Preguntas fundamentales de la filosofía

by Martin Heidegger, Ángel Xolocotzi Yáñez (Translator)

In this lecture course, presented in 1937-38, Heidegger's task is to reassert the question of the essence of truth, not as a problem of logic but precisely as the basic question of philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

211 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2008

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]

At the time of this course, Heidegger just finished his “Contributions to Philosophy”; a book that will stay private and unpublished for about 50 years. First it is surprising how much is revealed here, and today this book can serve as a very good introduction to “Contributions”. Maybe the reception of this course was so bad and the content so unintelligible for his students, that Heidegger decided not to make public “Contributions” during his lifetime and until all the courses were published.

This book - along with several others during this period - convinced me more and more that Heidegger considered the “essence/question of truth” as the central and probably the most accessible entrance into his philosophy - especially his late philosophy. This book is centered on the question of truth, while the “logic” announced in the title is rather a joke.

The best two sections in this book are those about the perception of beigness of beings (around page 113) and of the relationship between φύσις and τέχνη (around page 155) for the Ancient Greeks. On the first point, the Greeks determined the beigness of beings as constancy and presence, form and limit; and all these were dominated by unconcealedness/ἀλήθεια. The second point shows how for the Greeks τέχνη means to grasp beings as emerging out of themselves in a way they show themselves in their outward look/ἰδέα. In other words - with τέχνη the Greeks tried to retain the holding sway of φύσις in ἀλήθεια. These two points will evolve, consolidate, and eventually dominate what these days we take as unquestionable existence/reality and as the essence of technology.



Original 1/11/2022 review:

Heidegger at his best.

With “Being and Time” - and everything else around that period - Heidegger created something extremely deep, original, and radical. With this project, he hoped to start a metaphysical revolution in philosophy; but almost no one understood and followed him. Then he tried a political approach to this metaphysical revolution; and he failed again and this time quite miserably. As such, just by himself and mainly in private, he took everything further and reinvented himself a second time – in an even more deep, original, and radical way. This book and what was published recently (like “Contributions to philosophy”, “Mindfulness”, and “Ponderings”) stand witness to this.

The truth understood as the correctness of an assertion cannot be grounded; but only such “correct” individual facts can be accumulated without any possibility of a transition into a proper ground. In order to ground truth as correctness, one needs first to locate it in the opening of beings. If one does so, then one realizes - along with the Ancient Greeks - that truth is in fact the basic character of beings themselves and not something we humans attach to propositions. As such, truth as correctness has its ground in truth as unconcealedness/Aletheia. When Plato and Aristotle introduced correctness for the first time, they did it with Aletheia in the background. According to Heidegger: “the primordial history of the essence of truth gives rise to truth as the essence of beings themselves, as unconcealedness. This primordial positing of the essence, which is the task assigned to the beginning of the beginning, excluded an inquiry into Aletheia itself.” This necessary failure to explicitly inquire into Aletheia itself, inevitably lead the first beginning initiated by the Ancient Greek into the metaphysical dead end and nihilism represented by Nietzsche and current technology. As such, a second beginning is needed along the lines of the first one, but with all this metaphysical history in view and also transformed accordingly; and this is Heidegger's project starting here and continuing for the rest of his life.

It all started in wonder and amazement at the particular and unusual; and it ended in the commonsense platitude that only beings “are” and that there is absolutely no need for justification or ground in this respect. Academic philosophers unanimously agree that this state of affairs is not worth questioning, in fact not even worth mentioning. “In this wasteland of utter indifference” - logic is according to Heidegger just “a discipline of scholastically degenerated philosophical learning”; while the scientists are “the most miserable slaves of modern times”. As such, not much should be expected from science, “since every science, especially modern science, is a remote perversion of a definite kind of knowledge which has already decided on the essence and the type of truth normative for it (certitude).“

Given the above, for Heidegger the question of truth is no longer a “problem of logic”. In fact, anything ruled by the systematization of a system – like in the modern science system – should be avoided in this quest for truth. We should start with man's distinguished mark; and that is the basic faculty of perceiving, grasping, and gathering beings. The necessary philosophical thinking for this project is “that eruption and that procedure of man thanks to which he is established in the midst of beings, in face of beings as a whole, and knows himself as belonging to these beings”. But more fundamentally according to Heidegger, we should realize that “the clearing of beings is not something we ourselves merely think or represent. On the contrary, it is something in which we ourselves stand and apparently nothing of our own doing. We stand in this clearing in such a way that it first opens for us a relation to beings—and to ourselves as well.”

[TL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly one of his best and most important works. Strangely little-known.

'1) The question of truth as the most necessary philosophical question in an age that is totally unquestioning.

If we try to determine the present situation of man on earth metaphysically—thus not historiographically and not in terms of world-view—then it must be said that man is beginning to enter the age of the total unquestionableness of all things and of all contrivances. That is truly an uncanny occurrence, whose orientation no one can establish and whose bearing no one can evaluate.

Only one thing is immediately clear: in this completely unquestioning age, philosophy, as the questioning that calls forth what is most worthy of questioning, becomes inevitably most strange. Therefore it is the most necessary. And necessity has its most powerful form in the simple. The simple, however, is our name for what is inconspicuously the most difficult, which, when it occurs, appears to everyone immediately and ever again as the easiest and most accessible; yet it remains incontestably the most difficult.

[versus Deleuze:]
The simple is the most difficult, for the multiple admits and favors dispersion, and all dispersion, as a counter-reaction to the unification of man in his constant flight from himself—i.e., from his relation to Being itself—confirms and thereby alleviates and releases the heavy burden of existence. The multiple is the easy—even where concern over it seems toilsome.

For progress from one thing to another is always a relaxation, and it is precisely this progress that is not allowed by the simple, which presses on instead to a constant return to the same in a constant self-enrichment. Only if we risk the simple do we arrive within the arena of the necessary. What is most necessary in philosophy—supposing that it must again become the strangest—is precisely that simple question be which it, in its questioning, is first brought to itself: namely, the question of truth.' (13)


[The philosophical path (extending toward the furthest reaches of what is most concealed, i.e., the essence of Being itself) is the goal:]
'Philosophy is completely different from "world-view" and it is fundamentally distinct from all "science". Philosophy cannot by itself replace either world-view or science; nor can it ever be appreciated by them. Philosophy cannot at all be measured by anything else but only by its own now shining, now hidden, essence. If we attempt to calculate whether philosophy has any immediate use and what that use might be, we will find that philosophy accomplishes nothing.' (4)

'What else is the seeking but the most constant being-in-proximity to what conceals itself, out of which each need happens to come to us and every jubilation fills us with enthusiasm. The very seeking is the goal and at the same time what is to be found.

Obvious misgivings now arise. If seeking is supposed to be the goal, then is not what is established as a goal actually the limitless absence of any goal? This is the way calculating reason thinks. If seeking is supposed to be the very goal, then do not restlessness and dissatisfaction become perpetuated? This is the opinion of the feeling that is avid for quick possessions. Yet we maintain that seeking brings into existence the highest constancy and equanimity—though only when this seeking genuinely seeks, i.e., extends into the farthest reaches of what is most concealed and thereby leaves behind all mere curiosity.

What withdraws from us more than the essence of Being, i.e., the essence of that which, in all the fabricated and disposed beings holding sway around us and bearing us on, is the closest but at the same time the most worn out (through constant handling) and therefore the most ungraspable? To posit the very seeking as a goal means to anchor the beginning and the end of all reflection in the question of the truth—not of this or that being or even of all beings, but of Being itself.

The grandeur of man is measured according to what he seeks and according to the urgency by which he remains a seeker. Such questioning of the truth of Being is sovereign knowledge, philosophy. Here questioning already counts as knowing, because no matter how essential and decisive an answer might be, the answer cannot be other than the penultimate step in the long series of steps of a questioning founded in itself. In the domain of genuine seeking, to find does not mean to cease seeking, but is the highest intensity of seeking.' (6-7)


[A 'four-fold openness' holds sway as the ground and possibility of correspondence truth:]
'In the correctness of the representational assertion there holds sway a four-fold openness: (1) of the thing, (2) of the region between thing and man, (3) of man himself with regard to the thing, and (4) of man to fellow man.

This four-fold openness would not be what it is and what it has to be if each of these opennesses were separately encapsulated from the others. This four-fold openness holds sway rather as one and unitary, and in its compass every conformity to and every correctness and incorrectness of representing come into play and maintain themselves. If we attend to this multiple and yet unitary openness then with one stroke we find ourselves transported into another realm beyond correctness and its concomitant representational activity.

This multiple-unitary openness holds sway in correctness. The openness is not first produced by the correctness of the representing, but rather, just the reverse, it is taken over as what was always already holding sway. Correctness of representation is only possible if it can establish itself in this openness which supports it and vaults it over. The openness is the ground and the soil and the arena of all correctness.

Thus as long as truth is conceived as correctness, and correctness itself passes unquestioned, i.e., as something ultimate and primary, this conception of truth—no matter how long a tradition has again and again confirmed it—remains groundless. But, as soon as that openness, as the possibility and the ground of correctness, comes into view, even if unclearly, truth conceived as correctness becomes questionable.' (18-19)


[Against bad obviousness:]
'Obviousness is always a very problematic assurance of the legitimacy of an intuition. For, on the one hand, it is questionable to what extent that which is supposed to be obvious to the understanding is really understood or whether we have here precisely a renunciation of the will to understand and the appeal to thoughtlessness elevated to a principle.

On the other hand, it could be asked what kind of intelligibility or understanding is providing the standard here. What might be very obvious on a certain level of understanding—the most superficial—can be wholly unintelligible on the plane of the will to genuine comprehension. If, consequently, the customary determination of truth as correctness appears to us correct precisely when we reflect no further on it, then this "obviousness" is not yet a sufficient foundation for the delimitation of the essence of the true.' (37)


[In praise of 'genuine' obviousness. A single sentence that seems utterly essential for understanding Later Heidegger's aims:]
'What is obvious in the genuine sense is only what by itself precludes further inquiry as impossible, in such a way that thereby clarity reigns concerning the intelligibility of the obviousness.' (32)


[Only one who is 'truly climbing', i.e., philosophizing, can 'fall down' and thereby experience the height of the mountain more profoundly and uniquely than the ones who factitiously 'reach the top':]
'These lectures are proclaiming no eternal truths... I am not capable of such a proclamation, nor is it my task. Rather, what is at issue here is questioning, the exercise of right questioning, to be achieved in the actual performance of it... But in philosophy the relation of question and answer is quite peculiar. To speak metaphorically, it is like climbing a mountain.

We will get nowhere by positioning ourselves on the plane of ordinary opinion and merely talking about the mountain, in order to gain in that way "lived experience" of it. No, the climbing and the approach to the peak succeed only if we begin to mount. The peak might indeed be lost from view as we climb, and yet we keep coming closer to it. Furthermore, climbing includes slipping and sliding back and, in philosophy, even falling.

Only one who is truly climbing can fall down. What if those who fall down experience the peak, the mountain, and its height most profoundly, more profoundly and more uniquely than the ones who apparently reach the top, which for them soon loses its height and becomes a plane and something habitual?

It is not possible to judge and measure either philosophy, or art, or in general any creative dealing with beings, with the aid of the facile bureaucracy of sound common sense and a presumably healthy "instinct" (already distorted and mislead long ago), no more than with the empty sagacity of a so-called intellectual. Here the whole and every single thing within it can be experienced only in the actual performance of the painful work of climbing.

Anyone here who is only snatching up isolated propositions is not climbing along with me. The task is to go along every single step and the whole series of steps. Only in that way will there be a disclosure of the matter we are meditating on and of the goal we want to reach.' (21-22)


['The future is the origin of history':]
'But we can only understand that a reflection on history belongs precisely and essentially to the will to shape the future if we distinguish between a historiographical consideration and a historical reflection. The historiographical, as the word itself is supposed to indicate, refers to the past insofar as it is explored and presented, either expressly or inexpressly, from the perspective of what happens to be the present. Every historiographical consideration turns the past into such an object. Even where a "historiography" of the present is put forth, the very present must already be bygone. All historiography is retrospective, even when it makes the past timely.

The historical does not denote a manner of grasping and exploring but the very happening itself. The historical is not the past, not even the present, but the future, that which is commended to the will, to expectation, to care. This does not allow itself to be "considered": instead, we must "reflect" on it. We have to be concerned with the meaning, the possible standards, the necessary goals, the ineluctable powers, and that from which all human happenings begin. These goals and powers can be such that they have already come to pass—in a hidden way—long ago but are precisely therefore not the past but what still abides and is awaiting the liberation of its influence.

The future is the origin of history. What is most futural, however, is the great beginning, that which—withdrawing itself constantly—reaches back the farthest and at the same time reaches forward the farthest. The hidden destiny of all beginnings, however, is to seem to be thrust aside, overcome, and refuted by what they themselves begin and by what follows them. The ordinary character of what is henceforth the ordinary becomes the lord over what is for ever the extraordinary character of the beginning.

Therefore, in order to rescue the beginning, and consequently the future as well, from time to time the domination of the ordinary and all too ordinary must be broken. An upheaval is needed, in order that the extraordinary and forward-reaching might be liberated and come to power. Revolution, the upheaval of what is habitual, is the genuine relation to the beginning.

The conservative, on the contrary, the preserving, adheres to and retains only what was begun in the wake of the beginning and has come forth from it. The beginning can never be grasped through mere preservation, because to begin means to think and to act from the perspective of the future and of what is extraordinary, and from the renunciation of the crutches and evasions of the habitual and the usual.

The beginning never allows itself to be represented or considered in historiography. For, in that way, i.e., historiographically considered, it is degraded into something which has already become and is no longer beginning. The beginning is only acquired when we creatively experience its law, and this law can never become a rule but remains specific and particular, the uniqueness of the necessary. The uniqueness of the necessary is the simple which, as the most difficult, must ever and again be accomplished completely anew.

...The present, with the inevitable obtrusiveness of its results, certainly appears to offer in the most immediate way that which comes to pass, and yet history is precisely in any present what comes to pass most genuinely and is thus the most hidden. Therefore a historiographical consideration and presentation of the present is the most blind over and against history. This kind of historiography touches only the foremost of the foreground, which is, of course, taken by the common understanding as what genuinely comes to pass.

[Arendt:]
The historical is the super-historiographical but for that reason is precisely not the supra-temporal, not the so-called eternal or timeless, since the historiographical only reaches the past and not the genuinely temporal. The properly temporal is the stirring, exciting, but at the same time conserving extension and stretch from the future into the past and from the latter into the former. In this extension, man as historical is in each case a "spread".

The present is always later than the future: it is the last. It springs from the struggle of the future with the past. That the coming to pass of history emerges out of the future does not mean, however, that history can be made and directed by planning. Rather, man—precisely in creative shaping—can penetrate into the uncertain and incalculable only by means of the will to provide a direction within which what is necessary and out of a knowledge of the law of the beginning.' (37-40)


'The "result" of our discussions consists precisely in our relinquishing the search for a new doctrine and first and foremost getting to know and learning to question which historical dimensions and inner presuppositions are contained in the question of truth. Since the question of truth is the preamble for future thinking, it itself first determines the domain, the type, and the disposition of future knowledge. Therefore the first thing we have to do is put ourselves in a position that will never again permit us to insert our discussion of the question of truth into the habitual realms of previous discussions, theories, and systems.

The result of these "basic" discussions consists in a transformation of perspectives, norms, and claims, a transformation which at the same time is nothing other than a leap into a more original and more simple course of essential occurrences in the history of Western thinking, a history we ourselves are. Only after our thinking has undergone this transformation of attitude by means of historical reflection, will we surmise, in an auspicious moment, that already in our discussions another essence of truth, and perhaps indeed only that, was at issue.' (162)


[The fate of philosophy]
'Ever since truth became correctness and this essential determination of truth became known as the only standard one, philosophy has lacked the most original need and necessity of the beginning...Philosophy is [now] a free unfolding of a human capacity, that of thinking, and hence is but one cultural assert among others. Gradually the modern period included philosophy under the concept of a "factor" of culture, a notion in which anyone who has ears to hear must hear the calculations and contrivances determining in advance the Being of man in the midst of beings.

Now there are today everywhere sentimental people enough who lament this situation of philosophy and thereby posture as defends of the endangered spirit. But what they would like is simply that philosophy become again a more appreciated cultural assert. This concern over philosophy is a mere desire to return to the tranquility of a previous age, and it is essentially more pernicious than the complete disdain and disavowal of philosophy. For this backward-looking concern leads into error, into misconstruing the moment of Western history.' (156-7)


['Only if we know that we do not yet know who we are...']
'What if this withdrawal itself belonged to the essence of Being? What if this were the still unrecognized truth, never to be experienced or expressed, of the whole metaphysics of the West: namely, that Being is in its essence self-concealing? What if the openness were first and foremost the clearing in the midst of beings, in which clearing the self-concealment of Being would be manifest?

In the transition our of the first end of Western thinking into its other beginning, there has to be questioned, in a still higher necessity, with the carrying out of the question of truth, the question of who we are. This question will point in the direction of the possibility whether man is not only the preserver of unconcealed beings but is precisely the custodian of the openness of Being. Only if we know that we do not yet know who we are do we ground the one and only ground which may release the future of a simple, essential existence [Dasein] of historical man from itself.

This ground is the essence of truth. This essence must be prepared in thought in the transition to another beginning. For the future, the situation of the powers which ground truth in the first place, namely poetry (and consequently art in general) and thinking, will be quite different than it was in the first beginning. Poetry will not be first, but in the transition the forerunner will have to be thinking. Art, however, will be for the future the putting into work of truth (or it will be nothing), i.e., it will be one essential grounding of the essence of truth.

According to this highest standard, anything that would present itself as art must be measured as a way of letting truth come into being in these beings, which, as works, enchantingly transport man into the intimacy of Being while imposing on him the luminosity of the unconcealed and disposing him and determining him to be the custodian of the truth of Being.' (163-4)

[Edward Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is the essence of truth? What is the truth of essence? Heidegger admits there are no results to this question. The closest he gets to an answer is saying 'truth is the clearing of the vacillating self-concealing.' Man is the custodian of Being.One of the deepest works I've ever read for the parts I could understand! He also says we "know almost nothing of genuine reality...the news media determines what we should know and how we should know it."

[Mohammed Ridha · Rating 5 out of 5]

قرأته مترجماً للعربية بعنوان الأسئلة الأساسية للفلسفة.. مشكلات مختارة من المنطق، ترجمة وتعليق د.إسماعيل المصدق....الكتاب عبارة محاضرات القاها هايدگر في دورة الشتاء بجامعة فرايبورغ ما بين عامي ١٩٣٧ و ١٩٣٨ بمعدل ساعة واحدة اسبوعياً.....يتناول الكتاب مشكلة الحقيقة ويتتبع هايدگر مفهوم الحقيقة كما تظهر بأشكال مختلفة بحقب مختلفة، بالنسبة لهُ فإن الحقيقة بمفهومها الأصلي والأصيل لمعت أول مرة للمفكرين اليونان القدماء الماقبل_سقراطيين كـ لاخفاء الكائن وقد اكتملت الحقيقة بهذا المفهوم في فلسفة الثنائي العظيم افلاطون/ارسطو لتدخل بعدها مراحل الانتقال والتغير والطمس والنسيان وخصوصاً بعد الفلسفة الوسيطة المسيحية ليصبح أساس الحقيقة هو أحكام الإنسان ولتكون تعبيراً لصواب التمثل البشري....ينعى هايدگر هذا التحول والنسيان ويحاول تذكره بتمعن وينصح البشرية اذا ارادت ان تعرف نفسها جيداً ان تستذكر وتتمعن اساسات الحقيقة كما لمعت لإول مرة في اليونان القديمة، لإن الحقيقة هي حقيقة او ماهية الإنسان بالنهاية....يستذكر ويتمعن هايدگر بطريقة تأملية (عكس الطريقة الحسابية في التفكير التي يراها انها مشتقة من رؤية الحقيقة كصواب والتي عززت هذا المفهوم للحقيقة بطريقة راجعة) وهذه الطريقة غريبة جداً على طرقنا المألوفة بالتفكير وتختلف عن دروبنا المعتادة بتفحص انفسنا وتاريخنا..طريقة تفكير جذرية جداً الى درجة انه من الصعب حتى تخيلها...انها دروب هايدگر.

[Lucía]

(partes)

[Aja · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the optimism Heidegger provides in this book is so refreshing. Such a good book :’)

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book with a number of strangers in the philosophy department at the University of Toronto. It was a bizarre, challenging and wonderful experience. In my first introduction to the work and the group, I was mostly silent - listening to a few guys actually "wax philosophic". I don't know if I've ever seen the real deal before outside of movies, and it was very, very funny. Coming from the department of English, I had grown accustomed to my own discipline's "types" of PhD students. Sure, everyone is different, but there are whole swaths of students start to conglomerate into pretty standard types. The types in the philosophy department were unexpectedly different. I found the group to be a predominantly male group, and the male types in philosophy are just…I don't even know what to say…so (insert something nameless, bizarre and positive here)…maybe just put a picture of Slavoj Zizek in your mind. That's a part of the experience, enough said.

As for the actual book, that is - once I got over just enjoying the milieu - each week we read a chapter and discussed it for around 2 hours as a group. At first I was too timid to participate being the only non-philosopher. By week 4 I found my voice and realized as the conversations dug into specific passages, that I had read just enough Heidegger in my special fields that I could grasp the content and, more surprisingly, I could follow the discussion to the point that I could begin to engage and be engaged with. The sensation of the experience was one of delight and pleasure. Although, I'm not saying anything really about the content, my own experience with this book was one where I finally felt a ground to stand upon, and that ground came out of me.

I think that says it all, really.