SEINSFRAGE AND DENKWEG

No doubt the dominant philosophical fact of the past thirty-five years has been and is the appearing—with a frequency of two volumes per year—of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. It has been rightly observed that, thanks to this edition, in the place of what has long appeared as an archipelago of scattered endeavors (roughly divided into, on the one hand, Being and Time and what belongs to it, and, on the other, the so-called late philosophy), a whole continent has begun to emerge. Of this continent, however, we are as yet hardly able to make out the shape—not to speak of the top to which it towers and the depth to which goes. Once all 102 volumes of the planned edition (which, we are told, make only half of the existing handwritten material) have been published, the whole of Heidegger's attempt may finally, for a long moment, flash in its irreducible weirdness.

Meanwhile, the dominant role of the appearing of the Gesamtausgabe shows mainly in the marked reservation that is maintained vis-à-vis the Seinsfrage and the numerous critical questions it implies. Is Da-sein the element in which the stance of homo humanus may finally be grounded—or is it not? Is Ge-stell a sufficient determination of that which is and thus of the universal trait of sense of our epoch—or is it not?