Abstract
The essay presents four dimensions of Heidegger’s thinking on place: first, his basic insights on Da-sein, place, and opening; second, the details of how he worked out the relationships of things, place, locality, sites, the fourfold gathering, space, and horizon; third, his deepest thoughts in his last works that move beyond horizon to region (Gegend), Gegnet (abiding expanse), and Einräumen (clearing away, making room for); fourth, his ultimate letting go of the entire line of thought from Aristotle onward that conceives place as topos: that is a body’s place is the innermost motionless boundary of another body outside it and containing it, to say what he could of the unbounded which does not come toward us—The Open, The Free.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
Also usually overlooked is the fact that Heidegger’s famous example of the jug as a thing which gathers world echoes Aristotle’s explanation of thing and place: he explains place in terms of the dynamic of water poured in and gone out of a vessel, and the relation of “that which a thing is” to “that in which a thing is” in terms of a jug and wine (Physics, Bk IV, Ch. 1, 208b, 210a–b, 211b).
- 2.
- 3.
Note: Here Heidegger confusingly uses space [Raum] two ways without distinguishing space as metaphysical-scientific abstract space (that he wants to replace) from space as experienced ordinarily in our lifeworld and thought originarily. I retranslate so that the latter meaning is clearly named with “place,” rather than being tangled with the connotation that is being rejected.
References
Angus, Ian. 2001. Place and Locality in Heidegger’s Late Thought. Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought V(1), Spring 2001.
Heidegger, Martin. 1966. Conversation on a Country Path. In Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1971a. Building Dwelling Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1971b. The Thing. In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1972a. The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. In Time and Being. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1972b. Time and Being. In On Time and Being. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1973. Art and Space. Man and World 6(1): 3–8.
———. 1977. Letter on Humanism. In Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1992. Parmenides. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1996. Being and Time. Albany: SUNY Press.
———. 1999. Contributions to Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Malpus, Jeff. 2006. Heidegger’s Topology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mugerauer, R. (2017). Topos Unbound: From Place to Opening and Back. In: Janz, B. (eds) Place, Space and Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52214-2_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52212-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52214-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)