Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World,

Finitude, Solitude, by Martin Heidegger, translated
by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker

John Llewelyn

To cite this article: John Llewelyn (1998) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:
World, Finitude, Solitude, by Martin Heidegger, translated by William McNeill and
Nicholas Walker, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 29:1, 109-111, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.1998.11007224

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1998.11007224

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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 nevertheless importantly rectified to 'arche-writing' in Alan Bass's revised
translation of the essay in Margins of Philosophy (University of Chicago Press:
1982), and, as a result, confusion between Derrida's philosophy of 'arche-writing'
and parallel interest in France in practices of the signifier (Barthes, Kristeva,
Baudrillard, etc.) could begin to be cleared up through the English translation. The
above lapses in editorial supervision are not easily understandable and are more than
ironic given the task of fidelity that the editors set themselves.
Whilst unhappy to carp, and whilst my initial positive comments concerning the
Reader remain despite these later reservations, I do believe that both the lack of
editorial staging in The Continental Philosophy Reader and the above kind of lapse in
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editing are rooted in the same, for lack of a better word, 'absent-mindedness'. This
absent-mindedness gives the impression that the Reader straighforwardly reproduces
the state in which Continental philosophy was initially received in Anglo-Saxon
culture, betraying a lack of reflection (both cultural and political) on the need several
years after this reception to 'select' - that is, at the very least check ... - the texts
chosen. If to read philosophically is to feel the tensions of the fields one is discov-
ering, to feel those tensions as harboring the possible futures of those fields and to
read within those tensions, then this lack of reflection is itself unphilosophical. The
last comment may be unfair in spirit given the introductory push to the Reader. -
That said, this Reader will face soon, like all 'Readers' that take a distance to their
selections (for whatever reasons), increasing competition from the more interestingly
finite - selective and interactive - possibilities of the net...
Richard Beardsworth
American University of Paris

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: WORLD,

FINITUDE, SOLITUDE, by Martin Heidegger, translated by William McNeill and
Nicholas Walker, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995,
pp.xxiii+376.

While the introduction of Being and Time describes the phenomenon, logos and
how they belong to each other in phenomenology, the reflections with which this
lecture course of 1929-30 begins take as their point of departure the relationship of
logos and physis. Logos is the term explicitly common to these two pairs, because
implicit in it is a-letheia, truth as unconcealing, as privation of privacy, as twilight
robbery. Heraclitus spoke for the Greeks generally when he said that truth is the
violence which logos does against the desire of physis to conceal itself. A lecture
course concerned with metaphysics begins naturally with physis, and with what
comes to be taken as nature and the natural. The violence of the robbery which such a
course undertakes cannot be that of the establishment of truths by proof. It must be
what in 1927 Heidegger calls phenomenology and is described in 1929-30 as a way
of facing problems that comes out of the problems themselves. This is now called
"living" philosophy. One of the chief preoccupations of this course will be to ask
what is to be understood by this epithet.
The first part of the course faces the question as to how a living way of
philosophising can be aroused. We discover that this is a question of attunement.
Analyses of positions defended by Spengler, Klages, Scheler, Leopold Ziegler and

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 Nietzsche reveal that the fundamental Stimmung of contemporary Dasein is profound
boredom (Langeweile). Three forms of this "long-whiling" are examined: becoming
bored by something, being bored with something and the passing of time belonging
to it, profound boredom as "it is boring for one". The second of these is intermediate
and may tum into either of the others. There are also other intermediate forms. But
the ordinary conception of boredom hides profound boredom and therefore its
propensity to open toward its opposite extreme, the moment of vision (Augenblick).
Non-quantitatively deep long-whiling is not to be confused with boredom and
ennui as ordinarily conceived. Nor is the moment of vision to be confused with a
worldview. Each leads to a proper way of asking after the temporality of Dasein and
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the prevailing of world. However, whereas in Being and Time these questions begin
with a provisional analysis of Dasein's everyday mode of being in the world, the
approach here is by way of a comparison of the human being's having a world with
the relevance or otherwise of world to the stone, to the plant and to the animal. The
second of these gets passed over (swallowed up?) in the three hypotheses to the
investigation of which Heidegger now turns: the stone is worldless, the animal is poor
in world, man is world-forming. The reader will need to be on the qui vive to see
whether the author stands by his declaration that no hierarchical ranking is intended
of poverty in world and world-formation. The animal's poorness in world is a presup-
position of the natural science of zoology, and world-formation is a presupposition of
the human sciences.
A mechanistic interpretation of the organism and the instrumentalist interpretation
of the organ fall foul of the distinction between an instrument's being ready (jertig) to
perform a task and an organ's being capable (fiihig) of performing a function.
Distinctive of an organism is its being absorbed in itself, eingenommen, taken into
itself or being captured, benommen. As David Krell notes in the criticism of these
lectures conducted in Daimon Life, Benommenheit is the very word that Heidegger
employs in Being and Time of Dasein's being fastened in fascination by the world
and, in anxiety, by its uncanniness. Note too that this word is used there by Heidegger
of the inauthentic way of being in the world as Dasein's not being itself. The
apparent tension between what is said on page 176 and what is said on page 344 of
Being and Time is relieved if we remember that not being oneself is a positive mode,
however dominated by the present into which Dasein falls, and that this positivity is
its being the temporal ekstasis at which anxiety's past thrownness takes on futurity as
the possibility of being repeated. It should not surprise us therefore that
Benommenheit is ambiguous. Ambiguity is the essence of time. But we may well
continue to be astonished to find this word used two or three years later of the
temporality of animal life. Of course, the word is cognate with the verb benehmen,
the verb used in ordinary discourse for to comport oneself or behave. In Being and
Time this word is used of Dasein. In these lectures it is the word Heidegger prefers to
use when speaking of animals, verhalten being the one he prefers to use of human
beings.
Verhaltung is open to that being whose way of being open is not that of
captivation, but of being open to beings as beings and as a whole, that is to say, to the
world, and that is to say, to the word. (In the speech for the sixtieth birthday of Eugen
Fink included in this volume- which is dedicated to Fink's memory- Heidegger
refers to "a wording world", eine wortende Welt.) The lectures close therefore with a
discussion of the apophantic "as". This recapitulates the treatment of the same topic

110
 in Being and Time, except that this topic arises there out of a discussion of the
hermeneutic "as" operative in Dasein's everyday way of being primarily and for the
most part in the world of things as ready or unready to hand. Recall Heidegger's
decision not to take as point of departure for these lectures the provisional analysis of
Dasein's everyday way of being in the world. One of the aims of these lectures is to
elucidate the "as" of the world "as a whole". That "as" structure is more fundamental
than both the "as" of the use of instruments in a referential whole and the apophantic
"as" of propositionality. Heidegger is here drawing on and drawing out references
made by Aristotle to what lies deeper than the oppositions between yes and no, either
and or.
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If being bored with something and the passing of time belonging to it is interme-
diary and ground of the other two forms of long-whiling distinguished by Heidegger,
finitude occupies that place in respect of world and solitude. In the text itself
Heidegger prefers to speak not of Einsamkeit, but of Vereinzelung, separation,
isolation or, in this translation, individuation. This notion and that of becoming what
one is in a restless urge to be at home everywhere (Novalis) has a kinship with
Eigentlichkeit. Although this last expression does occur in this work, where it is
translated as "proper authenticity", it does so far less frequently than in Being and
Time. This is one of the reasons why the "Kierkegaardian" and "Lutheran" undercur-
rents of the earlier book are now less marked.
It is not only in comparison with Being and Time that these lectures raise
questions of convergence and divergence. For instance, the reference made in them to
metabole (Umschlag) calls to be juxtaposed to those made to this concept in The
Basic Problems of Phenomenology and in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics also puts flesh on the remarks about
boredom and freedom made in the contemporary lecture "What is Metaphysics?".
The above comments are enough to demonstrate the monstrous difficulties with
which the translators of these lectures have had to cope. They have done so with
courage and with imagination, as when for hingehalten (echoing and echoed by
verhalten) they say "held in limbo". They take the precaution of appending a
checklist of their translations of key terms.
John Llewelyn
Edinburgh

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