Martin Heidegger by George Steiner

Author:George Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2017-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

1 Commentary on it has been fitful or polemic. The most acute is still Marcuse’s 1932 preface to his dissertation on Hegel’s ontology and the theory of historicism. Lukács and Adorno have seen in these closing chapters an ominous mystification of the entire issue of historical man and society.

The Presence of Heidegger

iii

The Letter on “Humanism” sets out the idiom and motifs that were to dominate Heidegger’s postwar teaching and publications. It is composed in the evident shadow of national and professional debacle, and is meant to refute Sartre’s existentialism, which, albeit derivative from Sein und Zeit at cardinal points, had proclaimed itself to be a politically engaged “humanism.” Heidegger now postulates the absolute primacy of language: “Language is the house of Being. Man dwells in this house. Those who think [die Denkenden] and those who create poetry [die Dichtenden] are the custodians of the dwelling.” In Being and Time, the custodianship over being and truth, over authentic existence, was enacted. It hinged on the deed that springs from the supreme liberation of resolve, of commitment. Now it is not action in any ordinary sense but thought and poetry that guard, that alone can realize the presentness and integrity of Sein. They, as it were, are the instrumentality and medium of the ontological “letting-be.” Thought lets Being be: das Denken lässt das Sein sein. Heidegger deliberately borrows the vocabulary of French existentialism in order to underline the difference between his own position and that of his would-be followers. Denken ist “l’engagement par l’Etre pour l’Etre” (“thinking is ‘the commitment of Being by and for Being’”). The whole relationship of man to speech, of Dasein to Sprache, is enunciated in a way which does not break with the design of Sein und Zeit but which, unquestionably, gives it a new antihumanistic or, more exactly, antianthropocentric twist.

Language is proper to man, not simply because with his other faculties man also “has” [writes Richardson] the power of speech, but because he has a privileged access to Being. By the same token, the function of his language is simply to let Being be itself. Conversely, it is because other beings do not have this special access to Being that they cannot talk. If the use of language for modern man has become banal, the reason is not to seek on moral or aesthetic grounds but in the fact that the genuine nature of man and his essential relationship to Being remain in oblivion.

But this uniqueness of access is not centrality in any Cartesian, Kantian, or Sartrean sense. It is not man who determines Being, but Being that via language discloses itself to and in man. “Thrown into the truth of Being by Being,” man is now watchman over this truth. He is the sentinel in the “clearing” or, in one of Heidegger’s most celebrated formulations, der Hirt des Seins (“the shepherd of Being”). His trusteeship is, ontologically and concretely, the only authentic at-homeness in life, the only genuine indwelling worth striving for in human existence.

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