Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena by Fredrik Westerlund;

Author:Fredrik Westerlund;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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THE QUESTION OF THE OPENNESS OF BEING

The Question of the Turn

It is clear that Heidegger’s philosophical approach undergoes a change, or a set of changes, in the decade following the publication of Being and Time. The change concerns both the guiding question and matter of his thought as well as the task and method of his thinking. In the secondary literature, this change has commonly been labeled the “turn”—following Heidegger’s word “die Kehre”—and has generally been seen as the rough dividing line separating the early from the late Heidegger. However, it is far from obvious how the philosophical sense of Heidegger’s alleged turn should be understood, the last fifty years having witnessed a massive scholarly debate regarding this issue.

In his pioneering work Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought from 1963 William J. Richardson established the standard interpretation that has dominated the literature to this very day. According to Richardson, Heidegger’s thinking undergoes a turn in the years 1930–5, a turn which consists in a “shift from There-being [Richardson’s translation of “Dasein”] to Being” (1963: 624). Whereas the early Heidegger primarily focuses on Dasein and basically conceives of being as “the project of There-being” (238), the later Heidegger turns his principal focus to being itself as something which precedes and, of its own accord, gives itself to Dasein. This shift of focus, Richardson claims, is also linked to an alteration of Heidegger’s methodological approach, such that the phenomenological explication of the structures of Dasein carried out in Being and Time gives way to a historical thinking which articulates being such as it gives itself historically (525).

Against this, Thomas Sheehan has emphatically argued that there never occurred a turn in Heidegger’s central question. According to Sheehan, the standard interpretation of the turn has failed to distinguish between two quite different matters. On the one hand, Heidegger uses the word “turn” (Kehre) to designate the central issue of his thinking, namely the movement—characterized by the reciprocal co-belonging of being and Dasein—through which being is opened up. On the other hand, he uses it to name “the shift in the way [he] formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s” (Sheehan 2001b: 3). Indeed, in his 1962 letter to Richardson, Heidegger makes a clear terminological distinction between the two turns. Here he contrasts the “turn” (Kehre) as a designation of the issue itself with the “change” (Wendung) in his thinking of that issue (Richardson 1963: XVI–XIX; GA 11: 149–50; cf. Sheehan 2010: 93). Sheehan argues that the common failure to see that the “turn” for Heidegger primarily names his central topic and not some reversal of his philosophical standpoint is a consequence of the failure to grasp what that topic actually is. Heidegger’s central topic, Sheehan claims, is not being but “that which ‘gives’ being” (2001a: 192): “What produces (poiei, läßt sein) givenness? What enables being as parousia or Anwesen to be given at all?” (2001b: 7) Once we recognize that Heidegger’s central issue was the event that opens up being, more specifically the

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