The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King

2 Figuring the Matter Out

2 Figuring the Matter Out HEIDEGGER so RADICALLY transformed the traditional being-question that he eventually stopped using the term "being" as a designation for what he was ultimately aiming at. The appellation reiterated through the many waystations or topoi of his thought from his student days to his latest thought was in fact the word Sache, which can be translated as matter, topic, issue, problem, question , point of dispute (Gl 196,211; G61 12; SZ 37/50; SD). Though Heidegger liked to appeal to the word's original sense, namely, court case or legal battle, he also maintained that the conflict and difference involved here are not initiated by the belligerence of human thought. Rather "the Sache, the disputed case, is in itself a dis-pute, a dis-cussion [Aus-einander-setzung]" (NI 9/NI xv). The sameness of the Sache, which contains difference in itself, is thus not to be confused with identity: "But the same [das Selbe] is not the identical [das Gleiche]. In the identical, difference disappears. In the same, difference appears" (ID 107, 111/45). Heidegger often used subjunctive and aporetic phrases such as what is to be thought (das zu Denkende), what is worthy of question (das Fragwurdige), and what is to be said (das zu Sagende) as synonyms for the term Sache. This nameless name was not supposed to name anything actual, determinate, and singular, but rather invoked a possibility, an indeterminacy that allows itself to be reiterated and reinscribed in different and clashing ways. Heidegger's topic is not an answer, but essentially a question to be answered over and over on different thoughtpaths (Nl 457/NII 192). Thus Heidegger likewise gave up the term "philosophy" in the metaphysical doublet philosophy/being and preferred to speak rather of "paths" of thinking into the topic. "What endures in thinking is only the way" (G12 94/12). The postmetaphysical name of his thinking that he reinscribed through his many thoughtpaths was precisely the word Weg, way or path (Gl 201, 213; SZ 576/487; G61 157; SD 38/36). Though he continually placed the same topic in discussion (erortert), his paths never stepped onto the identical topos twice. There never was a single Heidegger, mens auctoris, topic, Heidegger's philosophy , since these are pluralized and differentiated into Heideggers, topoi, and thoughtpaths. And yet the anonymity of the term Sache, topic, still trembles across the expanses of his thought. How is one to get a sense for and learn Figuring the Matter Out 29 how to cope with the style of this Lucus a non Lucendo, this clearing where nothing gets cleared up? How to avoid becoming completely lost in Heidegger 's Black Forest of Holzwege? I argue that the word Sache is a kind of family name, an empty "formal indication," for the different Heideggers housed and trying to get along together in the family quarrel of his collected edition. I present a number of family resemblances in the different ways that he reiterated and placed his topic in discussion from his 1927 SZ, through his Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) and Nietzsche in the 1930S and 1940s, and to his Zur Sache des Denkens and Seminare in the 1960s and 1970s. My philosophical family portrait sketches three traits which, as I shall show later, were first inscribed in his youthful thought: namely, the end of philosophy, a new beginning, and indeed a constant beginning or being on the way. Using Heidegger's terminology from the early twenties to unlock the sense of his later thought, I explore how each of the above traits in his later thought is itself oriented around a multifaceted cluster of resemblances in the way that the sense of being (Seinssinn) is configured out into a number of intentional moments. The young Heidegger called these analogical moments the contentsense (Gehaltssinn), relational sense (Bezugssinn), fulfillment-sense (Vollzugssinn ), and temporalizing-sense (Zeitigungssinn) of our intentional comportment (Verhalten) to being. Content-sense points to the sense of the intentional content of experience, relational sense to the sense of the manner of intending this content, fulfillment-sense to the sense of enacting, performing, actualizing, or fulfilling the horizonal prefigurement of the whole intentional relation, and the all-important temporalizing-sense to the deep radical dimension of this fulfilling as historical time. Though Heidegger toned down his use of these phenomenological terms by the time he wrote SZ, he continued to employ them right up until the unfinished introduction of his collected edition, where...