Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189199 in Books
• Published on: 1969-12-19
• Released on: 1969-11-19
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is one of the twentieth century's most important, controversial, and influential philosophers. He is the author of the monumental Being and Time as well as other works translated and published in English as Basic Writings, Poetry, Language, Thought, On Time and Being, and On the Way to Language.

Customer Reviews

Gelassenheit
This is an indispensible work if you are interested in discovering what Heidegger was thinking towards the end of his career. "Discourse on Thinking" can be seen as a succinct statement of his thinking on thinking in relation to the onslaught of global technology and the concomitant nihilism that follows close behind.

In the face of the domination of global technology, what is to be done? In terms of "Letting-Be" (Gelassenheit) thinking must overcome its preoccupation with instrumental reasoning which is based on representation and rationality. It is in "meditative thinking" that we are able to arrive at a proper relationship with technology.

An important work related to this is Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology" in which he sets up the structure of this domination - the world is presented as a "standing resource" and we become "standing resources" in an indirect way. The work forms an invaluable background for this text and it is also available in Amazon.com. Another important work is Schirmacher's "Technik und Gelassenheit" which offers an important critique of Heidegger's philosophy of technology. The work is unfortunately, yet to be translated into English and even its German edition seems to be out of print at the moment. We await the translation of this work with much anticipation!

It does not take long to read this
This small, old book, an English translation in 1966 of a book published in German in 1959, consisting of a Memorial Address given on October 30, 1955 at the celebration of the birthday of a composer who lived in the years 1780-1849 in Heidegger's home town.

"I thank my homeland for all that it has given me along the path of life. I have tried to explain the nature of this endowment in those few pages entitled "Der Feldweg" which first appeared in 1949 in a book honoring the hundredth anniversary of the death of Conradin Kreutzer." (p. 43).

The Memorial Address is rather short, but it is followed by "Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking" (pp. 58-90) and a Glossary (pp. 91-93) which "includes only those words especially important to the argument which are translated in more or less unusual ways," including "Feldweg," which means "country path." One of the translators, John M. Anderson, also provides an Introduction to explain the differences in outlook of calculative thinking and meditative thinking. The explanation includes a description of BEING AND TIME (pp. 15-18, 20-21), INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS (pp. 18-19), and the special terms used in this book.

The Memorial Address is the simple part of this book, clearly aimed at "Honored Guests, Friends and Neighbors!" (p. 43). Instead of dwelling on music as the creation of those who seek to express their forms of meditation in notes that others can participate in, Heidegger names the forms through which spectators merely look and listen: "chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off . . . Picture magazines are available everywhere." (p. 48). Calculative thinking produces a habit seen by Heidegger as "the superficiality of man's way of life." (p. 49). Speaking just three weeks before a Soviet test of a thermonuclear device dropped from an airplane on November 22, 1955, Heidegger said, "Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this new age." (p. 52).

The attitude which Heidegger recommended to people at large reminds me of my own involvement in what I consider secret circus stunts. "But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technological devices that we fall into bondage to them." (pp. 53-54). By just observing, "we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call mystery." (p. 56). Meditation is called for as a more human activity, and the composer is finally brought back to our attention. "If we respond to the prompting, we think of Conradin Kreutzer by thinking of the origins of his work, the life-giving powers of his Heuberg homeland. And it is we who think if we know ourselves here and now as the men who must find and prepare the way into the atomic age, through it and out of it." (p. 56).

The Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking has three participants: Scientist, Teacher, and Scholar. The scientist is eager to learn whatever might be useful, or what "is said to shelter in itself the nature of thinking, whereas things themselves do not think." (p. 76). The Scholar is well aware of the views of Meister Eckhart and Kant, and can discuss non-willing in a manner that reminds me of aphoria and the forms of opposition related in the DICTIONARY OF SEMIOTICS to the semiotic squares used to illustrate its definitions of alethic modalities, being-able, believing-to-be, contradiction, deixis, having-to-do, illusion, life/death, modalities, secret, semiotic square, uncertainty, and veridiction. In a semiotic analysis of "Sleeping Beauty" page 161 of the DICTIONARY OF SEMIOTICS shows three semiotic squares used to illustrate the deep level by mapping the fundamental transformation between two poles of abstract meaning between which the text moves for each square. Heidegger might be picturing himself in his Conversation as the teacher who can say:

"Not only do I see this relation, I confess that ever since I have tried to reflect on what moves our conversation, it has claimed my attention, if not challenged me." (p. 59).

We are all allowed to feel a bit lost, as the scientist says:

"You say that the horizon is the openness which surrounds us. But what is this openness as such, if we disregard that it can also appear as the horizon of our representing?" (p. 64).