated this claim (121). The interlocutors write back and forth for the rest of 1927 and part of 1928 about the faculty process of passing Löwith.
In Supplement 2, the editors have printed in full “Martin Heidegger’s Assessment of Karl Löwith’s Habilitation Thesis (1928).” The thesis is entitled Der Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenchen. The assessment outlines a shared world from being-with-others, another concept that has remained untranslated in English, Miteinanderseins, where subjects create relations of “personae” playing roles for others in a shared world (162). Out of this shared world, individuals determine their existential subjectivity by the world of things belonging before that of people (162). The adoption of a shared world is limited by the individual, as each shares a responsibility to individuality as such so that others maintain this existential process. In his assessment, Heidegger calls this the “I-You” relationship (162). Heidegger admits in prior letters that psychoanalysis and anthropology are irrelevant to crucial issues and not of much interest to him. But in the evaluation of the thesis, Heidegger praises the work as it shows “a scholarly independence that exceeds what is typical of habilitation theses in philosophy” (163).
Period 3: 1930s
In a letter dated April 29, 1928, Heidegger writes to Löwith that the committee “stands in agreement; thus your work can be disseminated to the faculty as quickly as possible” (127). After the habilitation period, Löwith searches for academic positions. Löwith becomes a Privatedozent in Marburg—from 1928 until Hitler’s ascension in 1933—where Heidegger advises him to “hold at least a three-hour a week lecture concerning the history of modern philosophy since Descartes. You have to immerse yourself and take from it what you can get…In the future, do not be too surprised if you come to experience more, and more powerfully, the demoralization of the university” (130-131).
In 1929, Löwith marries Elisabeth Ada Kremmer. Heidegger sends his best. Then, the relationship of the decade-long pen mates turns tense. Document 96 displays Heidegger’s disregard for superficiality, especially among the university elites, as he is thankful to Fate that he is “truly made of stuff that cannot be harmed by all this whispering and whining. Despite the inner necessity of the creative process, I would rather choose to remain in utter silence than have my work be dependent on this profession” (136). He criticizes the fact that Löwith cannot get away “from Dilthey, Nietzsche, and psychoanalysis”, which was proven “during your first semester when you did not follow my advice to study a wide range of historical lectures, which would have forced you into other matters. But how could I blame you for such things! Then, I could have quite easily and effortlessly prevented your habilitation” (136). As a lecturing academic, and no longer a student, Löwith defends the claims of his habilitation thesis against the charges. According to Löwith, “for then it would indeed be tautological to say that the human only ‘is’ the human on the basis of the Dasein within him…in reality it is neither tautological nor self-evident; and a justification for why this is so was lacking from Being and Time, a jettisoning of the ‘neutrality’ of essential ontological claims, and I see the first signs of such an attempt on pages 17 and 18 of your lecture [What is Metaphysics], where this purity of Dasein is proven on the basis of the one…who experiences anxiety, and where you say that anxiety ‘transforms’ the human into pure Dasein” (138). Nevertheless, Löwith confesses to Heidegger that “an astonishing number of students have learned an unconditional respect for philosophy through you, and you have probably experienced more joy with some of them than you did with me” (141).
1931 and 1932 hold many of the same previous themes of going over lecture topics and explication of philosophical concepts, besides the fact that now Löwith is asking for Heidegger’s advice on lecture topics. Just before the new year in 1932, Heidegger sends his sincere condolences for the loss of Löwith’s father. In the tumultuous year for the relationship when Heidegger embraces the Nazi party, we have three letters and one telegram from 1933, all from Heidegger. We are missing at least two because Heidegger thanks Löwith for letters mid-1933, which is after the April date of Heidegger’s rectorship of Freiburg University. Also, Heidegger congratulates Löwith on a stipend in July. One of the omissions is Löwith asking if he could dedicate his book to Heidegger (the editors suggest the book in question is Löwith’s Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, or the Philosophical and Theological Overcoming of Nihilism). Heidegger responds, “in reality I know well how you feel about me, even when your work goes in other directions. Also, with an eye toward possible situations in which I might be asked to render a judgement about you, I suggest that you omit the dedication” (149). Two letters appear from Heidegger in 1936-1937. Löwith emigrates to Japan in 1936, as living in Europe grows calamitous.
Period 4: Reconciliation
Löwith would ride out the war in America, teaching at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut (1941-1949) and at the New School for Social Research (1949-1952). In 1952, he moves back to Germany to become an Ordinarius Professor at Heidelberg. From New York, Löwith sends a telegram in 1949 giving Heidegger best wishes on his sixtieth birthday. In Document 113 Löwith writes Heidegger from his new position at Heidelberg. After almost two decades of silence, interrupted only by the birthday telegram, Löwith discusses academic conferences and interpretations of Nietzsche. While 1966 is the year Heidegger claims that “only a god can save us now” in the famous Der Spiegel interview, a year later Heidegger and Löwith reconnect when Löwith is in Freiburg for a two-day colloquium on “Modern Atheism and Morality” (277). The return letter from Heidegger indicates that they did plan to visit each other. Unclear is how close the relationship is immediately afterwards. In the 1970s, nothing of substance is exchanged in letters. Heidegger writes Löwith in 1973 when he learns from Gadamer about his illness. During time of sickness, Heidegger writes, “the world contracts and withdraws into the simple. In our old age, we think of the end—but also of the beginning—of our paths” (155). This remark undoubtedly draws attention to the good moments they had discussing philosophy and gossiping about Husserl in the early 1920s. After Löwith’s death, we draw the correspondence to a close when Heidegger receives a photo of the departed from Frau Löwith to which Heidegger says shows him “in a state of calm and collected contemplation” (156).
What Correspondence 1919-1973 brings to English readers is indispensable. It uncovers a foregone age of thinking between two monumental figures. The major linchpin thematically is the year Heidegger becomes a figurehead for National Socialism. Before then, in the correspondence, Löwith is an astute student, and after, the relationship fragments. While Löwith would finally embrace a professional career in philosophy, after all his written anxiety about the pursuit, his insight into 1933 becomes a topic of an autobiography originally published as an essay for a competition at Harvard in 1939 “My Life in Germany Before and After 1933”. Indeed, many of Löwith’s later writings find Heidegger’s existentell analytic a reason for his political involvement with National Socialism. Undoubtedly due to Heidegger’s unique philosophical pedagogy in early 1920s, Löwith would make a laudable philosophical career searching for limits in a time when society removes traditional constraints. What these exchange of letters makes known with clarity is that Löwith, while habilitating under Heidegger, already finds the concepts of authenticity and facticity problematic for their lack of ground for being-with-others. The translators of this volume capture all the necessary components to make sense of Heidegger’s early thinking, while the editors carefully provide more than enough supplementary material to contextualize and situate the often-perplexing references. By providing English readers with Heidegger and Löwith’s erudite relationship, in their own written words, Correspondence 1919-1973 is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century continental thought.
Reviewed by: Christopher Braddock (Auckland University of Technology)
Wanda Torres Gregory’s latest book, entitled Speaking of Silence in Heidegger, explores the conceptual links and deep undercurrents at work in Martin Heidegger’s often unforthcoming thinking on silence. In typical chronological fashion (as with her previous book Heidegger’s Path to Language) she charts the course of Heidegger’s thoughts on silence, from Being and Time in the period of 1927–29, to the collection of essays in the 1950s On the Way to Language, and ending in Chapter 9 with critical conclusions about Heidegger’s thinking on silence from the 1950s onward. On this basis, Torres Gregory critically assesses Heidegger’s later ideas on silence in terms of “autonomous forces that define our essence as the beings who speak in word-sounds” (as described on her homepage for Simmons University where she is Professor of Philosophy).
This book plays an important role in prioritising non-visual phenomena. Both Don Idhe and Lisbeth Lipari have pointed to a visualist habit in phenomenology as well as western epistemologies in general. Idhe writes in Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound that there is a sense of vision that “pervades the recovery of the Greek sense of physis by Heidegger [where] ‘lighting,’ ‘clearing,’ ‘shining,’ ‘showing,’ are all revels in light imagery” (2007: 21). In this context, Idhe explores how auditory phenomena might be studied in a phenomenology of sound and listening that also gives way to “the enigma… of the horizon of silence” (2007: 23). Torres Gregory’s Speaking of Silence in Heidegger contributes richly to this genealogy of phenomenological scholarship that gives precedence to non-visual phenomena and their enigmatic relationship to hearing, listening and silence.
As I read Speaking of Silence in Heidegger, I was stimulated to question, ponder, and reason carefully about the great problem of silence. The contents page enticed me to read with chapter headings such as: Toward the Essence of Silence (Chapter 2); Quiet Musings in the Project toward the Stillness (Chapter 7); and The Soundless Peal of the Stillness (Chapter 8). I was immediately drawn into a sense of mystery and a longing to know more about essence, poetics, stillness of silence and its relationships to language. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in silence and the philosophy of language.
Reading the Introduction, titled “On the Way to Silence,” a wordplay on Heidegger’s “On the Way to Language,” we know that Torres Gregory is a good teacher (she is a recipient of the Simmons University Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching). She can say complex things relatively simply and map out her terrain with ease. The Introduction charts the thesis of the book well, pinpointing the author’s main claims, giving us a background to Heidegger’s ideas of silence in its links with truth and language as well as a comprehensive summary of chapters to follow.
A main focus of the book is the importance Heidegger places on the following terms: being silent (Geschweigen), keeping silent (Schweigen), hearkening (Horchen), and reticence (Verschwiegenheit) (Torres Gregory, 2021: xiii). Implicated in this theme, Torres Gregory’s interpretation focuses on what Heidegger says and doesn’t say (or hints at) concerning silence. “I make the effort to let him speak and intimate in his own words,” she writes (xiii). In this respect, Torres Gregory’s methodology follows similar enigmatic patterns to the concept of silence itself. Here, her folding of methodology and content is a powerful and original aspect of her writing. While some readers might find this overly speculative, this reader found it a productive mode of thinking in its own right, enabling an expansion of Heidegger’s ideas. However, given Heidegger’s emphasis on human silence as relating to a refraining from speaking about certain things or withholding certain words, his public silence concerning the Holocaust will come to mind for many readers. Torres Gregory does not shy away from this challenge, but the issue is by no means centre-stage in the discussion.
The Introduction identifies three distinct schematic forms of silence in the works of Heidegger: human silence which applies to speaking in word-sounds that can occur when we refrain from speaking, withhold words or when we are at a loss for words (xv); primordial silence, which is “deeper than human silence in that it pertains to being/beyng and to language in its being” and applies to the “essence of language as the soundless saying that shows or to the word as the silent voice or clearing of being/beyng”; and finally, primeval silence which is the “deepest silence that determines all silences, including the primordial silence of the word and, ultimately, the human silence” and “[p]ertains to the stillness and to the originary concealedness of being/beyng” (xv). Torres Gregory further explores three different levels at which silence occurs in language as speech: linguistic, pre-linguistic and proto-linguistic which move from language in word-sounds, the word as belonging to being/beyng, and the essence of language “as the soundless saying that shows or the word as the clearing” (xvi). Torres Gregory argues that this proto-linguistic level includes the stillness and relates to forms of primeval silence. This continues the work of scholars such as Alexander Garcia Düttmann in The Gift of Language who in asking “What does it mean to experience silence as the essence of language and as the completely condensed word (das ganz gesammelte Wort)?” answers via Rosenzweig, that the silence experienced is “unlike the muteness of the protocosmos (Vorwelt), which had no words yet” (2000: 23). Silence, Düttmann continues with reference to Heidegger, “marks the path which leads from proto-cosmic or pre-worldly mutism to trans-worldly silence” in which silence “no longer has any need of the word… is more essential than the word, which is the word as such” (2000: 24).
With reference to Being and Time, Chapter 1 articulates being-in-the-world through words (language) as significations, verbalising Da-sein’s mood and understanding. However, talking and listening are not necessarily characteristic of all discourse. Discourse has the possibility of silence when it is not fully vocalised; by not speaking about something, for example. Thus, hidden interpretations can remain silent and this silence is already part of vocalised discourse (Torres Gregory, 2021: 3). Moreover, silence can occur across authentic and inauthentic modalities. For example, idle talk and listening to idle talk (gossiping), Torres Gregory claims, imposes silence about beings talked about “by treating them as something that we already understand and have no need to inquire into any further” (4).
Levels of silence in language become even more complex as Torres Gregory follows Heidegger’s argument that silence can also occur in regard to the self in everyday being-in-the world. While the “authentic self has taken hold of and is its own self,” Da-sein’s everyday way of being-in-the-world involves covering itself up which is the inauthentic they–self (4). So, idle talk of the ‘they’ has potential to sever Da-sein from authentically relating to itself; it “drowns out the call of conscience through loud and incessant chatter and hearing all round” (8). The ‘they’ can talk loudly and endlessly provoked by its curiosities, and idle talk can silence authentic experiences. It can even cover up its own failure to hear the call of conscience (4). Furthermore, this chapter explains well the possibility that keeping silence is based on Heidegger’s notion of “having ‘something to say,’ which involves an ‘authentic and rich’ self-disclosedness and thereby can contribute to an authentic uncovering with others” (5). In this sense, authentically keeping silent in dialogue with others can mean silencing idle talk, counter-discourse and all linguistic/verbal language, which equates to a keeping silent and hearkening (8). But the “deepest silence lies within Da-sein, in what Heidegger refers to as ‘the stillness of itself’ and identifies as that to which it is ‘called back’ and ‘called back as something that is to become still’” (7).
Following Heidegger’s 1933–34 winter course “On the Essence of Truth,” Chapter 2 emphasises that language is the necessary medium of human existence and that the “ability to keep silent is the origin and ground of language” (19). Torres Gregory traces moments of Heidegger’s own keeping silence and reticence, thus mapping out a philosophical and pedagogical method in Heidegger that reflects the topic itself. This includes his ability to stay on the surface and provide minimal necessary clarification as if part of keeping silent and reticence. In this context, problems are described such that: “If we talk about ‘keeping silent,’ then it seems that we know nothing about it. If we do not talk about it, then we may end up mystifying it” (20). In turning to another problem, that animals cannot speak, questions are asked about whether “the ability to talk [is] the precondition for the ability to be silent” (20). Here, Heidegger argues that authentically keeping silent relates to the possibility of speaking and alludes to “what one has to say, one has and keeps to oneself” (21). It is at these junctions that Torres Gregory articulately claims an essential relationship between silence, truth and language in Da-sein’s being (21). Through a further reading of Heidegger’s 1934 summer course, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, Torres Gregory sets up subsequent directions for future chapters as Heidegger poses preliminary questions concerning language: “Is language only then, when it is spoken? Is it not, when one is silent?” and “Does it cease to be, if one is silent?” (26).
In Chapter 3, Torres Gregory shows how Heidegger develops a distinction between idle talk and keeping silent through Hölderlin’s poetry, helping him to define primordial silence as the origin of language, as well as language as the originary site of the unconcealedness of beyng, which pertains to what Torres Gregory identifies as primeval silence (31). The disclosive powers of poetry ‘thrusts’ us out of everydayness (32). Torres Gregory argues that Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetic verse “Since we are a dialogue,” allows him to revisit the notion of “talking-with-one-another” as a way of “being-in-the-world” as an event or happening determined by language (33). Importantly, this image of “humans as a dialogue” or “the dialogue that we are” includes an ability to keep silent as the authentic form of silence (34). Thus, an ability to speak is unified with an ability to keep silent (34). In this context, Torres Gregory notes that, for Heidegger, a poetic telling (which Hölderlin’s poetry exemplifies) or a philosophical lecture (where the most significant is kept silent or unsaid) are the authentic models of keeping silent, and also therefore of the possibility of saying and talking (34). In contrast, idle talk is incapable of keeping silent. Quoting from Heidegger’s Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhein,” Torres Gregory notes: “It is thereby a way of talking everything to death to which we become enslaved. Thus, he admonishes that ‘one cannot simply ramble on,’ if one is ‘to simultaneously preserve in silence what is essential to one’s saying’” (35). This important chapter finishes with a comparison between keeping silent and forms of hearing. Inauthentic mortals in their idle talk flee from hearing and have a “horror of silence” (38). So, a poetic or genuinely philosophical hearing involves “a keeping silent as well as an anticipatory readiness” (37). Here, Torres Gregory furthers the scholarship of Lisbeth Lipari who introduced the concept of ‘interlistening’ to describe how “listening is itself a form of speaking that resonates with echoes of everything heard, thought, said, and read,” while referencing Heidegger’s claim in Poetry, Language, Thought that “every word of mortal speech speaks out of such a listening, and as such a listening. Mortals speak insofar as they listen” (2014: 512).
Chapter 4 discusses Heidegger’s private manuscript from 1936 to 1938, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) where he initiates a transition from a metaphysics of objective presence to the thinking of the truth of beyng in the ‘appropriating event’ or Ereignis (Torres Gregory, 2021: xix, 41). Torres Gregory discusses the different forms of silence that unfold in the appropriating event. For Heidegger, thinking takes the form of a “thoughtful speaking” (41) and Torres Gregory pursues the thoughtful speaking of sigetics (to keep or to be silent) who “bears silence and is reticent in its co-respondence with the primordial silence of the word and the primeval silence of beyng” (xix-xx). As with other chapters in this book, one of Torres Gregory’s original contributions is to acknowledge Heidegger’s own tendency towards sigetics, forcing her to interpret what he intimates about the “deeper silences of beyng and the word when he identifies silence as the ground and origin of language in its essence” (xx). While exploring attitudes of restraint, shock, and diffidence, Torres Gregory argues that stillness, as the ability to hear beyng, involves the ability to be silent (43).
Chapter 5 analyses Heidegger’s 1939 graduate seminar, On the Essence of Language. The Metaphysics of Language and the Essencing of the Word Concerning Herder’s Treatise On the Origin of Language. Torres Gregory first establishes Heidegger’s resistance to Herder’s metaphysics of language where the word is reduced, for example, to signification as representation and objectification associated with ‘mark-sign’ and ‘sign-production’ (56). Herder’s failure to differentiate between human and animal (in a sounding of sensations) urges Heidegger to emphasise how the word has or takes us, rather than it being a communication device that the human has (58). In this context, Heidegger builds on Herder’s thinking on the ear as “the first teacher of language” to include “what is unsaid” (58). Torres Gregory has extremely valuable insights into Heidegger’s thinking as she notes that Herder misunderstands silence as an absence of noise rather than a more essential silence (59). For Heidegger hearing is the “hearkening that pertains to Da-sein’s silencing” (59). Again, Torres Gregory extracts extended (often reticent) meanings from Heidegger’s thinking, arriving at claims that the word is silent in a primordial sense, as it harbors or silently discloses beyng it is unconcealedness, (59) resulting in a claim that the silence of the word is the origin of language (60-1).
Chapter 6 explores the 1944 summer seminar “Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos”. Torres Gregory aligns silence with the unsaid, and the unsayable in Heraclitus, where Heidegger identifies ‘the true’ with ‘the unsaid’ (68). And in future chapters this will develop, for Torres Gregory, as “the essence of language as the peal of the stillness” (68). Here, hearkening to the word, or Logos, involves listening to the silent address of being, rather than listening to the chatter of human speech (69). Such attentive listening to the Logos is only possible, Torres Gregory argues, through Heidegger’s “thoughtful and poetic saying,” which is marked by silences. In this context, silence draws limits on what can be said. Silence or quiescence (the state of being temporarily quiet) is interpreted by Torres Gregory in its close association with concealedness (74). Word-sounds originate in quiescence and permeate speech as a hearkening and reticence of thoughtful and poetic sayings (71). In this regard, Torres Gregory draws attention to Heidegger’s term ‘fore-word’ and its relationship to quiescence as a stillness that is a deep and primeval silence (72). Thus, verbal word-sounds that occur in speech are grounded in soundlessness which is grounded in the stillness. Importantly, Torres Gregory highlights Heidegger’s differentiation between hearkening and listening as acoustic perception, noting that hearkening is “originary listening” that enables the hearing of sounds. As Torres Gregory writes: “the tones of the harp (to use one of [Heidegger’s] own examples), is thus based ultimately on our openness to the soundless and inaudible voice of being” (75).
Chapter 7 discusses two sections of Heidegger’s On the Essence of Language and On the Question Concerning Art produced just after 1939. Torres Gregory writes: “Heidegger sketches out his thoughts on silence, particularly in its primeval relation to beyng itself in the appropriating-event and as the origin of the essence of language” (79). With typical care, Torres Gregory discusses the translation of three key words: Verschweigen, Schweigen and Erschweigen which correspond to keeping secret in relation to the sayable, keeping silent in relation to the unsayable, and silencing in relation to the unsaid as such (79, 83). She reiterates the positive dimension that Heidegger lends silence as a positive force. She writes: “Keeping secret can be a way of sheltering what is sayable. Being silent can arise from our ability to leave the unsayable in its unsayability. As for our silencing, it inherently involves the positive acts of preserving and conserving saying with its ground in unsaidness” (83). Torres Gregory is at pains to show how these notions of ‘soundlessness’ or ‘non-sonorousness’ in Heidegger’s vocabulary are not negative concepts; not a lack, but a fullness from which sounds emerge, predicated on a stillness, as primeval silence (82). Because chapters 1 to 8 form a complex analysis of Heidegger’s thinking, with any criticism reserved for the final chapter, we are left at points in this book wondering how these philosophical concepts of language and silence might relate to different genders and cultures. For many women and/or indigenous peoples, silencing inherently involves negative acts of being silenced or being made to keep secrets as forms of disempowerment. As Torres Gregory briefly mentions in her concluding Chapter 9, this raises questions about how Heidegger’s thinking excludes bodies that differ.
Chapter 8 discusses the ways in which the collection of essays On the Way to Language and the idea of the ‘peal of the stillness’ unfolds as Heidegger ponders the relations between language and silence (95). Torres Gregory reiterates her three main foci on silence from the previous chapters (human hearkening and reticence, the primordial silencing of the word, and the stillness of primeval silence) (96) in relation to Ereignis, a term that has been translated diversely as ‘event,’ ‘appropriation’ or ‘appropriating event’. While Heidegger constantly refers to the disclosive power and necessity of language in its essence “as the appropriative speaking, saying, showing, letting-appear, clearing, and calling” (98), Torres Gregory notes his insistence that it is only through ‘authentic’ listening (in the manner of thinking and poetry) that humans have the ability to speak (100). In other words, all authentic saying must be attuned to restraint. Quoting Heidegger, she writes: “The reticence and reserve of poets and thinkers in their responding is thus appropriated by the peal of the stillness: ‘Every authentic hearing holds back with its own saying. For hearing keeps to itself in the listening by which it remains appropriated to the peal of the stillness. All responding is attuned to this restraint that reserves itself’” (102). And this chapter ends with a warning that language can only speak in relation to how the appropriating event reveals itself or withdraws. If this corresponds to our ability to quietly listen, Torres Gregory emphasises the significance of stillness within the “dangers that challenge-forth in the noisy and frenzied age of the ‘language-machine’” (103).
One problem with Speaking of Silence in Heidegger is a lack of contextualisation of the literature on silence. Torres Gregory’s book is definitely a specialist book on Heidegger rather than an analysis of the recent history of scholarship on silence in relationship to Heidegger’s thinking. For example, key texts on silence are relegated to the footnotes (albeit with brief analysis) and never appear in the discussion of the main text. These include Max Picard’s The World of Silence (1948), Bernard Dauenhauer’s Silence: The Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance (1980), Luce Irigaray’s “To Conceive Silence” (2001), Don Idhe’s Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Silence (2007), and Niall Keane’s “The Silence of the Origin” (2013). As a reader, I would have benefited from further incorporation of these texts into the discussion. This would have enabled Torres Gregory’s book to be a more significant contribution to the overall scholarship on silence. But, make no mistake, her book is a very significant contribution to Heideggerian scholarship and the notion of silence. It should also be pointed out that, apart from one footnote to Dauenhauer in Chapter 2, all these key texts on silence just mentioned appear in the footnotes for Chapter 9.
This attests to the importance of Chapter 9 in the overall argument of the book. In this concluding chapter, Torres Gregory expands the significance of her research in three different ways. Firstly, she questions whether the only way to silence and silencing experiences is through sonorous speech and asks how various non-linguistic achievements and co-responses to and with silence such as music might operate. In this vein, she questions Heidegger’s narrow focus on poetry and philosophical thinking as the only authentic models of keeping silent and also therefore of the possibility of saying and talking. Here, Torres Gregory explores Heidegger’s failure to incorporate the lived body in his philosophical concepts of language and silence, including the “gender neutrality of Da-sein, the homogeneity of the Volk as a ‘We,’ and the one world of the Mitdasein (being-there-with)” as ideas that exclude bodies that differ (113). Torres Gregory does not shy away from Heidegger’s antisemitism and the silencing of bodies that suffer oppression and extermination (114). Secondly, she argues that Heidegger “leaves open the possibility of a mysticism that is not ensnared in metaphysics” (115) in both content and his repetitive incantatory methods of writing. Thirdly, Torres Gregory critiques Heidegger’s emphasis on language with respect to animals who are rendered languageless and therefore silenceless. In this section, her critique that sheds light on contemporary dilemmas, such as our lack of relationship to the earth, is all too brief and could be the focus of another book: “Perhaps we would be better at letting the earth be the earth, if we tried to transpose ourselves into the animal’s intrinsically meaningful experiences, including that of its own extreme possibility” she writes (120).
Chapter 9, and this whole book, highlights the challenges faced in accommodating Heidegger’s thinking for our current times. For example, quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad questions the animate/inanimate dualism that places inorganic entities such as rocks, molecules and particles “on the other side of death, of the side of those who are denied even the ability to die” in her 2012 interview for Women, Gender & Research (Juelskjær et al, 21). And from a related but different perspective, Donna Haraway’s ideas of ‘companion species’ in her 2003 book The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness, argues for emergent ‘naturecultures’ in dog-human worlds, embracing linguistic ‘metaplasm’ as a way of avoiding human/nonhuman dualisms in language. These approaches lie in stark contrast to Heidegger’s insistence in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics that “The stone in its absorption ‘does not even have the possibility of dying,’ because ‘it is never alive’” (Torres Gregory, 2021: 120). And in contrast to Heidegger’s determination (again, as quoted by Torres Gregory) that animals, who do not possess human sonorous speech, “cannot die in the sense in which dying is ascribed to humans, but can only come to an end” (120). Barad and Haraway are the kinds of scholars that many of our postgraduate students are referencing as they embrace more-than-human modalities in the crisis of the Anthropocene. If Heideggerian scholarship wants to remain relevant, it needs to urgently critique and explore different approaches to Heidegger’s anthropocentrism.
Finally, in less than one page, this book addresses how Heidegger’s prophecies concerning gigantism and machination have a bearing on our current situation. Quoting Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), Torres Gregory writes: “At issue is whether the human being will be ‘masterful enough’ for the ‘transition to the renewal of the world out of the saving of the earth’” (121). And in the last paragraph, we glimpse the promise of what ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit) toward things might hold for our times; a concept that Hans Ruin explores as a ‘mystical’ comportment of Heidegger’s writing as a heightened openness and awareness in relationship to the work of Meister Eckhart. Given the proximity of thinking about silence and mysticism, I was hopeful that this book might have dedicated more words to the striking relations thrown up through Torres Gregory’s exploration of being silent, keeping silent, hearkening, and reticence. For example, the discussion in Chapter 1 concerning the authentic and inauthentic self relates in a powerful way to spiritual/mystical traditions that address the heedless and worldly desires of the ego as it muzzles an authentic relationship with the divine essence. This is not far removed from Torres Gregory’s discussion relating to Da-sein’s everyday way of being-in-the-world that covers itself up (the inauthentic they–self) and where internal idle talk of the they distracts Da-sein from authentically relating to itself (4). Torres Gregory’s claim that publicness and idle talk characterise an inauthentic silence—as well as the hearkening to the silent call of conscience involving the possibility of authentically keeping silent and reticent—resonates deeply with mystical traditions in their quest to quieten the ego in favour of compassion and spiritual forms of love towards the self and the world/earth. How would ‘releasement’ operate as an openness to the truth of Being? This is an example of how Speaking of Silence in Heidegger might have made more productive links within its own structure and towards broader fields of literature, especially pertaining to silence and mysticism.
Torres Gregory’s Speaking of Silence in Heidegger makes a profound and timely contribution to thinking about silence and its essential relationship to language. It guides us through complex registers of silence including forms of hearkening and reticence as a listening that is deeply attentive to the unsaid and the unsayable. It gives timely warning vis-à-vis the idle talk of the world and our own internal idle talk, reiterating that saying must be attuned to restraint or our ability to quietly listen. Furthermore, a deeper silence is a ‘calling back’ and lies within Da-sein as ‘the stillness of itself’. Moreover, our capacity for ‘the dialogue that we are’ to emerge in community depends on our capacity for attentive stillness within the dangerous noise of the ‘language-machine’.
Bibliography:
Düttmann Alexander García. 2000. The Gift of Language: Memory and Promise in Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig. Translated by Arline Lyons. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice Phenomenologies of Sound. 2nd ed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Juelskjær, Malou, Nete Schwennesen, and Karen Barad. 2012. “Intra-active Entanglements – An Interview with Karen Barad.” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning NR (Women, Gender & Research) 1-2: 10-23.
Lipari, Lisbeth. 2014. “On Interlistening and the Idea of Dialogue.” Theory & Psychology 24, no. 4: 504–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354314540765.
Ruin, Hans. 2019. “The Inversion of Mysticism—Gelassenheit and the Secret of the Open in Heidegger.” Religions 10, no. 15: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010015.
Torres Gregory, Wanda. 2021. Speaking of Silence in Heidegger. London, UK: Lexington Books.