Jason Scoffield and Dr. David Paulsen, Philosophy
The purpose of this project was threefold. First, the thesis resulting from this project was to provide a basic commentary on Discourse on Thinking. This was be done by using the much simpler “Memorial Address” and how it relates to the ideas developed in Heidegger’s other works to establish the background and approach necessary to understanding the more explanatory “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking.” Second, the paper was to then describe the concept of releasement, illustrating the primary role it must play if man is to dwell meaningfully in a world dominated by technology and modern science. Finally, it was to ahow that only through a religious attachment to God that man develops the disposition necessary for releasement.
Published in 1959, the small book Discourse on Thinking appeared near the end of Martin Heidegger’s career and is characteristic of the poetic, meditative literature that typified his later works. These later writings represent a significant “turn” from the phenomenological ontology of Being and Time to a growing concern over man’s ability to cope with the changes of the modern technological era. Heidegger’s movement away from the methodically systematic thinking of Being and Time led many critics to conclude that his “real” philosophy stopped with this earlier work while his later works were wither incomprehensible or downright mystical.
Considerable efforts have been made in rendering Heidegger’s later writings more intelligible, and significant inroads have been forged in understanding and evaluating the contributions of these writings. Unfortunately, Discourse on Thinking has been largely neglected. There has yet to appear a commentary on this small yet dense piece of work that attempts to explain its complex ideas while relating these ideas to the larger themes developed throughout Heidegger’s later works.
Discourse on Thinking plays an integral part in the study of Heidegger’s later philosophy for two reasons. First, the differing styles of the two essays therein provide both the uninitiated reader as well as the Heidegger scholar a valuable resource in approaching the larger corpus of the later Heidegger. “Memorial Address,” is a basic, largely jargon-free account of Heidegger’s diagnosis and prognosis of the “destitution” of the modern age, an account that was prepared for and presented to a lay audience. On the other hand, “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking,” is a philosophically dense explanatory account of a key concept in Heidegger’s later philosophy, Gallsenheit, or releasement, which was written for an audience steeped in philosophic training. In its development of the concept of releasement, Discourse on Thinking presents a valuable insight into how Heidegger felt man could overcome the danger of the modern age.
In the first essay “Memorial Address,” Heidegger expresses his concern that the primary cause of our inability to experience the full joy and peace of our existence is that we have abandoned the ability to think meditatively. In its stead we have adopted nearly exclusively the notion calculative thinking. Calculative thinking is the type of thinking we engage in when, in our planning, researching, and organizing, we reckon with the conditions before us with the calculated intention of them serving our specific purposes. In contrast, meditative thinking is contemplative thinking about the meaning that reigns in existence and the grounds that make everything else possible. It is the willingness to engage the simple, often paradoxical, patient contemplation of the meaning of existence. It allows us to be open to the possibility of what Heidegger describes as releasment, which in turn opens us more fully to the joys and mysteries of existence.
Unfortunately, the mindset of our modern technological age is to utilize almost exclusively, a metaphysical outlook that reveals the world a fashion open only to calculative thinking and not meditative thinking. It places man before the world as the subject to which everything objective in the world is to be delivered to for his use and purpose.1 By so doing, it reveals the world as an object to be used as we see fit, as a resource, a “gigantic gasoline station” used to fuel technology and industry.2 Finally, although the technology of any age has manipulated the world to our benefit, it has never threatened to so completely incline us to see the world only as an object to be manipulated, as does the technology of the modern age. The unique characteristic of modern technology, and its greatest danger to humanity, is that it not just that it discloses the world as a resource, but that it discloses the world solely as a resource.
In one of his last interviews Heidegger asserted that, “only a god can save us.”3 He says this for two reasons. First, because the draw of technology is so strong, its presence so pervasive, and its mode of revealing so appealing, “it is only a God who can save us.”4 Only a God can pull us out of the univocal metaphysical outlook of the spirit of the modern age. Second, the disposition associated with the worship of the divine is precisely the disposition of releasement. It is an openness to the mystery, a willingness to absolve one’s will, a sense of awe and wonder before the mysterious as well as the known, and an open waiting to be shaped by the Divine. Only a God can save us, because only through the worship of God do we relearn how think meditatively and, by so doing, open ourselves to the disposition of releasement that is so important to appreciating the mystery of the world and experience the joy and peace possible through our existence
In the end I feel this project was successful because I was able to come to a clearer understanding of what this influential philosopher felt was wrong with the modern outlook and what he felt was needed to solve this problem. Though I tried to explain the essence of his argument in simpler terms, I wasn’t able to completely do so with this paper. My task for the future would be to do just that.
References
- Martin Heidegger, “What are Poets For?”, 108. Found in, Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans, Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971).
- Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, Trans, John Anderson and Hans Freund, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), 50.
- Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 107.
- Mark Wrathall, “Between the Earth and the Sky: Heidegger on Life after the Death of God,” Unpublished Manuscript, 122.