Carman: Heidegger’s "turn" and the question of being

Heidegger presents the fundamental ontology of Being and Time   as clearing a path toward the question concerning "the" meaning of being (in general). Again, the book begins with a dramatic rhetorical question: "Do we today have an answer to the question concerning what we really mean when we use the expression ’being’ (seiend  )? Not   at all" (GA2 1). Heidegger then proposes to "reawaken" and "work out" the question (GA2 1). But he never presumes to answer it; indeed, it is not even obvious that he thinks it can have a single, univocal answer. The most he says in Being and Time - indeed, the central thesis   of the book - is that time is the "horizon   of any understanding of being in general" (GA2 1), hence, a fortiori, "the transcendental   horizon for the question of being" (GA2 39, 41). What Heidegger offers, then, is not an answer to the question of being, but an account of the hermeneutic conditions that render it intelligible.

It is only with the famous "turn" (Kehre  ) in (or toward) his later work that Heidegger drops all pretense of preparing the way for a systematic account of the meaning of being in general, in favor of a retrospective account of the history of metaphysics, or what he now calls the "history of being" (Seinsgeschichte  ), which is to say, a history of the dominant understandings of being that have grounded and guided Western thought since Greek antiquity. [1] By the mid-1930s, that is, Heidegger has stepped back from the constructive "scholarly" (wissenschaftlich) project of Being and Time to look back over the metaphysical tradition   from a vantage point he now regards as lying just beyond it, Nietzsche   having marked the both the culmination and the end of that tradition.

Whereas it might seem as if he just happens to leave the question of being unanswered in his early work of the 1920s, Heidegger now emphasizes that the question of being is not strictly speaking an interrogative at all, that is, a "question" in the grammatical or illocutionary sense, a question corresponding to an answer. It is instead an "experience" (Erfahrung  ), a mood, an unsettling, subrational apprehension (in both senses of that word) of the sheer that and what of things, a sense of astonishment, awe, perhaps a vague sense of dread. That uncanny sense of being is not merely a psychological state motivating an articulate question for systematic inquiry, a problem we might one day solve; it just is the "question."

In his later writings, then, rather than even pretend to set out in search of an answer to the question of being, Heidegger reads between the lines of the canonical texts of the metaphysical tradition with an eye to discerning the fundamental affects and understandings that constitute the history of being. His own philosophical contribution, he would later say, was to have articulated the question explicitly in the form of a question for the first time: "In the treatise Being and Time the question concerning the meaning of being is posed and developed specifically as a question for the first time in the history of philosophy" (GA40  : 89/88). [2] (CARMAN   in WRATHALL