In the Introduction to Being and Time Heidegger calls ‘To the things themselves’ the “maxim” of phenomenology. I argue that Heidegger recognized the maxim’s normativity but thought that Husserl’s understanding of it made it an inadequate guide for the phenomenological method. I show that Heidegger revised the maxim in his Marburg years with a focus on its role as a principle. The revised maxim specifies how to engage in phenomenological inquiry by calling the phenomenologist’s attention to the violence our fore-conceptions can do to the way phenomena show themselves. With this revised maxim in mind I reconsider the grounds of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl in the Marburg years, and explain his conclusion that Husserl’s phenomenology was unphenomenological. Finally, I show that Heidegger’s attempts to abide by his more rigorous maxim appear to fail.

The notion of event (Ereignis) that Heidegger introduces in the 1930s names a singularity as something that happens (geschehen), but cannot be repeated and cannot thus fall under a concept. The same holds for the notion of “other beginning,” which thus cannot be in continuity with the first beginning. I show that Heidegger uses two different descriptions of such an event: a messianic or diachronic one—something will happen, we are in transition toward it—and a synchronic one: the event permeates our ways of thinking now. I show that Michel Foucault’s understanding of “the event in thought” (l’événement dans la pensée) that he uses and applies in his Hermeneutics of the Subject can help us understand that the two aspects of the event—messianic and synchronic—are not contradictory, but belongs of necessity to a thinking of a singularity, as Heidegger practices it.

The paper argues that the second of Martin Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations (GA 77), namely, “Der Lehrer trifft den Türmer an der Tür zum Turmaufgang,” provides the reader with a live performance of a dialogue (much advocated by Heidegger) between a poet and a thinker. Through a textual analysis of various dramatic elements in the conversation, I provide an imaginative albeit plausible identification of the three characters in the dialogue (namely, the teacher, the tower warden, and the guest) that makes sense in light of the overall conversational context and opens new possibilities for the philosophical meaning of the conversation itself.

I argue that the analyses of language Heidegger offers in On the Way to Language demonstrate that language is both constitutively other to us and manifest to us as our historically specific possibilities of meaningful life. To do so, I argue that Heidegger’s focus on our experience of speaking demonstrates that we experience the alterity of language as an imperative, as questionable, and as perpetually ahead of us, and that these characteristics correspond to our ways of taking up meaningfully the possibilities of contemporary life available to us only in our collectively constituted, historical contexts. Further, I draw on Heidegger account of the experience of the poet who figures in Stefan George’s poem “Words” to argue that our experience of language is characterized by learning to criticize aspects of contemporary life. I also identify this practice of critique as essential to community, defining the latter as a collective attempt to preserve and transform possibilities of meaningful life.

Does Heidegger have an ethics of history? The very idea of an ethics of history, especially in regards to Heidegger’s work, appears to make little sense. For Heidegger, history is always the history of being, and, as we learn from the “Letter on Humanism,” the nature of ethics has yet to be fully determined. And yet, if we follow Heidegger is his way of determining the ethical in relation to *thos, we can in fact begin to speak of Heidegger’s ethics of history. Towards this end, I want to further interpret his characterization of *thos, especially as it is presented through the saying of Heraclitus, and extend the interpretation through the work of Giorgio Agamben.

In his 1937 lectures, Heidegger pursues Nietzsche’s initial thought of “the Moment.” This paper mimics Heidegger’s pursuit of Nietzsche’s Moment by tracing Heidegger’s own early arrival at the Moment in Being and Time. I argue that Dasein, like Zarathustra, is chased in and out of the Moment by its shadow. While Dasein forgets itself in inauthentically securing its identity in its shadow, which is closest-at-hand, it also confronts its own finitude in witnessing the daily dwindling of its shadow—the everyday passing away of time.

Heidegger’s lecture courses on Nietzsche give prominent attention to the question of what he calls “Nietzsche’s Alleged Biologism.” I will argue that Heidegger is not merely replacing the Nazi biologistic reading with a metaphysical reading, for his metaphysical reading of Nietzsche is biological, in a distinct sense. Although I reject this metaphysical reading, Heidegger aids my project of constructing a non-naturalist, yet physical reading of Nietzsche in at least four ways: 1) he rejects the Nazi biologistic reading of Nietzsche, 2) he sets forth distinct notions of the biological and the physical akin to Nietzsche, 3) he argues against scientific naturalism in favor of an alternative mode of knowing, and 4) he recognizes that rather than reducing everything to nature, Nietzsche anticipates him in intertwining more originary, dynamic notions of physis and techne.

This paper addresses not only what Heidegger writes about attunement, truth, and errancy, but also how they play out in his own thinking. It focuses on Heidegger’s non-public writings in the 30s and 40s and argues that what one may call Heidegger’s errancies, especially in his Black Notebooks, have their seat in a blindness connected to the ways attunements dispose his thinking. The paper first traces how Heidegger’s understanding of attunements from Being and Time to Contributions acquires more and more a historical determination. It then questions the difference between attunements that are grounding and attunements that are not grounding but disclosive with relation to specific things and events, and how this difference in attunements relates to Heidegger’s understanding of truth and errancy (Irre). This is followed by a closer look at how errancy is operative at a dispositional level (at the level of attunements) in his non-public writings. The paper argues that just as errancy cannot be removed from truth, non-grounding attunements cannot be removed from grounding attunements. In other words, attunements, and this includes Heidegger’s attunements, cannot be simply disconnected from things, events, and embodied lineages. The paper closes with the question of how determinations arise from attunements and what determines attunements.

Bill Richardson’s masterwork Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought was first published in 1963. What follows is fully informed by his guiding and enduring insight: the “turn” (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking, which, Bill referred to—in his memorable heuristic expression—as “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II.” From his book: “For the shift of focus from There-being to Being…was demanded…as soon as it became clear [to Heidegger] that the primacy of the Being-process belongs to Being itself” (HTPT, 624). Let us see how Bill’s basic reading is further borne out and underscored in the recently published Black Notebooks.

In the following paper, pursuing a lead from Heidegger’s 1937 reading of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, I look to the 1929/30 lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik for a corresponding conception of awakening in Heidegger’s own (openly metaphysical) thinking that would indicate a deeper connection of the two thinkers than meets the eye. I locate the awakening of a fundamental attunement, which I explore first, through the meaning of awakening as counterposed to sleep (an image of forgetting for both Nietzsche and Heidegger). As a didactic metaphor, I offer the optic of the lucid dream through which we are given to consider the horizonal negotiation of the everyday self and of Dasein as simultaneously awake. The lucid dream can perdure only momentarily, however, lest we risk life and limb, but it nevertheless has the potential to be transformative of life. Once awakening is properly explored, the investigation shifts to method: how should an attunement be awakened? I demonstrate that Heidegger’s argument turns on the horizonal negotiation of the simultaneous Being-there and not-there of the human being. Finally, focusing on the function of horizon in Heidegger’s positive characterization of attunement, I argue that Heidegger’s deployment of the Weise as melody speaks directly to the Weise of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

It is an opinion often ventured that Heidegger, having opened very briefly – in Being and Time – the question of birth, fails to properly engage the matter. It is said that, despite the thinking of historicity initiated there, and the occasional reference in later writings, the question of the natal is not properly addressed in his work. Instead, we are told, it is Hannah Arendt who picks up this neglected thread, turning it into a cornerstone of her thinking. This paper seeks to show that this story is inaccurate: that the development of a conception of ‘Anfang’ in the texts of the late 1930’s can be seen to address in a decisive manner the question of what will be called ‘natality.’ Aspects of the texts from this period, and in particular of the volume Über den Anfang (GA 70) can be read so as to reveal a rich and complex response to this problem, one that reverses many presuppositions regarding Heidegger’s work at this time, and more than filling this apparent lacuna.

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.

The epilogue of Martin Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes quotes Hegel's famous judgment: “[A]rt is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.” With this judgment, Hegel says that art has ceased to be the vehicle of self-knowledge for human beings; Hegel proclaims the pastness of art. But the future of art is thus put into question. This is how Heidegger transforms Hegel's verdict into a question: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which […] truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?” Thus, the question of the pastness of art turns into the question regarding whether art is to be or not to be, into the question of the future of art. Hegel's judgment proclaims the pastness of art, because art is implicated with material contingency. That means that the question of the rehabilitation of art, of the future of art, is at the same time the question of the phenomenological rehabilitation of the material. What is central to this project of rehabilitation is the figure of the work of art with its own peculiar kind of materiality. Therefore, Heidegger reformulates the material of art as earth which is a source not just of contingency but also of potentiality. Yet, Heidegger does not understand art as the creation of aesthetic objects, rather, art is concerned with ποίησιϛ, with the bringing forth of beings out of the unconcealment. Such is the formulaic definition of art as τέχνη in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: “All art is concerned with the process of coming into being, and to practice art is also to consider how something capable of being or not being [τι τῶν ἐνδεχομένων καὶ εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι] […] may come into being.” This formula, although it is nowhere present in the essay, is the hidden center of Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes – such is the claim of this essay. Heidegger returns to the ancient definition of τέχνη to place art within the parameters of history, i.e., starting history anew by introducing new beings. But every bringing forth of beings is a retrieval of the past, i.e., of the earth rich with potentiality from which alone the future can unfold. Thus, every decision concerning the future always takes up the past, i.e., the already-there of the earth.

Drawing on Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” I argue that art is constitutive of dimensions of our existence whereby we exceed our finitude: relationality and historicality. Further, I argue that such a characterization of art allows us to interpret the critique of Rilke Heidegger proffers in “Why Poet?” as follows: despite Rilke’s ability to step beyond the terms of modern experience, his work is limited, from a Heideggerian perspective, inasmuch as it cannot accommodate the relational character of our experience. I conclude by suggesting that identifying this lack of a relational aspect in modern experience helps identify the question most central to it: “what does it mean to be a we?”