Besinnung, meditation, meditação, meditación, besinnen, meditar, pensamento-do-sentido (EssaisConf), méditation (EssaisConf), reflection (QCT)

NT: 1. “Reflection” is the translation of the noun Besinnung, which means recollection, reflection, consideration, deliberation. The corresponding reflexive verb, sich besinnen, means to recollect, to remember, to call to mind, to think on, to hit upon. Although “reflection” serves the needs of translation best in this and other essays in this volume, the word has serious inadequacies. Most importantly, reflection-from Latin reflect ere, to bend back-intrinsically carries connotations uncomfortably close to those in Heideggeir’s use of vorstellen, to represent or set before, and could suggest the mind’s observing of itself. Moreover, reflection, like the other nouns available as translations of Besinnung, lacks any marked connotation of directionality, of following after. The reader should therefore endeavor to hear in “reflection” fresh meaning. For Heidegger Besinnung is a recollecting thinking-on that, as though scenting it out, follows after what is thought. It involves itself with sense (Sinn) and meaning, and is at the same time a “calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of questioning.” See below, pp. 180 ff; cf. What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 207 ff. (QCT 155)

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Having addressed the renditions of the keywords Abgrund and Ereignis, we now turn our attention to the word mindfulness itself, which appears in the title as well as throughout this translation as the English rendition of Heidegger’s word Besinnung. Right from its onset, be-ing-historical thinking unfolds itself as Besinnung and not as reflection since the latter belongs to the domain of a thinking that is not being-historical. Accordingly, it is of paramount importance in translating the word Besinnung to hone in on the foundational difference between reflection and Besinnung. In this context it would serve well to note the intimate hermeneutic-phenomenological connection between Sinn and Besinnung to which Heidegger pays especial attention both in Being and Time and Contributions to Philosophy. To obtain a rendition of the word Besinnung that approximates in English to what Heidegger regards as the very unfolding of being-historical thinking, we have to bear in mind that Besinnung is nothing but an inquiry into the self-disclosure of being – self-disclosure that in Being and Time Heidegger calls the meaning or ‘der Sinn’ of being and that in Contributions to Philosophy he calls the truth of being. What is of utmost significance here is that philosophy as Besinnung unfolds this inquiry. This inquiry is not merely a human enterprise of reflecting on the data of consciousness, on the peculiarities of perception or on the states of mind. It differs from reflection in that, as Besinnung, this inquiry is not entirely and exhaustively in human discretion. What distinguishes this inquiry as Besinnung is that it is basically determined and shaped by the truth of being. Thus there is an intimate interconnection between this inquiry, as Besinnung, and being. As Besinnung, this inquiry is already enowned by being. As enowned, it stands at the service of being by projecting-opening being’s enowning sway or being’s conferments, its ‘enowning throw’. Thus, what distinguishes this inquiry is that it is mindful of – does not, via reflection, lay siege on being’s conferments — its ‘enowning throw’. This ‘being mindful of being’s enowning throw’ cannot even be classified as a particular kind of reflection, or even as a mode of conscious awareness. Two factors are important here: on the one hand there is “the inexhaustibility of being’s enowning-throw” and on the other hand “the inconclusiveness of its projecting-opening”.¹ As a result, ‘being mindful of being’s enowning-throw’ is not an addendum to this inquiry but “originates from within the inexhaustibility of being’s enowning-throw . . .”.²

One way of grasping the distinction that Heidegger draws between Besinnung and reflection is to consider their bearings upon the issue called ‘self.’ Reflection on the ‘self’, which sustains all psychology and psychiatry, attends to the empirical states of the ‘self’ in order to render these states accessible to objectification. By contrast, in Besinnung on the ‘self’ these states are bracketed out and what is at stake is the grounding of the ‘self’ via ‘temporality’, ‘linguisticality’, ‘historicality’, ‘mortality’, and so forth. Heidegger alludes to the distinction between Besinnung on the ‘self’, as its grounding, and reflection on the ‘self’ by first questioning whether the ‘self’ is accessible to reflection at all and then by alluding to the necessity of grounding the ‘self’. He says:

[Besinnung] is . . . so originary that it above all asks how the self is to be grounded . . . Thus it is questionable whether through reflection on ‘ourselves’ we ever find our self . . . (Contributions, xxxii)

Here we see that while Heidegger endorses a grounding of the ‘self’ via mindfulness of the ‘self’ he questions the very possibility of accessibility of the ‘self’ to reflection.

In order to obtain in English an approximate rendition of the word Besinnung, we took our bearing from the distinction that Heidegger draws between reflection on the ‘self’, and being mindful of the ‘self’, and rendered the word Besinnung with mindfulness. The unique advantage of this rendition consists in the fact 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. In section 11 of Mindfulness, which comes right after the “Introduction”, Heidegger brings to mind this pliability of mindfulness when he says:

Coming from the overcoming of “metaphysics”, mindfulness must nevertheless touch upon the hitherto and cannot become inflexible as the finished product of a usable presentation either in a “doctrine” or in a “system”, or as “exhortation” or “edification”. (Mindfulness, 17)

(Emad & Kalary, GA66:Foreword)

1. Parvis Emad, “On the Inception of Being-Historical Thinking and Its Unfolding as Mindfulness”, in Heidegger Studies, XVI (2000), pp. 66 ff.[]
2. Ibid., 66.[]