Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger by Pattison George;

Author:Pattison, George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-08-11T04:00:00+00:00

Thinking, then, has an inherently problematic relation to written texts, something that must inevitably colour our interpretative approach to the written texts in which the thinker’s thought is recorded. The letter killeth – or at least renders the path of thought enigmatic. This comment also relates back to the strictures Heidegger places on a purely historical or summarising approach to philosophy.

All that has been written here about the characteristics of the thinker and his thought has been with a view to considering Heidegger’s understanding of the task of interpretation. We have learned that interpretation will only deserve to be taken seriously when it brings us into the orbit of the single thought of the essential thinker and enables us to encounter that thought in such a way as to become open to the decision it demands of us concerning our comportment towards beings-as-a-whole. But in setting out Heidegger’s prescriptions for going about this, it has become clear that he is not offering anything like a method in any conventional sense. On the contrary – and this is a further, ninth principle of Heideggerian hermeneutics – we can only arrive at the point of understanding the thought of an essential thinker on the basis of a leap: ‘the leap alone takes us into the neighbourhood where thinking resides’ (WCT: 12). We may recall the leap that brought us into the encounter with the tree in blossom, a face-to-face encounter in which each is present to the other as what it is. This encounter is no mere ‘idea’ but an event. ‘Let us stop here for a moment, as we would to catch our breath before and after a leap. For that is what we are now, men who have leapt, out of the familiar realm of science and even … out of the realm of philosophy’ (WCT: 41). But, it will be recalled, this leap does not hurl us into some weird existentialist abyss, it simply returns us to ‘the soil on which we really stand’.

Applying this to the question of interpretation, we may say that the leap of interpretative understanding is not the outcome of some new information about, e.g., the tree. It is not the result of finding the missing piece of the jigsaw, the clue that led us to the conclusion of our research. Rather it is a leap out of the scientific, academic approach into a direct encounter with the meaning of the text. Yet, this is not the discovery of some occult meaning – Nietzsche’s ‘secret note’ – but, in accordance with the principle of the hermeneutical circle, the disclosure of what has really guided our questioning all along, the soil on which we already stood. Consequently, understanding Nietzsche does not depend on the exhaustiveness of our knowledge of Nietzsche’s texts or Nietzsche’s sources or the history of the reception of Nietzsche’s ideas. Perhaps we must read some Nietzsche before we can claim to understand him (though Heidegger is never exactly clear on this!), but, however

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