This talk approaches the closely inter-connected themes of nature and Vorhandenheit in the early Heidegger by initially distinguishing three internally complex senses of these terms (the theoretical, the intraworldly and the extraworldly,) before honing in on the last of these: i.e., nature understood as radical non-hermeneutical excess (Übermaß.) In what follows, a series of early Heideggerian texts are discussed in terms of the way that this theme emerges in his thought, and its ambiguous place as a locus of the incomprehensible “unworlded world” over against the major stream of Heideggerian ontology as a thinking about the clearing of meaning. It is in this context that the difficult question of the ontological status of unworlded nature is broached in the context of Richard Polt’s discussion of the theme of excess in Heidegger.

If, as Lovitt (1977) declares, “Heidegger is primarily a teacher,” then how can interpreting Heidegger’s thinking as acts of pedagogical relationality inform not only our understanding of his thinking but also who we are as teachers? Given the introduction of a new format for presentation, I am proposing an oral presentation and discussion to cultivate possible answers to this question. Attendees are profoundly teachers; it is a fundamental part of our scholarly lives. We teach who we are, and who we are has been influenced by our engaging with Heidegger’s thinking. In this conversation, we will share and reflect on our backgrounds as teachers and how we understand our teaching in connection to Heidegger’s philosophy and calls for a renewal in “thinking.”

Sudden removal, transport, Entruckung, ekstasis. Time takes us and seizes us—we are finite and, thus, to some extent, impotent. But we must not fail to note that time takes us places. These places are landscapes that while virtual are no less real. This issue of the virtuality of landscape, of the reality of world(s) to which one travels is something of a mystery, a mystery that is shared in common between unlikely bedfellows: Heidegger and Latina feminist phenomenologists María Lugones and Mariana Ortega. As the first airing of a work long in progress, I hope to discuss Lugones’ provocative claim regarding the descriptive import of travel between worlds over and above the ontological justification of the reality thereof in light of both: 1) Ortega’s reading, which deploys tools from Heidegger’s Being and Time while leaving Lugones’ claim intact; and 2) a critical enrichment of the conversation Ortega opens that functions by linking her “multiple self” to Heidegger’s development of Dasein in the human being (GA 29/30), such that: a) “world travel” earns ontological distinction by way of radical finitude (and thus by way of time) and b) Heidegger’s myopic account of need circa 1929 can be diagnosed as such and extended beyond the limits of his intentions to make space for an ontico-ontological manifold that demands recognition.

Heidegger’s National Socialist political sympathies are plainer and more troubling to contemporary readers than ever before. This paper examines the relation of leader to society Heidegger uses to ground his account of the state. Heidegger draws on Aristotle and Kant to make his case in the 1930s. But breakthroughs in the previous decade, in Being and Time in particular, make the political ontology he endorses less than compelling. The power of the leader over the society he or she leads cannot repeat the relation of Being over entities. The ontological difference is different from, and incompatible with, all possible statements of political community. Ontologically speaking, totalitarianism is a category mistake. Confusing the transcendental domain for its ontic content, Heidegger refuses to learn his own lesson in ways Eric Voegelin helps us detect.

In this paper I focus on the specific communal setting within which Heidegger places Dasein’s authentic co-historicizing, namely, the Volk. Section §74 of Being and Time, with its invocation of the charged Volkish notions of fate, destiny, heritage, and struggle, has long been in the center of the debates over the possible connections between Heidegger’s philosophy and his early affiliation with National Socialism. In my paper I wish to intervene in this debate by looking at the early Jewish receptions of Heidegger’s philosophy in the 1930s and expose a strand in this reception that did not disapprove of the Volkish terminology put to use in the Dasein analytic, and at times even found it particularly fitting for the Jewish case. Exposing this strand allows for a better understanding of the historical and conceptual context within which Heidegger’s Volkish terminology was put to use, indicating that claims regarding a necessary ‘cause and effect’ connection between his early philosophy and fascist politics are simplistic.

It is often alleged that there is no substantial possibility for authentic community in Heidegger. This is encouraged by Heidegger’s frequent disparaging remarks about the public and public life. However, there are also several substantial passages, both in Being and Time and elsewhere, where Heidegger seems to endorse a notion of communal and historical being together. In this paper I try to work out this apparent inconsistency in a way that favors the possibility of authentic community. First, I explain the reasoning behind several influential accounts which argue that authenticity and community are essentially in tension. I argue that these interpretations mistakenly attribute a thesis about language and intelligibility—conflating Heidegger’s phenomenology of language with linguistic pragmatism or conventionalism—that Heidegger almost certainly did not share. Disabused of this mistaken attribution, the purported essential tension between authenticity and community is dissolved. Still, it’s true that public life can be and usually is at odds with authentic existence, and so there is a difference between ‘the public’ and an authentic community. I examine Heidegger’s early lectures on Paul’s attempt to maintain an authentic community among early Christian congregations to illustrate and explain this inherent tension or ambiguity.

This essay begins to investigate the possibility of a Heideggerian sense of hospitality. By drawing out the concern for home at the center of Heidegger’s analysis of uncanniness and attending carefully to its ethical resonances, I believe we find an opening to just such a possibility. Heidegger’s thinking of uncanniness, of an essential uncanniness that defines human-being as both unhomely and becoming homely, opens us to an ethicality understood in terms of home, an authentic being-with that finds its origin in the uncanny opening of human-being to Being, and thus, to beings.

Interpretations of Heidegger’s discussion of space in Being and Time have predominantly focused on two related themes: Heidegger’s attempt to ground spatiality in temporality and the problem of embodiment. Little direct attention, however, has been given to the role Heidegger’s discussion of spatiality plays in his analysis of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. This paper pursues the thesis that Heidegger’s account of Being-in-the-world, which is meant to avoid a subject-object dichotomy by representing a unitary phenomenon, falls prey to a charge of subjectivism lacking an adequate account of spatiality. I support this claim in three steps. In the first section, I show how Heidegger’s discussion of spatiality is aimed at deflecting a charge of subjectivism. The second section argues that Heidegger’s account of spatiality fails to go beyond the system of relations that defines worldhood and Being-in. In the final section, I will define what I consider to be a necessary condition for a non-subjectivist system of relations: an encounter between Dasein and entities in which the latter are not determined entirely according to the system of relations. I discuss the two instances where Heidegger discusses the idea of encounter, arguing that his account falls short of the criterion I propose.

Birds do it, bees do it…does Dasein do it? This question is less about whether members of Heidegger’s community have sex and more about whether the notion of sexual difference plays a primordial role in the existential make-up of a community. John Haugeland states, “Dasein is neither people nor their being but rather a way of life shared by members of some community.1” What is shared here is an understanding of being that is, in a certain way, chained to a body that is historically contingent. Does the fact that bodies are sexed say [Sagen/Zeigen] anything about our way of Being? To answer the opening question, according to Heidegger, Dasein doesn’t do it. That bodies are sexed merits no serious analysis, and the act of having sex, despite its being responsible for the infinite propagation of beings (for whom Being is an issue) is of no ontological significance: Ni homme, ni femme- c’est un Dasein. This phrase is a reformulation of Guenther Anders’ statement, “Ni homme, ni capucin- c’est un Dasein”. Neither surrendering to the desires or material concerns of man, nor transcending to the supra-natural world of the divine, Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein is one of pseudo-concreteness. Dasein is the middleman, forgetful of the milieu4. If ancient metaphysicians forgot the meaning of Being [ϕνσις] by neglecting its duality, Heidegger is equally guilty in overlooking the dynamic unfolding of the dialectic of sex.

This paper proceeds by investigating three ‘topoi’ or sites within Heidegger’s texts where the presence of Stoicism most fundamentally articulates itself as critical to his understanding of the truth of being (aletheia) and its historical destining as Ereignis. We will begin with the “Letter on Humanism” (1947), the most comprehensive “public’ statement of his later thought-by first considering how Ereignis-often translated as the event or event of appropriation to indicate the historical destining of being-might be said to be consonant with the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis-the appropriation or familiarization with oneself echoed by both Chrysippus and Hierocles. In doing so, we will attempt to trace Heidegger’s interpretation of oikeiosis back into the origins of his fundamental ontology by turning to the genesis of care/cura (Sorge) in Sein und Zeit (1927)-specifically the Roman myth of Hyginus that bears its name-before concluding with an early lecture course, Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion (1920-1921) where his engagement with the Pauline tradition reveals oikeiosis to be a hidden enigma in his thinking about the meaning of being and its historical destining.

Plato criticized Mythos for its falsity, but he uses many myths in his own dialogues on the way to attaining truth. He had a distinct standard for making use of or dismissing a myth: truth or falsity. His myths are the inseparable part of his philosophical logos. Heidegger interpreted the myths in Republic from the perspective of the truth of being. Polis is a metaphor of alētheia. The Cave myth presents a vivid picture of how to reach truth by struggling with concealment. The Er myth showed that unconcealment is destined to decline and turn to concealment. As the souls were required to drink the water of ameleta, concealment and forgetfulness entered into the essence of human being. In the essence of truth there is untruth, the counter-essence of truth. Firstly, the truth is reached by struggling with every kind of untruth. Secondly, according to the essence of being, truth of being or the presencing is in order, which means that it comes from concealment and soon goes into concealment again. The truth of being is not physis/emerging as in the Greek, but declining. The decline is determined from the start, as destiny.

The panel’s concern is to invite deeper consideration of Heidegger’s life-long engagement with ancient Greek thinking and language. The touchstone is the forthcoming publication of the translation of GA 55 Heraklit.