Four Seminars

by Martin Heidegger, Andrew J. Mitchell (Translator), François Raffoul (Translator)

In Four Seminars, Heidegger reviews the entire trajectory of his thought and offers unique perspectives on fundamental aspects of his work. First published in French in 1976, these seminars were translated into German with Heidegger's approval and reissued in 1986 as part of his Gesamtausgabe , volume 15. Topics considered include the Greek understanding of presence, the ontological difference, the notion of system in German Idealism, the power of naming, the problem of technology, danger, and the event. Heidegger's engagements with his philosophical forebears―Parmenides, Heraclitus, Kant, and Hegel―continue in surprising dialogues with his contemporaries―Husserl, Marx, and Wittgenstein. While providing important insights into how Heidegger conducted his lectures, these seminars show him in his maturity reflecting back on his philosophical path. An important text for understanding contemporary philosophical debates, Four Seminars provides extraordinarily rich material for students and scholars of Heidegger.

Genres: Philosophy, German Literature, 20th Century

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these four seminars old Heidegger is summarizing, clarifying issues, and looking back at the trajectory of his thought. The book also gives a hint at the growing interest of the French intellectuals in his ideas. It talks about Heidegger in the third person and the reader encounters strange sentences like: “the session ends on the silence created by the wind of speculation”.
The ontological difference is at the center of these four seminars. One cannot help thinking of Hegel postulating such a difference just in order to overcome it by his dialectics. As such, Hegel and his main follower Marx occupy a large part of this book. Interestingly enough, Marx with his transformation/production approach as opposed to the philosophers' interpretation approach, seems closer to the technological understanding of Being when compared with the objective/representation/scientific understanding of Being. According to Heidegger, the point is to keep the ontological difference as difference (as Heraclitus did) and to resist the temptation to “overcome” or “solve” it and consequently fall into metaphysics. Related to this, there is a funny anecdote and misquote from Hegel that continuously appears in this book - “a torn sock is better than a mended one”; when the students in Heidegger's seminar laughed a second time after hearing it, he angrily reproached them with: “perhaps you all live with a mended consciousness”.
A new and interesting idea is that the Greeks experienced the overabundance or the excess of what presences. As such, philosophy started for the Greeks from this excess - and the same applies to Heidegger himself. In “Being and Time” he started with the “is” from “what a being is”. Because of this starting point, his initial approach was limited to the meaning of Being' meaning also understood as project. After “Being and Time” (i.e. the Turn), the meaning of Being was replaced by the truth of Being; while later in his life the truth of Being was further replaced by the location of Being. He also acknowledges here that the invention of new terms in “Being and Time” was not the right approach; instead one should go back to the essential simplicity of language.
Another new and interesting development in Heidegger late thought is the understanding of technology not just in terms of “standing reserve”, but as completely lacking any permanence. As such, “being replaceable” is more appropriate, when compared with “standing reserve”, in order to understand the current technological epoch of Being.
One more interesting revelation from this book is the impact of Husserl's “categorical intuition” in Heidegger's early development. For Kant, all categories (or the given/surplus of Being over the sensuous content) are internal and belong to the subject/consciousness. Husserl, claimed that there are some categories given through senses; specifically these “categorical intuitions”. With this new concept, a Being independent of humans is hinted by Husserl. Heidegger took this idea further by replacing consciousness with Dasein – Dasein understood as “being-in-the-world” (two more made-up words that Heidegger regrets). Husserl saw this complete dropping of consciousness from “Being and Time” as a pure scandal and fundamentally rejected Heidegger's project.

[Lucy]

heidegger engaging with marx, however sporadically, is just so exciting to me!

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly just students taking notes on some later courses of Heidegger’s, notably Giorgio Agamben

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents accounts of four seminars that Heidegger gave from 1966 to 1973, the first three notably in France, in Le Thor. Heidegger's thoughts in these seminars combine a look back over his own work, especially Being and Time, with the context of his later thought about technology, the history of philosophy, and the contrast between traditional metaphysics and the Greek world.

The seminars are not presented directly in Heidegger's words. They consist of "protocols", a kind of official set of notes or minutes kept by the seminar participants. Although the protocols re-tell Heidegger's thinking, they still remain firmly within it. That makes the accounts more "true" to Heidegger's thought than they otherwise might be, but no more easily penetrable either. This book is definitely not an easy way into Heidegger's thought -- it begins in the middle of his thinking, and it does not retreat to the distance another writer might take in order to re-characterize it for easier understanding.

That said, I do think these seminars offer a valuable perspective on Heidegger's account of technology. Many of the concepts from The Question Concerning Technology are discussed here, and, for my own part, I always find repeat discussions of these topics by Heidegger very helpful in trying to understand just what he was getting at. Here he adds new examples and expressions of the technological world, especially the modern computer. The great culmination of the computer's development would not be that it mimic or reproduce the human, as some strains of artificial intelligence strive towards, but that the human disastrously come to mimic the computer, that thinking becomes calculation and nothing more, as we come to understand ourselves in its distorted mirror. Understanding Heidegger's warnings about technology in this way provide a direct tie to the "greatest danger" that he refers to in The Question Concerning Technology, that thinking as calculation would permanently exclude the possibility of "originary thinking" or "thinking Being".

There are other discussions here not commonly found in Heidegger's published work -- notably, extended remarks on Marx and Marx's place within metaphysics and technology, and on the virtues and shortcomings of Being and Time. Of Being and Time, the seminar account says, ". . . the language of Being and Time, Heidegger says, lacks assurance. For the most part, it still speaks in expressions borrowed from metaphysics and seeks to present what it wants to say with the help of new comings, creating new words. . . . Heidegger now says, more precisely, that through Holderlin he came to understand how useless it is to coin new words; only after Being and Time was the necessity of a return to the essential simplicity of language clear to him." Thus the change in style from the structured, more traditional philosophical writing of Being and Time to the simpler, if no more readily understood, later writings.

All in all, I think, for readers who want to spend the time needed to understand Heidegger, these seminars add a valuable additional perspective, another angle from which to keep building that understanding.