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

Introduction: The Thinking of Place

Introduction: The Thinking of Place Accordingly, we may suggest that the day will come when we will not shun the question whether the opening, the free open, may not be that within which alone pure space and ecstatic time and everything present and absent in them have the place which gathers and protects everything. —Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being The idea of place—of topos—runs through the thinking of Martin Heidegger almost from the very start. Although not always directly thematized —sometimes apparently obscured, displaced even, by other concepts—and expressed through many different terms (Ort, Ortschaft, Stätte, Gegend, Dasein, Lichtung, Ereignis),1 it is impossible to think with Heidegger unless one attunes oneself to Heidegger’s own attunement to place. This is something not only to be observed in Heidegger’s attachment to the famous hut at Todtnauberg;2 it is also found, more significantly, in his constant deployment of topological terms and images, and in the situated , “placed,” character of his thought, and of its key themes and motifs.3 Heidegger’s work exemplifies the practice of what might be thought of as “philosophical topology,” yet Heidegger must also be counted as one of the principal founders of such a mode of place-oriented thinking.4 The aim of this volume is to contribute to both the topological understanding of Heidegger and the continuing articulation and elaboration of topology as philosophically conceived. In this respect, the essays aim to supplement and expand the analysis of Heideggerian topology already begun in my Heidegger’s Topology,5 but they can equally be seen as contributing to my own project of philosophical topography as first set out in my earlier volume Place and Experience.6 The essays collected here (essays that span a decade or more of writing) thus focus on the idea of place, first, as it appears in Heidegger’s thinking as it arises in a number of ways and in 2 Introduction relation to a range of issues, and, second, as it can be seen to provide the focus for a distinctive mode of philosophical thinking that encompasses, but is not restricted to, the Heideggerian. In this respect, the focus on place that appears here, while certainly finding a fruitful setting in Heidegger’s work, does not derive from a Heideggerian perspective alone. It is not that, taking Heidegger as a starting point, the idea of place as philosophically significant comes into view, but rather, beginning with the idea of place as philosophically significant, one comes to a different reading, and perhaps a different appreciation, of the thinker from Messkirch, as well as of a number of other key figures—most notably perhaps, Kant, Aristotle, Gadamer, and Davidson, but also Benjamin , for instance, and, although they make but the briefest of appearances here, Arendt and Camus. The idea that place should be philosophically so significant in this way—that it might actually be central to philosophy as such (and that it is so is the underlying claim throughout much of my work as well, I would argue, of Heidegger’s)—is to some extent a claim defended and elaborated upon, in various ways, throughout the essays contained here, but it is perhaps worth saying a little more by way of such a defense or elaboration from the very start. What underpins my conviction concerning the philosophical centrality of place, not only in Heidegger, but also more generally, is something that involves both a philosophical idea as well as a matter of personal experience or personal “phenomenology.” I will say a little about the personal element that is at issue here, but first let me address the philosophical. One of the features of place is the way in which it establishes relations of inside and outside—relations that are directly tied to the essential connection between place and boundary or limit.7 To be located is to be within, to be somehow enclosed, but in a way that at the same time opens up, that makes possible. Already this indicates some of the directions in which any thinking of place must move—toward ideas of opening and closing, of concealing and revealing, of focus and horizon, of finitude and “transcendence,” of limit and possibility, of mutual relationality and coconstitution. It is not surprising, therefore, to find such an important focus on “being-in,” essentially a focus on place and placedness, within...