Crisis Theory and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections

Preface

While Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg im Breisbau in 1943, Heidegger lectured on the topic of “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is Dead’,” in which he had something to say about “preparatory thinking.” Given Heidegger ’s pronouncements, I believe that a reflection of the sort attempted here is a matter of “preparing for a simple and inconspicuous step in thought.” Such is preparatory thinking, in which what matters is “to light up that space within which Being itself might again be able to take man, with respect to his essence, into a primal relationship.” The problem for the thinker, of course, as Heidegger himself noted, is to proceed in “an unpretentious way,” all the while conceding that we shall all of us share in this thinking, “clumsy and groping though it be,” with the hope that this sharing “proves to be an unobtrusive sowing—a sowing that cannot be authenticated through the prestige or utility attaching to it—by sowers who may perhaps never see blade and fruit and may never know a harvest. They serve the sowing, and even before that they serve its preparation.” Heidegger’s metaphor appropriately distinguished between the sowing and the plowing, the latter “making the field capable of cultivation.” In this work I expect that my contribution is first and foremost one of “having a presentiment of, and then finding, that field,” of contributing to its cultivation, and only secondly one of sowing that field. And, insofar as “to each thinker there is assigned but one way, his own, whose traces he must again and again go back and forth that finally he may hold to it as the one that is his own— although it never belongs to him—and may tell what can be experienced on that way,” this book constitutes an invitation to all who would share in a preparatory thinking and to sow the field. Preface vii ...