Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking

by Martin Heidegger, Andrew J. Mitchell (Translator)

This volume presents two important lecture cycles delivered after WWII, exploring the poetry of Hölderlin and the nature of thought itself.Heidegger delivered his lecture series, Insight into That Which Is, at Bremen in 1949. It was his first speaking engagement after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin’s poetry and themes developed in his earlier works.In the Freiburg lectures, delivered in 1957, Heidegger ponders thought itself and freely engages with the German idealists and Greek thinkers who had provoked him in the past. Andrew J. Mitchell’s translation allows English-speaking readers to explore important connections with Heidegger’s earlier works on language, logic, and reality.

Genres: Philosophy, German Literature, 20th Century

219 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 2, 2012

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]

These two lectures show the transition of Heidegger's thinking to the later topics and style; along with his return to the public sphere after the prohibition against his teaching. Two of his later and fundamental writings are hinted at and developed here: “The question concerning technology” and “Identity and difference”. Moreover, the Event of appropriation and the history of Beyng – as developed in his personal books during WW2 – are explicitly present in these two lectures.
Thing - as gathering and appropriating the fourfold (i.e. earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) – things. Its meaning changes according to the interpretation of that which is; that is of beings. Recently and as understood by Kant for example, a thing is an object that opposes a subject. These days a thing is rather understood as standing reserve. As object or standing reserve and encountered in representation, the thing no longer things and presences itself as a thing; and even more fundamentally, the Event of appropriation refuses itself. Positionality (where constant is understood as continuous orderability within a standing reserve conscription), as the essence of technology, ensue; and everything - including humans and even God - is such ordered. The danger as errancy looms large, “but where the danger is, there grows also what saves”; thus there is hope of a Turn that may bring the humans back into the ownership of the Event of appropriation.
In the “Basic Principles of Thinking”, Heidegger takes aim at logic, grammar, sciences, technology, dialectic as fulfilled by Hegel, and at metaphysics in general; and at their three formal principles of thinking: the principle of identify, the principle of contradiction, and the principle of excluded middle. For early Greeks and up to Aristotle, thinking - understood as logos - was the gathering that lays before such that is able to bring something to the fore; or the letting of what presences from itself appear here. Even more fundamentally, for Parmenides Being belongs with thinking in the Same. But in order to experience the belonging-together of Being and human thinking, a leap into the Event of appropriation is needed. Metaphysics – especially as science with its subject-object and mathematical setting and as modern technology understood as positionality – does not recognize the Event and the possibility of such a leap. Moreover, for Heidegger language as saying is even more fundamental than thinking and Being; for “language speaks and not the human”, “language is the house of Being”, and “thinking is in its essence saying”.

[Jacques Antoine]

Excellent example of Heidegger's later style of thinking and writing. The Bremen lectures are a deeper and more extended treatment of the material sketched out in "The Question Concerning Technology." The Freiburg lectures are an expanded treatment of the material worked out in many of his essays on poetry, especially "Language" and "Poetically Man Dwells."

[Ilja Celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time to find out more about das Gestell for the thesis.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s like he started applying a very abstract thought process, and focused on his bit about technology

[Xiiz Iikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Heidegger's thinking regarding with the essence of technology which he describes as "positionality". Although this was an occasionally heavy (uninteresting) read for me on some parts, there are also some other intriguing thought in these lectures.

[Nick Poulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

an amazing and lucid look at Heidegger's late thought

[Edward Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meditation on nearness, positionality, technology, and "The Danger."

[Jeffrey Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only read the Bremen section (not Freiburg) but those lectures will change your life.