No One Can Jump Over His Own Shadow

Thomas Sheehan in conversation with Richard Polt and Gregory Fried.

3:AM Magazine
published online 8 December 2014
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one-can-jump-over-his-own-shadow/
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Richard Polt and Gregory Fried have collaborated on translations of Heideggers Introduction
to Metaphysics and Nature, History, State. They co-edited A Companion to Heideggers
Introduction to Metaphysics and are the editors of the series New Heidegger Research,
published by Rowman & Littlefield International.
Below they interview Professor Thomas Sheehan, the author of the first title published in the
series, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift.

Richard Polt & Gregory Fried: In your view, what have been the predominant paradigms in
Heidegger research so far?

Thomas Sheehan: I understand a paradigm of Heidegger research as (1) a scholarly explanaation of the whole of Heideggers oeuvre, at least as it is known at the time, and (2) one that is
accepted by a significant number of Heidegger scholarsin short, a holistic interpretation that
garners a significant scholarly following. On this reading, therefore, insofar as they meet the
second criterion but not the first, the works of Hubert Dreyfus, Jacques Derrida, and Richard
Rorty do not constitute paradigms of Heidegger scholarship.

From the mid-1940s through the 1950s, few of Heideggers works were available in the Anglophone world, either in German or in translation, and he was understood largely as an existentialist
who had exerted notable influence on Jean-Paul Sartre. Within this existentialist paradigm one of
the better analyses in English was Thomas Langans The Meaning of Heidegger: A Critical Study
of an Existentialist Philosophy (1959).
The years 1962-64 marked a critical turning point in Heidegger scholarship. His signature work
Sein und Zeit (1927) was finally translated into English (Being and Time, 1962). The following
year William J. Richardson published his majestic work, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to
Thought (1963), which covered Heideggers publications through 1958 and established what I
call the classical paradigm that has dominated the scholarship for over fifty years.
Richardsons reading was confirmed that same year by Otto Pggelers Martin Heideggers Path
of Thinking (1963; ET 1987), and in the following year by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmanns
Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers (Martin Heideggers Self-Interpretation, 1964).
These three texts interpreted Heidegger not as an existentialist focused on human being alone
(Dasein) but rather as a phenomenological ontologist focused ultimately on the meaning of
being.

RP & GF: Briefly, how does your own paradigm differ from the classical paradigm?
TS: Making Sense of Heidegger builds on and yet moves beyond the classical paradigm, in part
because the book takes into account all of Heideggers published work up through the first half of
2014.
First, the book argues that Heidegger was a phenomenologist from beginning to end and that
phenomenology is not about the being of things (i.e., the fact that they exist out there in the
world and have a traditional essence). Rather, phenomenology is about the meaningful presence
(Anwesen) of things within contexts of human concerns and interests.
Secondly, the book argues that the final focus of Heideggers work was not the meaningful
presence (aka being) of things. Ratherand thirdlyhis final focus was on the structure of
human being that requires us to deal with things only discursively and thus only in terms of such
meaningful presence. He called this structure thrown-openness or, in his later work, appropriation.
Finally, the book argues that (1) the classical paradigm got it wrong on both appropriation and
the so-called turn in Heideggers thinking; (2) Heideggers so-called history of being is
utterly inadequate to explain the condition of the modern world; and (3) Heideggers reflections
on technology are among the least convincing texts in his oeuvre.
The book also and importantly retranslates key terms in Heideggers lexicon, for example: exsistence for Da-sein and appropriation for Ereignis. In the latter case, ap-propri-ation refers
to the fact that ex-sistence is a priori thrown into its proper condition of being, the openness
that makes meaning possible and necessary.

RP & GF: Why wouldnt a focus on the structure of human being amount to an anthropocentrism that Heidegger rejected?

TS: If the anthropos part of anthropo-centrism refers to ex-sistence as the essence of human
being, Heidegger is anthropocentric.
Pace Heideggerian fundamentalists, Heidegger never got beyond the essence of human being as
ex-sistence. Our ex-sistence consists in our being made to stand out ahead of ourselves as a
groundless openness or clearing. Within this openness we can synthesize this object here
with that meaning there and thus understand the things current being, i.e., what it currently is
for us or better, how it is meaningfully present to us. Thus our essence as ex-sistence is what
allows for all forms of being; and this is the answer to Heideggers basic question: Whence the
being of things?
However, if the anthropos refers to human beingseither singularly or as a wholein disregard of their essence qua ex-sistence, then that is the kind of anthropocentrism that Heidegger
rejected.
To take a specific case of anthropocentrism: Marx asserts that the root of man is man (Critique
of Hegels Philosophy of Right). Would Heidegger agree with that? Yes and no. In the most
general terms, yes: Marx was claiming that human beings do indeed have an essence. But
specifically, no: Heidegger and Marx disagree on what the essence of a human being is.

RP & GF: What do you make of this well-known statement from the 1946 Letter on Humanism? The human being is thrown by being itself into the truth of being, so that ex-sisting
in this fashion he might guard the truth of being . The human being is the shepherd of being
(Pathmarks, p. 252).

TS: Heideggers post-war language is an idiosyncratic and often obscure restatement of what he
had already established in Being and Time (1927) and in texts up to the end of 1930. The sentences you cite require some translation into less obfuscating English. From a close reading of
Heideggers own texts, Making Sense of Heidegger establishes the following:

RP & GF: What about Heideggers statement against Sartres existentialist humanism: Prcisment nous sommes sur un plan o il y a principalement ltre [We are precisely in a situation
where principally there is being] (Pathmarks, p. 254).

TS: Heidegger was a bad reader of Sartre (and remember, it was Jean Beaufret who interpreted
Sartre for him) when he claimed that the difference between them was that for Sartre We are in a
situation where there are only human beings, whereas for Heidegger We are in a situation
where there is principally being.
First of all, Sartres words are taken out of context. In that paragraph Sartre is discussing the
source of meaning and values after the death of God, Heidegger would agree with Sartre that
phenomenologically one cannot responsibly appeal to Gods divine ideas as the source of truth or
to Gods divine will as the source of value. Rather, in such matters both Heidegger and Sartre are
emphatically in a situation where there are only human beings.
Second, the contrast (if it is that) between Sartre and Heidegger is not between man and being. What Heidegger means by being in the passage above is not the being of things but being

itself. However, that phrase is only a heuristic term, one that stands in for the thrown-open
clearing. But the thrown-open clearing is the essence of human being.
To say, as Heidegger does, that we are in a situation where there is principally being is to say
that we cannotat least phenomenologicallyget deeper or higher than ex-sistence. It is
precisely the thrown-open clearing that makes possible (or gives, in Heideggers language) all
forms of the being of things.
Thus he says: Ex-sistence is the individualized X that gives being, that makes being possible. It
is the X-that-gives [das es gibt] (GA 73, 1: 642.2829). Heidegger even says that the openness which is ex-sistence belongs to being itself, is being itself, and for that reason is called
Da-sein (GA 6, 2: 323.14-15). In short, ex-sistence in its fullness is the one and only topic of
Heideggers thought.
So, Heidegger should have actually read Sartre instead of getting him secondhand from Beaufret.

RP & GF: What about the famous turn in Heideggers thinking in the 1930s?
TS: The book argues that there was no such turn in the 1930s. The technical term turn
(Kehre) has at least four distinct meanings in Heideggers philosophy, and this fact has thrown off
the scholarship for the last seventy-five years.
Usuallyand incorrectlythe turn is taken to mean that in the 1930s Heidegger changed the
orientation of his work from a focus on ex-sistence (Dasein) to a concentration on being (Sein).
However, Heidegger himself insisted that the primary and proper sense of the Kehre is not some
such change in orientation but rather what he called the oscillating sameness of ex-sistence and
the clearing-for-meaning. In other words, the Kehre in its proper sense is the very thing itself,
the core topic, of Heideggers philosophy and not a change in the direction of his thinking.
Nonethelessand this is typical of many of his terms, including the word beingit must be
said that he himself did not always make this clear in his writings. Could Heidegger have been
less obscure and more straightforward, both in his philosophy in general and in his terminology?
Answer: Is the Pope a Catholic?

RP & GF: What is Heideggers so-called history of being (Seinsgeschichte)?

TS: Heideggers history of being is in fact five distinct things. First of all it is a straightforward
historical account of what being (Sein) has meant and how it has functioned in a dozen philosophers from the pre-Socratics through Nietzsche.
Second, it argues that these philosophers either did not question (in the case of the pre-Socratics)
or overlooked and forgot (from Plato to Husserl) the appropriation of ex-sistence that makes all
forms of being possible. As such, the history of being is also a history of forgetting, but it
is the philosophical forgetting not of being but of the appropriation of ex-sistence, its a priori
status as the openness that makes possible all forms of meaning, aka being.
Third, the history of being is an argument that appropriation gives or sends the various
historical configurations of the clearing-for-meaning to the philosophers who comprise Heideggers history, even as those philosophers overlook the source of such sendings.
Fourthly, Heideggers history of (a) the overlooking of appropriation, coupled with (b) the
sending of configurations of the clearing-for-meaning becomes a narrative of the devolution of
Western culture, a downfall that is due precisely to the overlooking of appropriation.
This alleged concatenation of ever-increasing stages of obliviousnesswhat Heidegger discusses
as metaphysicsculminates, in his story, in the contemporary global modus vivendi that is
characterized by widespread techno-think and techno-do, such that any inkling of appropriation is
obliterated, with disastrous consequences.
Fifth and finally, Heidegger claims one can get free of this history of beingthis metaphysics and its current depredationsby personally (a) recovering an awareness of ones status
as the appropriated clearing and (b) living ones life in terms of that finite and mortal clearing,
which in fact is ones nature or essence.

RP & GF: Where do you think Heidegger went wrong in his history of being?
TS: It is in the fourth sense of the history of being that Heidegger overreached and went far
beyond his competence. I argue that
the first sense of the history of being is a notable contribution to philosophy;
the second sense can indeed be argued coherently and even convincingly;
the third sense is the later Heideggers rearticulation in historical terms of what his early work
had already established in existential terms;
the fourth sense is a philosophically ungrounded and ungroundable claimi.e., here is where
Heidegger went wrong; and
the fifth sense is only a laterand not entirely clearrestatement of what Being and Time has
already established under the rubric of resolve and authenticity.

RP & GF: If he did go wrong, as you suggest, why did he?

TS: From very early on, Heidegger held a mostly negative view of modernityeconomic, social,
and politicaland of its philosophical turn to the subject from Descartes to his own day.

The roots of that view may lie in the conservative Catholicism of his youth; in his idealization of
rural life in late nineteenth-century Germany; in his discomfort at the flourishing of German science and technology after 1860; in his resistance to the rationalization of the lifeworld; and in his
shock at the horrors of the Great War and his countrys abject defeat.
Heidegger once said that no one can jump over his own shadow (GA 41: 153.24) and he liked
to cite Hlderlins verse, As you began, so will you remain, (GA 12: 88.25, citing Der Rhein,
line 48). These texts may offer clues to Heideggers own approach to modernity. We may wonder whether his own shadowhis limited personal and cultural experience, his pinched worldview, his deep anti-modern conservatismrestricted his ability to understand and properly
engage past history and present events.
Heidegger viewed all of Western history sub specie metaphysicae. He claimed that metaphysics
is the essential ground of Western history (GA 76: 56.18), and his later work, with its top-down
philosophical worldview, is bereft of any sophisticated or even competent awareness of the
concrete economic, social, and political grounds of the twentieth-century world.

RP & GF: The three volumes of Black Notebooks published last spring (and there are more to
come) leave no reasonable doubt that Heidegger had anti-Semitic attitudes. And his public
statements, even into the 1940s, indicated that he supported, with whatever qualifications, the
Nazi regime and its war efforts. How do you see this affecting his philosophy?

TS: Heideggers attempt to launder his cultural pessimism and revanchist nationalism through
his metaphysical history of the downfall of the West is a complete failure and should be
recognized as such. This includes, most saliently and infamously, his undeniable anti-Semitism
and Nazism.
In my opinion, the attempts of Heideggerians to explain his anti-Semitism via exculpatory
qualifications (e.g., he wasnt a biological anti-Semite like the Nazis) are strategies of abject
avoidance, a desperate refusal to accept the obvious. The question, rather, is whether his deep
cultural anti-Semitism, along with his craven allegiance to Hitler, hemorrhages into the core of
his philosophy.
Some, like the indefatigable but philosophically challenged Emmanuel Faye, insist that Heidegger was a Nazi even before he was born and that his philosophy from beginning to end was nothing but an effortin Fayes wordsto introduce Nazism into philosophy.
I argueadmittedly against mainstream scholarshipthat the essential core of Heideggers
philosophy was in place by the end of 1930 and that it is in no way tainted by his later Nazism or
his abiding anti-Semitism. However, when it comes to his work from the 1930s into the 1950s,
one must carefully and critically pick and choose between what is infected and what is not.
As far as I can see (and barring further revelations) his public work after 1960 is free of Nazism
and anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, it is still contaminated by his uninformed and narrow-minded
anti-modernism.

RP & GF: Those same Black Notebooks also show that he developed an increasingly vehement critique of Nazi metaphysics as a form of modern subjectivism and will to power. Do you
think this critique is useful, or is it compromised by what you think is his misreading of modernity more generally?

TS: Yes, those volumes do express Heideggers critique of Nazi metaphysicsbut thats the
problem: Heidegger approached Nazism in the same way that he approached everything elsethe
World War and the Holocaust includednamely as a metaphysical problem.
What planet was Heidegger living on between 1933 and 1945? Yes, he was a philosopher, but
that in no way absolved him from investigating the specific economic, social, and political roots
of modernity.
Instead, what we get from him is a top-down philosophical narrative about the Wests abiding
ignorance of Ereignis, with its disastrous consequences, along with a Solzhenitsyn-like jeremiad
against modernity and its intrusions on rural life. And all of this is topped off with the lovely
thought that only a god can save us. Surely we can do better than that.

Notes on the contributors follow on page 8.

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ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE

Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and Emeritus

Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, he specializes in contemporary European
philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and
Roman Catholicism. As well as Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (2015), his books
include: Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth (trans., 2007); Becoming Heidegger (2007); Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987); The First
Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the
Thinker (1981).
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWERS

Richard Polt is professor of philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He is the
author of Heidegger: An Introduction and The Emergency of Being: On Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy.

Gregory Fried is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Suffolk University in
Boston. Together with Richard Polt, he is the series editor of New Heidegger Research, with
Rowman and Littlefield international. He is the author of Heideggers Polemos: From Being to
Politics and has written numerous articles on Heidegger.
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