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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger's Mindfulness « Previous | |Next »
April 29, 2007

In this review of Heidegger's Mindfulness (Besinnung) Miguel de Beistegui states that the text is the second of a series of seven books written between 1936 and 1944, and published posthumously in the third section of the Gesamtausgabe entitled "Private Monographs and Lectures." All those books are specifically and intimately connected with the first and most important of the series, Contributions to Philosophy: On Ereignis, written between 1936-38 and published as volume 65 of the Complete Works.

de Beistegui says that part of the Mindfulness text gives us valuable indications and clarifications regarding Heidegger's earlier work, and Being and Time especially.

Being and Time is neither an anthropology, focused on the analysis of man as Dasein, nor a metaphysics, focused on the investigation regarding the beingness of beings. Besinnung goes further still in that direction: the human being is no longer the origin of the meaning or the truth of being, as was the case in the period of fundamental ontology, but only one of the four "poles" in the tense or strifely relation of which nature and history become manifest and unfold.

de Beistegui adds:

By the same token, this development signals a further move away from philosophy as anthropocentrism: "man" is not the measure of all things nor, as Sartre famously claimed, and Heidegger will go on to criticise in the Letter on Humanism, the only plane on which we find ourselves. The humanity of the humanity is rather derived from its position and role within "the fourfold" (men, gods, earth, and world). The technological age is the age of the ultimate abandonment of the truth of being, which translates into the triumph of the human as the sole point of reference, or the standard by which everything else is measured.

The Mindfullness text belongs in the "crossing" into the other beginning inasmuch as it tries to dislodge the human from its central position -- one that Heidegger believes to be destructive, for the human itself as well as for the world -- and to open it up, historically and existentially, to its forgotten essence.

Besinnung or Mindfulness approximates in English to what Heidegger regards as the very unfolding of being-historical thinking: an inquiry into the self-disclosure of being and differs from reflection since the latter belongs to the domain of a thinking that is not being-historical. The translators say that the word 'mindfulness' has a pliability that is denied to reflection -- a pliability that does not let mindfulness become rigid and unyielding and end up in doctrines, systems, and so forth.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:02 PM |