Joan Stambaugh
Perhaps the only really certain thing about Heidegger's conception of the turn is its broad range of meanings. The second most certain thing lies in the fact that it did not represent some sudden change of mind, but in some significant sense was anticipated from the very beginning. In this brief essay I should like to examine what seem to me to be two possible basic meanings of the tum. The first is fairly uncomplicated: the tum around from the standpoint of the human to the perspective of being itself. The second is more problematic and cannot be exhaustively clarified because, as Heidegger says, we don't know what will happen: the turn of the forgottenness of being into the preservation of the presencing of being. These two meanings are by no means identical.
It was the expressed intention of Being and Time to begin by phenomenologically analyzing Dasein, the human being who is the only being that has access to being, in order to arrive at the meaning of being. The fundamental characteristic of human being was found to lie in Care, and the structure of Care, how it actually comes about and takes place was found to lie in temporality. Basically: temporality makes Care possible. However, within Being and Time itself the projected tum around was not fully accomplished. As Heidegger himself stated in his response to William J. Richardson's two questions: "The ecstatic horizonal temporality characterized in Being and Time is by no means what is most of all time's own that is sought corresponding to the question of being."1 The completion of the tum around, to the extent that Heidegger was able to carry it out at all, must be sought in subsequent works undertaking the unbuilding or "deconstruction" of the history of metaphysics. One of the chief characteristics of this tum around lies in the greater simplicity of language. The neologisms of Being and Time gave way to more conventional language used in a special and new way. An example of this special and new way can be found in the shift of intonation as found in Der Satz vom Grund and elsewhere. Much of the later Heidegger almost reads like a Presocratic. The initial attempt in Being and Time to overcome the subject-object split and subjectivity in general is completely realized in these later works. As Richardson himself noted, "Insofar as this 'turn' of accent was always planned (as various indications in Being and Time and the Kant book prove), we can interpret it from the inner movement of the original experience of being."2
But the more interesting and problematic turn is the tum from the forgottenness of being into the preservation of the presencing of being. There appear to be two possibilities inherent in the concealment germane to being and its unconcealment. First of all, concealing is absolutely essential to the unconcealing of being as is evidenced by the recurring phrase, almost a Leitmotif, clearing of self-concealing. That granted, the question becomes that of what kind of concealing is involved here. The "answer" to this question is contained in the formulation of the tum itself: the turn from forgottenness to preservation.
In the forgottenness of being Being remains absent (bleibt aus). This remaining absent is compounded by the fact that we neglect it and leave it out (lassen es aus). This is total forgottenness; we have forgotten that something has even been forgotten. This is a distorted form of concealment that is present with us now as framing (das Gestell). Framing is a destining of being; it is the way being presences now, indeed the only way. But the very essence of Framing is the danger. Right in the midst of this danger a self-turning prevails, thus far unknown to us, thus not experienced or thought. At present this self-turning is turned toward the forgottenness of its presencing and thus against its own truth . Its other possibility of self-turning, from the forgottenness of being to the truth of being is profoundly concealed. This other possibility could only come about if the danger became known as what it is. Not only can we not do anything to effect this; we don't even know if it will come about. Heidegger remarks that it would even be ruinous to know this as we would immediately assimilate this knowledge to our calculating manipulation in some kind of misguided effort to precipitate it. This would entrench us more deeply within Framing, the danger could never emerge as danger and the possibility of a tum into truth would be blocked off.
Heidegger repeatedly states in different texts that he does not know what will happen. Intensely aware of the finitude not only of man but more importantly of being, he never claimed anything like the omniscience of the absolute Spirit. And yet for all his grappling with nihilism and Nietzsche's diagnosis of the West, he appears to harbor a glimmer of hope that the truth of being might wrest itself free from forgottenness. What would happen then? Heidegger's answer is disarmingly simple. Then the Fourfold of heaven and earth, mortals and godlike ones would prevail. The world would world and the thing would thing. Things would no longer be stifled in the network of ordering and steering of the standing reserve. The Fourfold could presence in the thing. For the Fourfold is itself not a thing or a being; it can presence only in the thing. If the thing is stifled in the network of the standing reserve, the Fourfold remains absent. This does not mean that it is off somewhere waiting to come to presence; it is not in any sense of the word "is."
This all sounds deceptively simple if not downright anticlimactic. But in this simplicity lies what Heidegger calls the splendor of the simple. Yet he goes "beyond" this to intimate that something quite extraordinary could happen. First of all, he states that the turning in the danger could only happen in an immediate, sudden way. No one and nothing can bring it about, not even being itself. "The way that it, being itself, sends itself is not preceded by any effecting nor followed by any effect. Abruptly out of its own essence of concealment being appropriates itself into its epoch."3
In this tum the clearing of the essence of being comes about. In this clearing a lightning occurs in which the human is sighted. Heidegger's language is guarded here. The "sighting" does not have the structure of subject-object and thus we cannot ask what it is that sees. One might say that this seeing moves in the vicinity of Plotinus whose seeing (Schauen) rather becomes what it sees. Even Framing has its own kind of seeing; it is not a blind fate (Verhangnis).
Yet the two possibilities discussed here by no means exhaust what Heidegger has thought in the tum. Gadamer characterizes the tum as the way in which Heidegger 's whole thinking moves. "Heidegger first realized all this completely only when he had gone back to his home country, to Freiburg and the Black Forest, and began 'to sense the power of the old ground,' as he then wrote to me. 'Everything began to get slippery.' He called this intellectual experience 'the tum,' not in the theological sense of a conversion but in the sense he knew from his way of talking. The term 'tum ' refers to a bend- a hairpin or switchback - in the path that goes up a mountain. One does not tum around here; rather, the way itself turns in order to continue going up."4
Finally, in Heidegger's answer to Richardson we have a few sparse, enigmatic remarks that might be cited here. Heidegger said that he had first spoken publicly of the tum in the "Letter on Humanism." But the matter of the tum had already concerned him a decade earlier; it took him many years to gain clarity. The tum was neither invented by him nor does it concern only his own thinking.
The "occurrence" of the tum you ask about "is" being as such. It can only be thought out of the tum. No special kind of happening belongs to this tum. The turn between being and time, between time and being determines it:;elf from the manner in which It gives being, It gives time .... In accordance with the multifaceted matter of being and time all the words that speak that matter such as tum, forgottennes s and destiny also remain complex. Only a multifaceted thinking attains the co-responding Saying of that matter.5
One might hazard some final speculation that Heidegger's tum is not just some direction that either he or even being takes. In fact, it may not essentially involve a change of any kind. It may be, for lack of a better expression , a kind of dialectical structure. Even though he called dialectic "the embarrassment of philosophy" in Being and Time and often cited this in conversations, indicating emphatically that he had not changed his mind, still he did have his own brand of Heraclitean, never Hegelian, dialectic at work (or play) in his thinking. Linguistically, what would support this speculation are the expressions "self-turning" (Sichkehren) and the adjectival use of "turning" (kehrig), primarily to characterize the danger. This points to turning as an internal structure rather than as an external direction. As Heidegger stated in his letter to Richardson, the turn plays in the matter itself. This leaves us with the directive to cultivate a multifaceted thinking appropriate to the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the matter. It also leaves us with the question, linguistically insoluble in Western language and perhaps in any language whatsoever, of whether Heidegger is speaking about a process or a structure.
1. William J. Richardson, "Heideggers Weg durch die Phiinomenologie zum Seinsdenken," Philosophisches Jahrbuch, LXII, Munchen: Sonderdruck, 1965, pp. 385-396, p. 398.
2. Ibid., p. 395.
3. Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, Pfullingen: Neske, 1962, p. 45.
4. Heidegger, "Ein Vorwort. Brief an P. William J. Richardson," Philosophisches Jahrbuch, LXII, pp. 397-402, p. 401.
5. Ibid.
Joan Stambaugh - The Turning
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