Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being

1. The Topos of Thinking

1 The Topos of Thinking We may venture the step back out of philosophy into the thinking of Being as soon as we have grown familiar with the provenance of thinking. —Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought If Heidegger’s thinking is, as he himself says, a “topology of being” (Topologie des Seyns)1 —a saying of the place of being—then what is the place that appears here? What is the place of being, and in what place does this thinking take place? These questions direct our attention not only to the role of topos or place as that which is the object of Heidegger’s thinking, and so as that toward which it is directed, but to the very topos or place within which Heidegger’s thinking emerges, and the character of that thinking as itself determined by topos, as emerging out of it, and as returning to it.2 As such, these questions move us within the domain of a form of “metaphilosophy” that looks to uncover the essential framework within which Heidegger’s thinking takes place. Understood as topological, Heidegger’s thinking can be said to be concerned with place in at least three ways: (i) with place as the proper focus of thinking, and so as that which it is concerned to think and to speak, to address and to articulate; (ii) as that which is the proper horizon of thinking, that holds thinking within it, that bounds it, and that thereby allows thinking to appear as thinking; and (iii) as that which is the proper origin of thinking, out of which thinking emerges, and from which it gains its direction as well as its sustenance.3 In exploring these three ways in which topos appears in Heidegger’s thinking, it is important to note that they are not sharply distinct from one another, but instead reflect different aspects of what is a single, unitary topos—a place that encompasses focus, horizon, and origin, and that always appears as containing within it an essential indeterminacy and multiplicity. 14 Chapter 1 It is only appropriate that the exploration of the place of thinking should begin where thinking itself begins, and so take as its starting point the placed origin of thinking. Here origin is itself to be understood not as some temporal starting point, but rather as that out of which something comes to appearance. Origin is thus already topological—to begin is to begin in and from out of place. In Heidegger, this focus on the placed origin of thinking appears very early. It is present in Heidegger’s emphasis on the need to turn back to “life” as the proper context for philosophy, in the emphasis on the idea of hermeneutical situatedness, and in the focus on Dasein—that mode of being that is constituted in terms of the “there/ here”—as the proper site for the opening up of the question of being as such. No matter the changes in Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, a key point around which his thinking constantly turns is the idea that thinking arises, and can only arise, out of our original encounter with the world—an encounter that is always singular and situated, in which we encounter ourselves as well the world, and in which what first appears is not something abstract or fragmented, but rather the things themselves, as things, in their concrete unity. Philosophy begins, then, in that same place that is the place for the emergence of world—and so for the appearance of things, the engagement with others, and the recognition of self. This place is one that is constantly before us, in which we are always situated , and yet from which we often seem estranged. Although there are occasions when Heidegger appears to present this original and originary place of encounter in terms that are suggestive of the unique and the epochal (for instance, in “The Origin of the Work of Art”4 ), for the most part, it is the place of the ordinary and the everyday in and through which what is extraordinary shines forth. In Heidegger’s early writing this appears in terms of the continual use of everyday examples for phenomenological interrogation—it is in the engagement with such ordinary things that the world itself comes into view. In his later essays, the happening of the Fourfold—the unitary gathering of earth, sky, mortals, and gods—is presented as occurring not through the work...