Discourse on Thinking
Martin Heidegger
Language: English
Pages: 49
ISBN: 0061314595
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Contents:
I Memorial Address
II Conversations on a Country Path About Thinking
Discourse on Thinking questions that must occur to us the moment we manage to see a familiar situation in unfamiliar light.
Martin Heidegger's Discourse on Thinking which is translated here, was published in 1959. It comprises a statement of the point of view of his later thought. Since Heidegger's later thought has evoked so much interest among philosophers and, in the last few years, theologians, it seems important to have significant examples of it available in English. Discourse on Thinking is a particularly good example for this purpose not only because it is so recent, but because of its format and style.
Discourse on Thinking has two parts: a Memorial Address in honor of the German composer, Conradin Kreutzer, which Heidegger delivered to a general audience, and a dialogue- or conversation- in which the theme stated in the address is developed in a more specialized and profound way. The dialogue was written from more extended notes on a conversation dating from 1944-45 between a teacher, a scientist, and a scholar.
From John M. Anderson's and E. Hans Freund's preface to this transation
beginning has been called of late the atomic age. Its most conspicuous symbol is the atom bomb. But this symbolizes only the obvious; for it was recognized at once that atomic energy can be used also for peaceful purposes. Nuclear physicists everywhere are busy with vast plans to implement the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The great industrial corporations of the leading countries, first of all England, have figared out already that atomic energy can develop into a gigantic business. Through
belonging to it. Teacher: But if we are already appropriated to that-whichregions? Scientist: What good does that do us if we aren't truly appropriated? Scholar: Thus we are and we are not. Scientist: Again this restless to and fro between yes and no. Scholar: We are suspended as it were between the two. Teacher: Yet our stand in this betweenness is waiting. Scholar: That is the nature of rel easement into which the regioning of that-which-regions regions man. We presage the nature of thinking as
that-which-regions requires a trace of willing. This trace, however, vanishes while releasing oneself and is completely extinguished 'in releasement. Scholar: But in what ways is releasement related to what is not willing? Teacher: After all we said about the enduring of the abiding expanse, about letting rest in returning, about the regioning of that-which-regions, it is hardly possible to speak of that-which-regions as will. Scholar: Certainly the fact that on the one hand both the regioning
this can no longer be said in a single word. Still I know a word which up to now seemed to me appropriate to name the nature of thinking and so of knowing. Scientist: I would like to hear this word. Scholar: It is a word which had occurred to me as early as our first conversation. I had this in mind when I remarked at the beginning of today's conversation that I owed a valuable suggestion to our first conversation on a country path. Several times in the course of today's conversation, I was about
Heidegger calls the region. , What is evident of the horizon [its openness], then, is but the side facing us of an openness which surrounds us; an openness which is filled with views of the appearances of what to our re-presenting are objects. In consequence the horizon is still something else besides a horizon ... [and] this something else is the other side of itself, and so the same as itself. You say that the horizon is the openness which surrounds us. But what is this openness as such, if