Abstract
Abstract:
In homage to the theme of ‘Denken and Danken’ for our conference, I will undertake a close reading of Lecture X of Part I of What is Called Thinking? (1968) [GA 8- Was Heisst Denken? (1954)]. In that specific lecture X of Part I within the 1951-52 lecture series, Heidegger invokes Being and Time (1927). These are the first permitted lectures after denazification and the last before his retirement at the university in Freiburg. Not only do they constitute an enormously significant moment in the later Heidegger’s thinking, they take us back to, arguably, the most obscure matter for Heidegger in general: one that runs from his early days to his death, namely that which remains ‘unthought’ for Western metaphysics, or its ‘own ground and foundation’ (Heidegger, 1968, p. 100). However much one may dwell in and on the relation between thinking to Being in the later Heidegger, will come back to the opening moment of the lecture, namely the lifelong quest to question time based on presence of the now and the spatialized idea of time as the movement of ‘passing’ nows (Heidegger, 1968, p. 101). We will try to go further on this question of the meaning of Being as time as its horizon (of the question and of Being), the greatest articulation of which occurs in Being and Time (1927).
Furthermore, the interrelatedness of Being and Time (after the 1927 work, Being and Time) requires a double possibility: a.) not only questioning the dual archē that beings occur in Being and time - in Western metaphysics - and as construed as passing now-points (present as now, future as yet to be now, and past as having been now) [Heidegger, 1968, pp. 102-103]; but b.) the interrelation of time and Being as Event supersedes (and conceptualizes the event as passage) when we no longer have recourse to the eternal presence of the ‘now’ (Heidegger, 1968, p. 102) and the spatialization of time as linear passage consisting of three, namely present now, future as yet to be now, and past as already now. Instead, we hypothesize a four-dimensional temporalizing of temporality as an outgrowth of not only where Being and Time (1927) leaves off in Division Two, but also what remains ‘unthought’ in the later Heidegger’s lectures, such as What is Called Thinking? To dissociate time from space (and therefore the history of Western metaphysics and physics for that matter) is to dissociate time from movement while rethinking the latter two as an impossible relation irreducible to presence and spatiality; and therefore not in terms of some being that moves or moves itself or undergoes change, nor a change of location in space, which remains the same, whether we return to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics or not.