The Kehre / from Being and Time to Ereignis: is the Turn the deepening of the Seinsfrage along one continuous path, a genuine break with the BT-style fundamental ontology, or the silent abandonment of an unworkable project?

Martin Heidegger, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The Turn is the deepening of the Seinsfrage from the Dasein-centered fundamental ontology of Being and Time to the non-subjectivist thinking of Being itself. The shift is not from one philosophy to another; it is the development of the same question into a register that does not begin from the subject of inquiry. In Sein und Zeit the path was: from the analytic of Dasein, through the existentials, to originary temporality, toward the meaning of Being itself.

The unfinished status of BT (Division Three of Part One and the entirety of Part Two were never written) is itself a sign that the path could not be completed in the Dasein- first register; the BT project ran up against the limit of its own starting point. The Kehre is the response to that limit: the question is not abandoned, it is approached differently.

Being is rethought as Ereignis, the event of appropriation in which Being and Dasein come into their own through their mutual belonging; the categories of Lichtung (the clearing of Being), Sage (Saying), and Wahrheit als Aletheia (truth as unconcealment) emerge as the appropriate vocabulary for thinking Being in this register. The Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (GA 65, drafted 1936-1938 and published only in 1989) is the major late text in which this shift is articulated, though it could not be published in my lifetime because it was not yet ready for the form a published book requires.

Richardson's Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) is correct in its thesis that the path is one path: there is a Heidegger I and a Heidegger II, but there is one Heidegger, and the thinking from BT through the late lectures is one path.1234

Sources

  1. This question is the question of metaphysics. With Being and Time, however, the "question of being" receives an entirely other meaning. Here it concerns the question of being as being.
    Four Seminars, p. 47
  2. This classic mode of argumentation moves solely within a terrain that is not at all intended within Being and Time (the ontic origin of the human), rather it turns the entire explanatory context on its head within this fatal terrain that is lacking all the necessary requisites: it calculates ("Atheism," "secularization") effects from causes that are not even there.
    Remarks I-V Black Notebooks 1942-1948 Pt 2, p. 8
  3. To be sure, that could never be an immediate "description," as if Da-sein were simply to be found objectively present somewhere; nor could it be through a "dialectic," which is the same approach on a higher level.
    Contributions to Philosophy Of the Event, pp. 264–265
  4. An intimation of this essence of beyng could strike us only if we were already equipped to experience ἀλήθεια as in the first beginning. Yet how far removed are we from that, and how definitively? Even if thoroughly distorted and unrecognizable, the still unbroken predominance of "metaphysics" has reached the point that beyng represents itself to us only as a side effect of the representation of beings beings.
    Contributions to Philosophy Of the Event, pp. 373–374

Where the argument is made

  • Letter on Humanism (1947, in Pathmarks) as the canonical post-war retrospective on the Turn
  • Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) GA 65 (drafted 1936-38, published 1989) as the major late text articulating Ereignis
  • Identity and Difference (1957) on onto-theology and the metaphysical forgetting
  • On Time and Being (1962, Heidegger's late lecture at Freiburg)
  • the Spiegel interview (1966, published 1976)
  • the post-Kehre lecture courses (Schelling 1936, Hölderlin 1934-35 and 1942, Nietzsche 1936-46)

How the argument was received

The major interpretive question of Heidegger scholarship and the central point at which the structural unity of the work is at stake. William Richardson's Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) is the canonical continuity reading, with Heidegger's own preface endorsing the 'one path' framing; Otto Pöggeler's Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking (1963/1987) develops the systematic-philosophical version of the continuity thesis. The discontinuity reading — that the BT project of fundamental ontology was abandoned and replaced by a different mode of thinking — has been defended by some early Anglophone commentators but is not the dominant scholarly position. Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (1993) traces the development from the early Freiburg lectures (1919-1923) through the Marburg years to BT, and the genetic reading tends to support the continuity thesis by showing how the categoreal scheme of BT emerged from a long path of hermeneutic-phenomenological work. The post-Kehre lecture courses (Schelling, Hölderlin, Nietzsche) are the working material in which the new register was developed.