Abstract
Good Morning, Herr Professor, I hope this form of address is acceptable to you and that your ghost has not already been put into an unphilosophical state of mind, a ‘mode of attunement to the world’ inimical to the impassioned but disinterested inquiry which I intend that we shall embark upon together. With a little bit of research, I suppose I could find out how you were customarily addressed by those who wished to indicate their respect for your person; or at least how individuals of your standing would normally have expected and wanted to have been addressed. But there is, as Henry James that most philosophical of anti-philosophers pointed out, a ‘fatal futility’ in mere facts. A morning in a library, spent thinking not about Da-sein and Mitda-sein but employed researching the appropriate way of addressing high-ranking German academics, would take me rather closer than I would wish to inauthentic Da-sein — even to the realm of ‘Idle talk’, of Gerede, which has its place but not here. Our business together is with the ontological and primordial, not with the ontic and derivative. So, for the present, it will be as ‘Herr Professor’ that I shall address you.
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Notes
George Steiner, ‘A Secondary City’, in Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989), pp. 1–50.
Martin Heiclegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 11 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p. 486. Quoted in David Cooper, Heidegger (London: Claridge Press, 1996), p. 60. I have a feeling that you would not have been entirely pleased with this marvellous little book which distils so much of your thinking into a very few, authoritative and often witty pages.
The Heiddegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. R. Wolin (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), p. 68. Quoted in Cooper, Heidegger, p. 58.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Prose ofT.S. Eliot ed. with an introduction by Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), p. 40.
Martin Heiclegger, Being and ‘l ime, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 158. I have relied entirely on Professor Stambaugh’s translation of the seventh edition of Sein und Zeit (originally published by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, 1953) in the large number of passages I have quoted in this Conversation. (The page numbers are those of the English translation, not of the German original.) Not being a German scholar, I cannot comment on the accuracy of the translation; I can only, as an impassioned reader, report with gratitude on its luminous clarity and expressiveness — and on the immensely helpful supporting material, notably the Lexicon of English Expressions, tracing the entire history of the terms used by the translator as they appear in the book.
Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1999), p. 153.
See ibid., ‘Heidegger’s Politics: Facts and Thought’, pp. 152–63.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, translated by Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). The final sentence is worth quoting: And it is perhaps for the same reason that he refused to the very end to discuss his Nazi involvement: to do it properly would have been to admit (to himself as well as to others) that his ‘essentialist thought’ had never consciously formulated its essence, that is, the social unconscious which spoke through its forms, and the crude ‘anthropological’ basis of its extreme blindness, which could only be sustained by the illusion of the omnipotence of thought. (p. 105) That ‘social unconscious’ is well described in Hans Sluga’s Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993) which shows very clearly how Heidegger’s sense of mission and destiny was of a piece with an apocalyptic sense experienced by many German intellectuals at the time and their interesting delusions as to the role they should assume in averting disaster.
Karl LOwith, quoted in Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) p. 11.
If you do have access to a library where you are at present, you may wish to consult my The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (London: Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1999) and ‘The Poverty of Neurophilosophy’, in my On the Edge of Certainty and Other Philosophical Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1999). I hope that Herr Professor Husserl is not the librarian.
Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Quoted and translated by David Bell, Husserl (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 84.
This is reported in Russell’s Autobiography and cited by John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 205.
Heinrich Weigand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929–1976, translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1993), pp. 12–13.
Ibid., p. 13.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), p. 524.
Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass: Bradford Books, 1987), p. 5.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Helen Zimmern (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 1.
Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. ii, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 642.
See Hugh Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) for a decisive treatment.
Rarner Maria Rilke, First Duino Elegy. I have used the translation by J.B. Leishman (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967).
I owe this lethally witty phrase to David Cooper, Heidegger. It is consistent with another unforgettable image of the Philosopher-as-Warrior: The story was told of how a few students, led by the philosophy Dozent and former lieutenant-commander Stieler, were drilling with wooden dummy rifles in the clay pit of a brickwork when Heidegger drove up in a car and jumped out. Stieler, who was over six feet five inches tall, stood to attention before the stocky Heidegger and made a corrct military report, and like a commanding officer, Heidegger, whose war service had been confined to postal censorship and a metereological observatory, formally received his report and saluted. Such was the nature of Heidegger’s battle scenes. This is reported in Martin Heidegger. Between Good and Evil, by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 267.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by U.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961): Feeling the world as a limited whole — it is this that is mystical. (6.45)
Quassim Cassam, Self and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Had you read this book and, indeed, the works of certain analytical philosophers such as Strawson who lie behind it, you would not have overlooked the centrality of the body in conferring identity upon the self. Indeed, you might have been persuaded by Cassam’s brilliantly argued case that ‘consciousness of our thoughts and experiences requires a sense of our thinking, experiencing selves as shaped, located and solid physical objects in a world of such objects’.
See ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). The final sentence of this essay is worthy of note: But how else can mortals answer this summons than by trying on their part, on their own, to bring dwelling to the fullness of its essence? This they accomplish when they build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling. (p. 339)
See, for example, ‘The Concept of the Enlightenment’, the opening chapter of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s massively influential Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1973).
It is the final, resonant sentence in your lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, available in Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrer Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 317. After you had uttered it, ‘there was no reverent silence but a standing ovation’ (Safranski, p. 294).
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© 2002 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (2002). By Way of Introduction. In: A Conversation with Martin Heidegger. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513938_1
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