Heidegger: The Turn

The later thinking — Being, technology, and dwelling

A course on the thought of Martin Heidegger.

What you will learn

  • Understand the Kehre (the turn) — from Dasein's disclosure of Being to Being's own self-giving.
  • Grasp the human as 'shepherd of Being' (not its master) and the clearing as the site of disclosure.
  • Understand that the sense of Being has a history — physis and aletheia for the Greeks, the world-picture for the moderns.
  • Grasp 'the conquest of the world as picture' as the stance of modernity.
  • Understand that the essence of technology is a mode of revealing, not the machines themselves.
  • Grasp Gestell (enframing) and standing-reserve — and why Heidegger thinks the deepest danger is to revealing itself.
  • Understand 'language is the house of Being' — language as the site of disclosure, not a mere instrument.
  • Grasp that language 'speaks' and the human answers — and the special role of the poet.

Course outline

  1. The Turn — Being and Time tried to reach Being through us. Heidegger comes to feel that even this kept the human at the centre — and turns: from what we do to Being, to what Being does, how it gives and…
  2. The History of Being — Being is not timeless. It is sent differently to each age — emerging for the Greeks, narrowing through the centuries, until the modern world becomes a 'picture' set before a mastering subject.
  3. Technology and Enframing — The essence of technology is nothing technological. It is a way the world reveals itself — as nothing but resource to be ordered. The Rhine becomes a water-power supplier; we ourselves become…
  4. Language, the House of Being — Against technology's reduction of everything to resource, Heidegger turns to language — not a tool we use to label a ready-made world, but the very dwelling in which Being comes to word and things…
  5. The Fourfold and Dwelling — What is it to dwell — not merely to be housed, but to be at home on the earth? Heidegger says we build because we already dwell, and that to dwell is to gather the fourfold: earth and sky, divinities…
  6. Releasement and the Saving Power — Heidegger's answer to the danger of technology is not more action or control, but almost its opposite — Gelassenheit, a releasement or letting-be — and a faith, from Hölderlin, that where the danger…

Works read in this course

  • Letter on Humanism — Heidegger's 1947 statement of the turn — Being, not the human, is at the centre; 'language is the house of Being' and the human is 'the shepherd of Being.' (In Pathmarks.)
  • The Question Concerning Technology / Bremen Lectures — The 1949 Bremen lectures (The Thing, Positionality, The Danger, The Turn) — the essence of technology as Gestell (enframing) and standing-reserve.
  • Poetry, Language, Thought — The essays on the work of art, the thing, language, and 'Building Dwelling Thinking' — the fourfold and what it means to dwell.
  • On the Way to Language — The late essays in which 'language speaks' and the human only answers.
  • Discourse on Thinking — The 1955 Memorial Address — calculative vs. meditative thinking, and Gelassenheit (releasement).
  • Off the Beaten Track — The Holzwege essays, including 'The Age of the World Picture' — modernity as the conquest of the world as picture.

Part of the Simposeum course library.