The Young Heidegger

Abstract

<p>Using his recently published lecture courses from 1919 to 1926, I tell the story of Heidegger's youthful thought, w hich has survived over the years as a "rumor," if not a legend. More specifically, I attempt a deconstructive reading of his later thought by tracing the major themes of his question of being back to their origin in his youthful period. I present these themes as the end of philosophy, the other beginning for the being-question, and the constant initiation of this new beginning as an ongoing way. I argue that the real turn in his thinking is not found in a turn from his 1927 "Being and Time" to his later works after 1930, but rather in his turn away from the metaphysics of his very early 1913 doctoral dissertation and the 1916 habilitation writing to his thought in the early twenties. Regarding the theme of the end of philosophy, I should that the young Heidegger already criticized the three epochs of metaphysics (the ancient, the medieval, and the modern), and that he did this with the help of Aristotle's critique of Plato's idea of the good; Luther's attack on Aristotlian scholasticism and Kierkegaard's critique of Hegelianism; and the critique of Neo-Kantianism in Husserl's "Sixth Investigation" and in Dilthey's philosophy of life. Regarding the theme of the other beginning for the being-question, I show that he posed this question as the question of "being in and through life," which he investigated in terms of the three intentional moments of world, factical life, and temporalizing. Regarding the theme of the way-character of his being-question, I show that he understood his philosophy as the "formal indication" of a way for interpretively showing the things themselves. In my Conclusion, I argue for the critical appropriation of his later thought in the light of the existential-phenomenological problematic and language of his youthful period, which provides us with a philosophical Rosetta stone for demythologizing and translating his later mytho-poetic, speculative language into a more familiar and natural lexicon.</p>