Zimmerman (1982:xix-xx) – virada [Kehre]

Although there is some danger in applying the notion of "development" to a thinker’s work, Heidegger himself provides some justification for this approach when he talks about the "turn" (Kehre  ) in his thinking. (LR, xvi; WGM, 159/207-208) In some sense, all of his philosophical work involves a turning-back or returning to [xx] beginnings, to what is primordial but forgotten.1 Yet he mentions two particular "turnings" (understood here as "changes") in his thinking. In his "Letter on Humanism" (1946), he says that his earlier essay "On the Essence of Truth" (1930) reflects such a change. (WGM, 159/207-208) The latter essay tries to find a way beyond the residual subjectivism of Being and Time   by claiming that truth (unconcealment) possesses human existence, and not   the other way around.2 This attempt to move away from the humanism and subjectivism characteristic of transcendental   philosophy was not wholly decisive, however. Heidegger had still not adequately dealt with the fact that voluntarism, too, is a kind of subjectivism. For several years he continued to maintain that courageous resoluteness is a necessary element in any new disclosure of Being. In his "Letter to Father Richardson  " (1962), he alludes to another change which occurred in his thinking around 1936 (LR, xiv), the period in which he was developing the notion of Ereignis  . (ZS  , 46/43) For the present study, this change is important. It was only then that he found the vocabulary to say that authenticity is not so much self-possessedness (Eigentlichkeit  ) as "being-appropriated" (ver-eignet) by the disclosive event of which we are always a part. For the purposes of this essay, Heidegger’s "early" thinking is found in work done before about 1936; his "later" thinking is found in work done thereafter. I offer the usual reservations about making such chronological distinctions in the work of an author. Indeed, it will become clear in the course of this essay that there are remnants of voluntarism in Heidegger’s work after 1936, and that there are important efforts to overcome subjectivism in work done long before that. I take seriously his admonition to Father Richardson not to understand his thinking after 1936 as something wholly different from the thinking which had gone on before. The turn in Heidegger’s thinking was not an abrupt about-face but, instead, a kind of ripening in which certain impediments fell away so that the flower of his thinking could bloom. One of the major impediments was his early overemphasis on the role of will in authenticity.