I have already noted the way in which spatial and topological notions have a problematic status in Heidegger’s early work, and there is no doubt that the idea of topology emerges as an explicit and central idea for Heidegger quite late in his thinking. Yet the claim I will advance here is that what guides that thinking, if only implicitly, almost from the start, is a conception of philosophy as having its origin in a particular idea, problem, and, we may also say, experience: our finding ourselves already “there,” in the world, in “place.” The famous question of being that is so often referred to by Heidegger himself as the primary focus for his thought thus has to be understood as itself a question determined by this starting point. In his book on the young Heidegger, John van Buren writes that:
Heideggerians in their search for “Being” have for years been after the wrong thing. Despite Heidegger’s continued use of such phrases as “the question of being,” “being as being,” and “being itself,” right up until the unfinished introduction to his collected edition, his question was never really the question of being , but rather the more radical question of what gives or produces being as an effect.1
Much of my argument here could be put in terms of the idea that the question of being is indeed underlain by a “more radical question”—namely, the question of place—so that, in van Buren’s terminology, being has to be understood as, one might say, an “effect” of place. Strictly speaking, however, I would prefer to say that being and place are inextricably bound together in a way that does not allow one to be seen merely as an “effect” of the other, rather being emerges only in and through place. The question of being must be understood in this light, such that the question of being itself unfolds into the question of place. Moreover, one of the intriguing features of van Buren’s work is that, while he does not thematize the concept of place in any significant way, he nevertheless paints a picture of Heidegger’s early thinking in terms of a proliferation of ideas and images of place, home, situatedness, and involvement2—even suggesting, at one point, that “in 1921 Heidegger already used the term Dasein in the sense of a site of being.”3
There is much in van Buren’s work, then, as well as in that of Theodore Kisiel on which van Buren often draws, that is important for filling out the place-oriented character even of Heidegger’s earliest thought—and van Buren and Kisiel will be important sources for my discussion of the early Heidegger. Yet just as van Buren does not thematize the topological character of Heidegger’s early thought, so his work differs from mine in a number of important respects. While van Buren takes the early Heidegger to be an “an-archic” and even “anti-philosophical” thinker, I see Heidegger, through his career, as concerned to engage with philosophy’s own topological origin. As a consequence of this, my reading of Heidegger is probably a rather more unified and systematic one than van Buren would find congenial. On my account, then, and in contrast with van Buren’s, the Heideggerian project is to find a way of adequately responding to and articulating the topos, the place, that is at stake in all philosophical thinking. Heidegger’s engagements with the mystical tradition, with medieval theology, with Christian personalist thinking, with the foundations of logic, with phenomenology, and with German idealism do not constitute merely different elements or strains in his thought (there is in this sense, contra John Caputo, no mystical “element” in Heidegger),4 instead all are part of the one attempt to think philosophy, and the most basic philosophical concerns, in as essential manner as possible—which, on my reading, means to think philosophy in terms of place. In drawing on these various sources, Heidegger can be seen to be working through a topology of Western thought that aims at unearthing the fundamentally topological character and orientation of that thought. One of the reasons for Heidegger’s significance to place-oriented thinking is thus the way in which his work can be seen as just such an “unearthing” or “working out” of the topological character of the Western philosophical tradition—a character that is present throughout that tradition, as Edward Casey’s work suggests, and yet is so often present as something overlooked or obscured.5 In discussing his own “transcendental” reading of the early Heidegger and the contrast between that reading and the reading offered by John van Buren in his book The Young Heidegger, Steven Galt Crowell writes that:
Readers of Heidegger quickly sense the presence of two voices in his work. There is, first, the Heidegger who seeks the proper name of being; the Heidegger who, in spite of his best insights into the ontological difference, often seems to imagine being as some primal cosmic “event,” a hidden source or power. Seeking the “meaning of being,” this Heidegger appears to want philosophy to “eff the ineffable.” There is, second, the Heidegger who is concerned with the reflexive issue of the possibility of philosophy itself, the Heidegger who constantly chastises other thinkers for not being rigorous enough, for succumbing to metaphysical prejudice and losing sight of the things themselves. This Heidegger seems precisely to shun the excesses of what the first Heidegger appears to embrace . . . Van Buren gives the palm to the first, “mystical” and “antiphilosophical,” voice, while I follow the second “transcendental” and “critical” one.6
My own approach can be seen as taking something of a middle path between van Buren and Crowell—an approach that aims to hear these two voices as one and the same. Both the mystical and the transcendental have to be understood as focused on the same question, namely, the question of the place, the “situatedness,” of philosophy and the place, the topos, of being as such. One might argue that mysticism places its emphasis on the need to retain a sense of the originary unity of that place and its essential ungroundedness in anything other than itself, while the transcendental focuses on the attempt to articulate the structure of that place and the way place functions as a ground. Yet it turns out that these two approaches converge. The mystical and the transcendental do not constitute different ways of taking up the same question except inasmuch as they have come to be seen as different ways because of the way they have emerged as separate within the philosophical tradition. Yet the transcendental is no less concerned to preserve the originary character of the place of being than is the mystical. Indeed, when we understand the real character of the transcendental, both in terms of that which it aims to address and the manner in which it aims to do so, then the transcendental and the mystical can be seen to speak with a single voice. If the transcendental drops away in Heidegger’s later thinking, it is not because we cannot understand Heidegger’s later thought in those terms, but rather because Heidegger himself adopts a particular conception of the transcendental as tied to the concept of transcendence and that notion does prove to be problematic in the way Heidegger comes to understand matters. Yet we can also maintain a sense of the transcendental, and the hermeneutic and phenomenological, as continuing into later Heidegger, so long as we maintain a core conception of the transcendental, and the hermeneutic and phenomenological, as essentially topological in character.7
That place is indeed at issue here, at least in the way Heidegger views matters, is evident from the way Heidegger takes philosophical thinking to itself arise out a certain sort of situatedness (something that will be the focus for much of my discussion in chapter 2 below); but it also becomes evident fairly quickly once one begins to explore Heidegger’s understanding of the question of being that, van Buren’s comments notwithstanding, he clearly takes as the fundamental question of philosophical inquiry. As I noted in discussing van Buren above, my claim is that the question of being already implies (“unfolds into”) the question of place, and it is worth setting out, if only in summary form, how this connection seems to emerge, and, indeed, how it is already evident in the way Heidegger understands the question of being as such.
John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumour of the Hidden King (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 38. See also Thomas Sheehan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001), p. 188. ↩
See especially his discussion in The Young Heidegger, chaps. 12-13, pp. 250ff. ↩
Van Buren, The Young Heidegger, p. 251. ↩
See John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1978). ↩
The topological character of philosophical thinking is not, I would claim, peculiar only to Western thought, but basic is to any attempt at a certain “fundamental” thinking and obtains irrespective of the cultural tradition in which such thinking occurs. ↩
Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 7. ↩
This is a point that seems to me to have been always implicit in my work on these topics. However, in trying to make sense of Heidegger’s own use of the term “transcendental” and the special role it plays in his thinking (something explored further in chapter 4), I have sometimes used the notion of the Transcendental as an idea that stands in tension with the topological—see, for instance, “From the Transcendental to the ‘Topological’: Heidegger on Ground, Unity, and Limit,” in Jeff Malpas (ed.), From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 75-99. ↩