Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking
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Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking
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Overview
Heidegger delivered his lecture series, Insight into That Which Is, at Bremen in 1949. It was his first speaking engagement after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin’s poetry and themes developed in his earlier works.
In the Freiburg lectures, delivered in 1957, Heidegger ponders thought itself and freely engages with the German idealists and Greek thinkers who had provoked him in the past. Andrew J. Mitchell’s translation allows English-speaking readers to explore important connections with Heidegger’s earlier works on language, logic, and reality.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253007162 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 238 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Andrew J. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is translator (with François Raffoul) of Heidegger's Four Seminars (IUP, 2003).
Heidegger’s contribution to the growth and development of National Socialism was immense. In this small anthology, Dr. Runes endeavors to point to the utter confusion Heidegger created by drawing, for political and social application of his own existentialism and metaphysics, upon the decadent and repulsive brutalization of Hitlerism.
Martin Heidegger was a philosopher most known for his contributions to German phenomenological and existential thought. Heidegger was born in rural Messkirch in 1889 to Catholic parents. While studying philosophy and mathematics at Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Heidegger became the assistant for the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Influenced by Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Heidegger wrote extensively on the quality of Being, including his Opus Being and Time. He served as professor of philosophy at Albert-Ludwig University and taught there during the war. In 1933, Heidegger joined the National Socialist German Worker’s (or Nazi) Party and expressed his support for Hitler in several articles and speeches. After the war, his support for the Nazi party came under attack, and he was tried as a sympathizer. He was able to return to Albert Ludwig University, however, and taught there until he retired. Heidegger continued to lecture until his death in 1973.
Read an Excerpt
Bremen and Freiburg Lectures
Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking
By Martin Heidegger, Petra Jaeger, Andrew J. Mitchell
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1994 Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am MainAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00716-2
CHAPTER 1
The Point of Reference
All distances in time and space are shrinking. Places that a person previously reached after weeks and months on the road are now reached by airplane overnight. What a person previously received news of only after years, if at all, is now experienced hourly over the radio in no time. The germination and flourishing of plants that remained concealed through the seasons, film now exhibits publicly in a single minute. Film shows the distant cities of the most ancient cultures as if they stood at this very moment amidst today's street traffic. Beyond this, film further attests to what it shows by simultaneously displaying the recording apparatus itself at work along with the humans who serve it. The pinnacle of all such removals of distance is achieved by television, which will soon race through and dominate the entire scaffolding and commotion of commerce.
The human puts the longest stretches behind himself in the shortest time. He puts the greatest distances behind him and thus puts everything at the shortest distance before him.
Yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance. What confronts us at the shortest distance in terms of length, through the imagery of film or the sound of the radio, can remain remote to us. What is vastly far away in terms of length, can be near to us. Short distance is not already nearness. Great distance is not yet remoteness.
What is nearness if it remains outstanding despite the shrinking of the greatest lengths to the shortest distances? What is nearness if it is even warded off by the restless removal of distances? What is nearness when, along with its own exclusion, remoteness too remains away?
What is happening when, through the removal of great distances, everything stands equally near and far? What is this uniformity wherein everything is neither far nor near and, as it were, without distance?
Everything washes together into the uniformly distanceless. How? Is not this moving together into the distanceless even more uncanny than everything being out of place? The human is transfixed by what could come about with the explosion of the atomic bomb. The human does not see what for a long time now has already arrived and even is occurring, and for which the atomic bomb and its explosion are merely the latest emission, not to speak of the hydrogen bomb, whose detonation, thought in its broadest possibility, could be enough to wipe out all life on earth. What is this clueless anxiety waiting for, if the horrible [das Entsetzliche] has already occurred?
The horrifying is what transposes [heraussetzt] all that is out of its previous essence. What is so horrifying? It reveals and conceals itself in the way that everything presences, namely that despite all overcoming of distance, the nearness of that which is remains outstanding.
CHAPTER 2The Thing
How do things stand with nearness? How can we experience its essence? Nearness, it seems, cannot be immediately found. We sooner achieve this by pursuing what is in the vicinity [in der Nähe]. In the vicinity are what we customarily name "things." But what is a thing? How long has the human observed and questioned things, how variously has he used them and, indeed, even used them up. And guided by such intentions, how insistently has he also explained the things, that is, led them back to their causes. The human has proceeded in this manner with things for a long time, and he is even still so proceeding, without ever once in all this considering the thing as thing.
Up to now, the human has considered the thing as a thing just as little as he has considered nearness. The jug is a thing. What is a jug? We say: a vessel; that which holds another in itself. What does the holding in the jug are the base and sides. This holding itself can be held at the handle. As a vessel, the jug is something that stands on its own. This standing-on-its-own characterizes the jug as something independent. As the self-standing [Selbststand] of something independent, the jug is distinguished from an object [Gegenstand]. Something independent can become an object when we represent it to ourselves, be it in immediate perception, be it in a thoughtful remembrance that makes it present. The thinghood of the thing, however, does not reside in the thing becoming the object of a representation, nor can the thinghood of the thing at all be determined by the objectivity of the object, not even when we take the opposition of the object as not simply due to our representation, but rather leave opposition to the object itself as its own affair.
The jug remains a vessel, whether we represent it or not. As a vessel, the jug stands on its own. But what does this mean, that what holds would stand on its own? Does the standing-on-its-own of the vessel already define the jug as a thing? To be sure, the jug stands as a vessel only insofar as it was brought to a stand. Of course this occurred, and it does so occur, through a posing [ein Stellen], namely through a producing [das Herstellen]. The potter completes the earthen jug from out of the earth that has been especially selected and prepared for it. The jug consists of this. By virtue of what it consists of, the jug is also able to stand upon the earth, be it directly, be it indirectly upon a table and bench. What subsists through such production is what stands on its own. If we take the jug to be a produced vessel then it indeed appears that we grasp it as a thing and by no means as a mere object.
Or do we even now still take the jug as an object? Just so. To be sure, it no longer counts as solely the object of a mere representation, but it is the object that a producing delivers and puts here, placing it against us and across from us. Standing-on-its-own seemed to characterize the jug as a thing. In truth, we nevertheless think this standing-on-its-own in terms of production. Standing-on-its-own is that toward which producing is directed. Standing-on-its-own is therefore still thought, and despite everything is ever still thought, in terms of an objectivity, even if the objective-stance of what is produced is no longer grounded in a mere representing. Indeed, from the objectivity of the object and the objectivity of what is self-standing, no road leads to the thinghood of the thing.
What is it that is thing-like in the thing? What is the thing in itself? We only arrive at the thing in itself if our thinking has previously reached the thing as thing.
The jug is a thing as a vessel. To be sure, this holder requires a producing. But the production by the potter by no means constitutes what is proper to the jug insofar as it is a jug. The jug is not a vessel because it was produced, rather the thing must be produced because it is this vessel.
The producing lets the jug freely enter into its own. Yet the essence of the jug's own is never completed by a producing. Let loose through its completion, the jug gathers itself in what is its own so as to hold. In the process of production, however, the jug must show its outward appearance to the producer beforehand. But this self-showing, this outward appearing (the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), characterizes the jug solely in the respect that the vessel stands across from the production as something to be set here.
What the vessel in this outward appearing is as jug, what and how the jug is as this jug-thing, can never be experienced, much less appropriately thought, with regard to the outward appearance, the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. For this reason, Plato, who represented the presence of what is present on the basis of the outward appearance, thought the essence of things as little as Aristotle and all subsequent thinkers. Setting the standard for what was to come, Plato had much more experienced all presencing as the object of a producer; instead of object [Gegenstand], we say more precisely: what stands here [Herstand]. In the full essence of what stands here, a twofold standing-here holds sway; on the one hand, standing here in the sense of a stemming from ..., be this a bringing forth of oneself or a being produced; on the other hand, a standing here in the sense where what is brought forth stands here in the unconcealment of what is already presencing.
All representing of what presences in the sense of something standing here and of something objective, however, never reaches the thing as thing. The thinghood of the jug lies in that it is as a vessel. We become aware of what does the holding in the vessel when we fill the jug. The base and siding obviously take over the holding. But not so fast! When we fill the jug with wine, do we pour the wine into the sides and base? We pour the wine at most between the sides and upon the base. Sides and base are indeed what is impermeable in the vessel. But the impermeable is not yet what holds. When we fill up the jug, in the filling, the pour flows into the empty jug. The empty is what holds in the vessel. The empty, this nothing in the jug, is what the jug is as a holding vessel.
Yet the jug does consist of sides and base. By virtue of what the jug consists of, it stands. What would a jug be if it did not stand? At the very least a failed jug; and therefore always still a jug, namely one that indeed would hold, but as constantly toppling over it is a vessel that spills. But only a vessel can spill.
The sides and the base, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not what properly do the holding. But if this lies in the emptiness of the jug, then the potter, who shapes the sides and base upon the potter's wheel, does not actually finish the jug. He only forms the clay. No—he forms the emptiness. For this emptiness, within it, and from out of it, he shapes the clay into a figure. The potter grasps first and constantly what is ungraspable in the empty and produces it as what holds in the form of a vessel. The empty of the jug determines every grip of the production. The thinghood of the vessel by no means rests in the material of which it consists, but instead in the emptiness that holds.
But is the jug really empty?
The physical sciences assure us that the jug is filled with air and with all that constitutes the compound mixture of air. We let ourselves be deceived by a semipoetic manner of observation in calling upon the emptiness of the jug.
But as soon as we leave this aside so as to investigate the actual jug scientifically and in regards to its actuality, then another state of affairs shows itself. If we pour wine into the jug we merely force out the air that already fills the jug and replace it with a fluid. Viewed scientifically, to fill the jug means to exchange one filling for another.
These suppositions of physics are correct. By means of them science represents something actual, according to which it objectively judges. But—is this actual something the jug? No. Science only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.
It is said that the knowledge of science is compelling. Certainly. But what does its compulsion consist of? In our case, in the compulsion to relinquish the jug filled with wine and to put in its place a cavity in which a fluid expands. Science makes the jug-thing into something negligible, insofar as the thing is not admitted as the standard.
Within its purview, that of objects, the compelling knowledge of science has already annihilated the thing as thing long before the atomic bomb exploded. The explosion of the atomic bomb is only the crudest of all crude confirmations of an annihilation of things that occurred long ago: confirmation that the thing as thing remains nullified. The annihilation is so uncanny because it brings with it a twofold delusion. For one, the opinion that science, more so than all other experience, would encounter the actual in its actuality. Second, the pretense that the thing could just as well be a thing regardless of scientific research into the actual, which presupposes that there ever were essencing things at all. If the things had ever shown themselves as things, then the thinghood of the thing would have been evident. It would have laid claim to thinking. In truth, however, the thing remains obstructed as thing, nullified and in this sense annihilated. This occurred and occurs so essentially that the things are not only no longer admitted as things, but the things have not yet ever been able to appear as things at all.
What is the basis for the non-appearing of the thing as thing? Has the human simply neglected to represent the thing as thing? The human can only neglect what has already been allotted him. The human can represent, regardless of the manner, only that which has first lit itself up from itself and shown itself to him in the light that it brings with it.
But what now is the thing as thing such that its essence has never been able to appear?
Did the thing never come into the nearness enough such that the human could adequately learn to attend to the thing as thing? What is nearness? We asked this already. We asked in order to experience the jug in the vicinity.
What is the jughood of the jug? We have suddenly lost it from view and indeed at the very moment of intrusion by the pretense that science would be able to provide us with information as to the actuality of the actual jug.
We represented what is effective of the vessel, its holding—the empty—as a cavity filled with air. This is the empty thought as actual, in terms of physics, but it is not the empty of the jug. We do not let the empty of the jug be its empty. We did not attend to what does the holding in the vessel. We did not consider how the holding itself essences. For this reason, what the jug holds must also escape us. Wine becomes for the scientific representation a mere liquid, a universally possible aggregate state of matter. We left off considering what the jug holds and how it holds.
How does the empty of the jug hold? It holds in that it takes what is poured into it. It holds in that it retains what is taken up. The empty holds in a twofold manner: taking and retaining. The word "holding" is thus ambiguous. The taking of what is poured in and the retaining of the pour nevertheless belong together. Their unity, however, is determined by the pouring out, to which the jug as jug is correlated. The twofold holding of the empty consequently lies in the outpouring. As this, the holding is authentically how it is. The outpour from out of the jug is a giving [Schenken]. In the gift of the pour there essences the holding of the vessel. This holding requires the empty as what holds. The essence of the holding empty is gathered in the giving. Giving, however, is richer than a mere outpouring. The giving, whereby the jug is a jug, gathers in itself the twofold holding and does so in the outpouring. We name the collection of mountains [der Berge] a mountain range [das Gebirge]. We name the collection of the twofold holding in the outpouring, which together first constitutes the full essence of giving [des Schenkens]: the gift [das Geschenk]. The jughood of the jug essences in the gift of the pour. Even the empty jug retains its essence from out of the gift, even if an empty jug is not capable of an outpouring. But this "not capable" is appropriate to the jug and to the jug alone. A scythe, on the contrary, or a hammer are incapable of achieving the "not capable" of this gift.
The gift of the pour can be a libation. There is water, there is wine to drink.
In the water of the gift there abides the spring. In the spring abides the stone and all the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky. In the water of the spring there abides the marriage of sky and earth. They abide in the wine that the fruit of the vine provides, in which the nourishment of the earth and the sun of the sky are betrothed to each other. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, there abides in each case the sky and earth. The gift of the pour however is the jughood of the jug. In the essence of the jug there abides earth and sky.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bremen and Freiburg Lectures by Martin Heidegger, Petra Jaeger, Andrew J. Mitchell. Copyright © 1994 Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Translator's Foreword
Insight Into That Which Is: Bremen Lectures 1949
INDENTThe Point of Reference
INDENTThe Thing
INDENTPositionality
INDENTThe Danger
INDENTThe Turn
Basic Principles of Thinking: Freiburg Lectures 1957
INDENTLecture I
INDENTLecture II and Review of Lecture I
INDENTLecture III, The Principle of Identity
INDENTLecture IV
INDENTLecture V
Editor's Afterword
Glossaries
INDENTGerman-English
INDENTEnglish-German
What People are Saying About This
This volume represents a major event in English Heidegger scholarship. Students less acquainted with Heidegger's work will find entry to his ideas through concrete subject matter. Even for the general academic reader, the Bremen lectures offer material for historical and political discussions.