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OTTO PÖGGELER
When, in the troubled year 1947, Heidegger found himself indicted on account of his National Socialist entanglement, he privately published Out of the Experience of Thinking. Like a convalescent cherishing the simplest of experiences in order to maintain his balance, Heidegger in this work invokes the changes of the days and seasons and relates them to the language of thought. He holds onto the disguised poetic character of thought, as if herding his flock to the shelter of high valleys; he has to separate himself from the excesses of a half-poetic reason. “For a thoughtful poetics is in truth the topology of being [Seyn].” This topology calls poetic thinking “the dwelling place [Ortschaft] of essence.”1 “Essence,” of course, is here understood verbally and historically, so as to differentiate the one place (Ort) of thought from any other and so that thought will tend toward producing his poetics.
Ten years later Heidegger published The Principle of Reason (Der Satz vom Grund),2 an invited lecture given at the University of Freiburg, in which he no longer sought to articulate the essence of reason in systematic fashion (as he had in his 1929 contribution to the Husserl Festschrift3). Instead he lets speak the guiding words of Western thought, in order to listen for a language that might indicate a new path for thinking. The principle of reason belongs to these guiding words. According to Wilhelm Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences,4 Leibniz and Hegel, having seen the final formulation of metaphysical thinking in this principle of reason, thereby fail to be open to history. In section 15 of The
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1. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976, Gesamtausgabe vol. 13 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), 75ff; “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). The Gesamtausgabe will be cited hereafter as GA, followed by the volume number.
2. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, GA 10 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997); The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
3. Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Festschrift für Edmund Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag (Halle: Niemeyer, 1929); Vom Wesen des Grundes (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995); translated in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1883); Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).