Heidegger's Black Notebooks by Andrew J. Mitchell

Author:Andrew J. Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

A SECOND SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM

Heidegger’s next idea is easily understood against this backdrop. Up until now his philosophy had only managed to set one ontology against another. Put more succinctly, romanticism was now in opposition to modernity.

The new task was to avoid the mistake of Being and Time. All philosophical projects up to and including Being and Time need to be illuminated in such a way that their shortcomings become clearly visible. The preferred means for this task is now the history of being. In it worldviews succeed ever older worldviews, and it becomes apparent that in truth there is no progress. Each new take on the world tries to outdo the one just overtaken by claiming sole validity and forcing its successors into oblivion. In the grander scheme of things, it turns out to be arbitrary which Weltbild currently holds sway, since it is barred from reaching the truth by the fact that it is a “picture of the world” in the first place. So far so good, one is tempted to say. Heidegger sees his “ ‘idea (principle?) of destruction’ determined” by this context of continuous discrediting (GA 94:75). In the Black Notebooks Heidegger turns it into an historical imperative: “To chase man through the otherness and strangeness of the essence of being” (GA 94:43). Poststructuralism aligned with this process of destruction in the history of Being and called it “deconstruction.”

The real problems set in once Heidegger stops operating anarcho-critically and becomes affirmative insofar as he now wants to determine the position in the history of Being from which such a destruction of metaphysical claims is launched. But this means to turn a reflexive stance into a proper point of view or, to use Luhmann’s vernacular, to move the observer who has to stand outside any dogmatic machinations into the history of Being. Using Kantian terminology, we might generally say Heidegger’s move means to revert the modern transcendental approach back into a premodern metaphysical one. Heidegger does this by turning the perspective of the observer into a beginning of the history of Being. Since he still wants to hold his distance from the metaphysical positions he attacks, he makes this new beginning into a “grand beginning [großen Anfang]” to which “we have to revert” (GA 94:53). It is grand apparently because it not only happens within time but outside time as well, with temporality somehow emanating from it. All later pictures of the world react to this, although they never understand it in its essence—so says Heidegger.

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