Bremen and Freiburg Lectures Studies in Continental Thought EDITOR JOHN SALLIS CONSULTING EDITORS Robert Bernasconi William L. McBride Rudolf Bernet J. N. Mohanty John D. Caputo Mary Rawlinson David Carr Tom Rockmore Edward S. Casey Calvin O. Schrag Hubert L. Dreyfus †Reiner Schürmann Don Ihde Charles E. Scott David Farrell Krell Thomas Sheehan Lenore Langsdorf Robert Sokolowski Alphonso Lingis Bruce W. Wilshire David Wood Martin Heidegger Bremen and Freiburg Lectures Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Published in German as Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 79: Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge Edited by Petra Jaeger © 1994 by Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main English translation © 2012 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. [Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. English] Bremen and Freiburg lectures : insight into that which is and basic principles of thinking / Martin Heidegger ; translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. p. cm. — (Studies in Continental thought) ISBN 978-0-253-00231-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00716-2 (electronic book) 1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Ding an sich. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. Reasoning. I. Title. B3279.H48.B7413 2012 193—dc23 2012008012 1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12 CONTENTS Translator’s Foreword vii Acknowledgments xvii InsIght Into that WhIch Is: Bremen Lectures 1949 The Point of Reference 3 The Thing 5 Positionality 23 The Danger 44 The Turn 64 BasIc PrIncIPLes of thInkIng: freIBurg Lectures 1957 Lecture I 77 Lecture II and Review of Lecture I 92 Lecture III, The Principle of Identity 108 Lecture IV 122 Lecture V 144 Editor’s Afterword 167 Glossaries German-English 173 English-German 185 v t ’ f ransLators oreWord This translation brings two key lecture cycles from Heidegger’s later thinking to an English-language readership. Published as volume 79 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition) in 1994, Insight Into That Which Is of 1949 is Heidegger’s first speak- ing engagement after the Second World War, and Basic Principles of Thinking from 1957 is his last extended lecturing engagement at Freiburg University.1 The texts taken together provide a pan- orama of the issues at stake in Heidegger’s late thinking. In many respects the Bremen lectures inaugurate the late period of Heidegger’s thinking. It is here that he first formulates his conception of the thing as a gathering of the “fourfold” (das Geviert) and of technology as a matter of “positionality” (das Gestell). This basic tension in Heidegger’s thought between a sin- gular existence and the drive to replaceability is first articulated in these pages in a manner that is uncompromising if not, at times, shockingly blunt, especially in treating recent events from 1. Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge: 1. Einblick in Das Was Ist: Bremer Vorträge 1949, 2. Grundsätze des Denkens: Freiburger Vorträge 1957, Gesamtausgabe vol. 79, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994). Volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe will hence- forth be cited as “GA” by volume number, with first German then English pagination of available translations, separated by a slash. Heidegger’s last teaching engagement at Freiburg was the 1966–67 Heraclitus seminar held with Eugen Fink. See Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraklit, in Martin Heidegger, Seminare, GA 15, ed. Curd Ochwadt (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986), 9–266. English translation in Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993). vii viii Translator’s Foreword the war. In no uncertain terms, Heidegger announces the era of technological circulation to be a break with that of modern metaphysics and its conception of representational objectivity. The profundity of Heidegger’s thinking, however, lies in his re- fusal to construe singularity and replacement as two separate orders of existence, but instead to understand them as mutually dependent upon each other. The thing needs the standing re- serve to be what it is. The 1957 Freiburg lectures, Basic Principles of Thinking, were the third and final installment in something of a trio of lecture courses Heidegger delivered in Freiburg on the topic of thinking (What Is Called Thinking? of 1951–52 and The Principle of Reason from 1955–56 being the earlier two). Here Heidegger traces the notions of being and thinking as operative in dialectical thought back to their roots in the Greek conception of the λόγος. From the Aristotelian conception of a λόγος ἀποφαντικός and its prin- ciple of grounding, however, Heidegger proposes a “leap into the abyss” whereby λόγος is understood more primordially (via Homer) as “saying” (sagen). Heidegger’s concluding ruminations on the interconnection of being, language, and thinking are some of the most provocative of his career. Both of these cycles taken together portray a world that is always arriving, a fragile world shadowed by danger, but a danger that likewise allows us to belong to that world. They present us with a vision of being as arriving, of things as danc- ing, and of language as an abyssal realm of appearing. Further details concerning the delivery of the lectures and the state of the manuscripts can be found in the German editor’s after- word below (167–71). A few of the translation choices in the lectures that follow warrant further explanation here. Additionally, full German- English and English-German glossaries are supplied after the main text. The following remarks sketch some of the concep- tual considerations motivating the translations indicated, ar- ranged here largely in order of appearance: Das Geviert / the fourfold The word names a gathering of four (earth, sky, divinities, mor- tals), the bringing together of four parties. How these elements hold together is articulated through the gathering power of the Translator’s Foreword ix German prefix Ge- (also to be heard in Ge-Stell, positionality, the gathering or collection of all puttings and placings, of modes of stellen). Nowhere is the operative force of this Ge- ever named a fold or folding. Of a literal “fourfold” (Vierfalt), Heidegger here does not speak. Thus, a neutral term like “foursome” would be preferable to “fourfold,” which makes some unwarranted assumptions about the nature of the Geviert. Nevertheless, external considerations and unsavory associa- tions lead to the retaining of “fourfold” to translate Geviert. To be sure, there is much mention of folding in the essay “The Thing,” where the term Geviert first arises, but that is due to the repeated use of the term Einfalt. One must simply bear in mind that each of the four come together in a “single fold” and not in any multiplicity of folds as one might wrongly hear in the term “fourfold” (see GA 79: 12/11). Die Einfalt / the single fold The word identifies the simplicity of naivete, guilelessness. The Einfalt is not “complex,” though the English language does not have a word like “uniplex,” which is what the literal sense of the word leads us to think. It is the simplicity of a fold. Earlier trans- lations elided the distinction between Einfalt and Einfach in Hei- degger’s work. Where the difference was remarked, it was often explained with the emphasis on the Ein as “simple oneness.” This attributes too much weight to the unifying force of the Ein, while Heidegger’s emphasis here falls much more on the “fold.” The term itself emerges in the text in response to an act of fold- ing: the four are “folded into a single fourfold [in ein einziges Geviert eingefaltet]” (GA 79: 12/11). The very next sentence then introduces the “single fold of the four [die Einfalt der Vier]” (GA 79: 12/11). This single fold names the simple belonging together of the four. ring / nimble; scant gering / lithe; slight These terms are at the heart of Heidegger’s conception of the “thinging” of the thing. Each presents two strands of meaning, with gering serving as an intensification of ring (according to the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch). On the one hand, and as per Heidegger’s own definition, the terms name the “supple, x Translator’s Foreword lithesome, malleable, pliant, nimble” (see below, GA 79: 19/18). On the other, they name the slight, scant, modest, and few. Hei- degger uses both senses in his discussion, though the first more positive sense predominates. In keeping with Heidegger’s defi- nitions, I have rendered ring as “nimble” and gering as “lithe” when the emphasis is on the first sense. When the second sense is operative, as in the closing passages of “The Thing,” I have rendered ring as “scant” and gering as “slight.” Through these terminological maneuvers, Heidegger seeks to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of construing the thing as either something sub- stantial and solid or as something utterly diffuse or negligible. The thinging of the thing does not take place in a second order of reality apart from that of our own. These things are liminally situated. Their nimbleness consists in their opening onto rela- tions with the world around them via the mirror-play of the fourfold. Neither present nor absent, things are “slightly” of the world, we might say, and that is all they can ever be. weilen / to abide verweilen / to linger (intrans.); to let abide (trans.) The thing abides (weilt). It remains for a while (eine Weile). This “while” is the duration (die Weile) of that which abides (ein Weiliges). Abiding is an open-ended lingering. There is a calm to it (a Ruhe and a Stille), but it is a calm that is coterminous with the shortness of one’s stay. The difficulty for the transla- tor here stems from Heidegger’s use of the verb verweilen in a transitive sense (previously translated as “to stay” or “to bring to abide”). It names the way in which the fourfold coalesces in the thinging of the thing. To capture this transitive sense, I have sought to follow Heidegger’s own indications from his discussion some ten months later in the 1950 lecture “Lan- guage.” Here the context is precisely that of the fourfold and the thinging of the thing, with Heidegger stating that “the things allow [lassen] the fourfold of the four to abide with them [bei sich verweilen]. This gathering letting-abide [Verwei- lenlassen] is the thinging of the thing.”2 Thus I have chosen to 2. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe vol. 12, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klos- termann, 1985), 19. English translation: Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. and