Heidegger’s thought – it marks, in particular, the appearance of the idea of the ‘event’, the ‘Ereignis’, that dominates Heidegger’s later thinking (and that will be a starting point for the discussion in chapter five below) – but there is also a significant sense in which the mode of thinking that is opened up in the Contributions in 1936 does not become entirely clear until around 1945 with the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ and the works that follow it, and in this respect it is significant that Heidegger publishes very little, although he is by no means inactive, in the ten-year period from 1936 to 1946.348 Thus one can also envisage the turning as actually comprising two movements, the first occurring between around 1930 and 1936, between ‘The Essence of Truth’ and Contributions, and the second between 1936 and around 1945, between Contributions and the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’.349 The first period sees the working through of the problematic presented by Being and Time, and the second the articulation of the re-oriented framework inaugurated in Contributions.
Thomas Sheehan has recently argued, however, that it is a mistake to identify the turning or ‘change’ that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking in the period after Being and Time and that seems to culminate in the Contributions with the ‘turning’ or ‘return’ that is at issue in the movement of thought itself (Sheehan distinguishes between the ‘change’ – die Wendung – in Heidegger’s own thinking and the Turning – die Kehre – of thinking as such).350 As Sheehan bluntly puts it:
Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters – on the one hand ‘the turn’ (die Kehre) and on the other ‘the change in Heidegger’s thinking’ (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger…351
While I think that there is some point to Sheehan’s argument here – there is, indeed, an important distinction to be made here – I nevertheless think that Sheehan’s emphasis on the difference at issue here obscures the continuity that also obtains, implying a greater simplicity and clarity in Heidegger’s than is properly warranted. The shift in Heidegger’s thinking that occurs between 1930 and 1936, and is probably not really completed until 1945, can itself be understood as a singular instantiation, if in
348 [Insert reference]
349 See Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, esp. pp.215-18. Crowell suggests a periodisation of Heidegger’s thinking that divides it into four stages: from 1912-17, during which time Heidegger is largely concerned with matters of logic and the question of the ‘meaning of meaning’; from 1917-1927 (and extending in some respects up until 1930), which sees Heidegger involved in reworking Husserlian, Diltheyan and Aristotelian themes around the question of ‘the meaning of being’; 1930-1945 (although a shift is already evident in 1929), during which Heidegger attempts to disentangle himself from ‘metaphysics’ and to reconfigure his thought around the question of the ‘truth of being’; from 1945 onwards, which sees Heidegger’s articulation of a mode of thinking that aims at the ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics through the focus on the primordial ‘event’ (‘Ereignis’) of being (this, of course, is that in which, following Heidegger’s own late comments, I have suggested the question of the place, topos, of being comes to the fore). A similar four-part periodization is also suggested by Young: ‘Heidegger himself identifies a “turn” in his philosophy as having begun in 1930. Since he also says, however, that it was not completed until the transition to “Ereignis-thinking” in 1936-8 (see GA 15 p.344 and p.366), he himself invites us to contemplate three (of course related) thinkers: an early (pre-1930) Heidegger, a middle or transitional thinker (1930-8), and a late Heidegger (post-1938)…I shall argue for the recognition of yet another “turn” as occurring in about 1946. So in addition to Heidegger’s three, I shall identify a fourth…a “post-war” Heidegger’ – Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p.3.
350 See Sheehan, ‘Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics’, in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp.3-16.
351 ‘Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomena to Introduction to Metaphysics’, in Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, p.3.
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