Mindfulness

by Martin Heidegger, Parvis Emad (Translator), Thomas Kalary (Translator)

Written in 1938/9, Mindfulness (translated from the German Besinnung) is Martin Heidegger's second major being-historical treatise. Here, Heidegger develops some of his key concepts and themes including truth, nothingness, enownment, art and Be-ing and discusses the Greeks, Nietzsche and Hegel at length. In addition to the main text, the text also includes two further important essays, 'A Retrospective Look at the Pathway' (1937/8) and 'The Wish and the Will (On Preserving What is Attempted)' (1937/8), in which Heidegger surveys his unpublished works and discusses his relationship to Catholic and Protestant Christianity and reflects on his life's path. This is a major translation of a key text from one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations Series.

Genres: Philosophy

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ask Beyng!” - writes Heidegger in this book - “And in its stillness as in the beginning of the word god responds. You may roam through all beings: nowhere does the trace of god manifest itself.” If you do, “then there is Beyng”. Mindfulness is about overcoming metaphysics, questioning Beyng, letting Beyng be, and patiently waiting for the last god to respond.
All his previous works up to this point - including “Being and Time” - are retrospectively denounced here as metaphysically speaking and presenting; even if Heidegger claims that his thinking in them was not metaphysical. Then there was the fiasco of his political involvement with the Nazi and his failure as rector. Later in his “Ponderings”, he claims that around 1933 he was not able to fully realize what “God is dead” meant in terms of metaphysics and political action; hence his political mistakes.
In this book Heidegger is purifying himself of the last traces of metaphysics in his thinking, speaking, and action. It started with “Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event)”. “Mindfulness” followed along with several other books. “Contributions” is the main one, while “Mindfulness” follows closely in importance. “Contributions” goes deeper, but it is rather schematic; while this one develops its arguments at length. The depths of thinking and insights in these books are mind-blowing and shocking. The style of writing is like nothing before them. The thinking and writing here are no longer bounded by traditional ontology, philosophy, language, logic, standard arguments, methodologies, and so on. Heidegger starts and stays with Beyng; as the inquire it is no longer about “what are beings?“, but about “how does Beyng sway?”.
These books point to the metaphysical assumptions that made Western culture possible; culture that started with the Greeks, passed through Christianity, German Idealism, and ended in the current technological setting and nihilism. Not just that, but the hints of this abandonment of beings by Being - as manifested in our modern technological world - were present in how Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle understood Being and consequently constituted the first beginning. Christianity, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and so on along with their metaphysical understanding of Being followed almost inevitably from this Greek and partially flawed start. Heidegger believes that a new beginning is needed and here he is doing his part in pointing to this history of Being, the Event, and the Mindfulness required for this transition/leap. A last god is needed to save us - and all that we can do is make room for him, be ready for when he will pass by, be mindful, and wait for him in silence; or else he will fly away.
A lot of people are dismissing these books as poetical and aphoristic non-sense, or at best as a failed project. “Being and Time” is relatively easy to follow because it is partially embedded in metaphysics - as Heidegger himself acknowledged - and bridges can be followed from the known and familiar to the unknown and strange. Moreover, Heidegger wrote “Being and Time” with a public in mind; but not here, since he wrote these books just for himself. Additionally, we must remember that Heidegger mastered the entire philosophical tradition from the early Greeks to Nietzsche and he knew that what made possible all these thinkers is not easily expressed in common and metaphysical language, and definitely is not up for public debate. With “A Retrospective Look at the Pathway” at the end of this book, Heidegger places this book along with others into his pathway of thinking between 1913 and 1938.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heidegger’s inner Nazi comes out frequently in the beginning of this book. He talks about race, blood, soil, the specialness of Germany and praises Oswald Spengler as if it all makes sense even when it adds nothing to his major theme. Here’s a tip: for anytime you read a book that praises Spengler, fascist warning bells should ring in your ears because he is very foundational to Fascists (see his Decline of the West, or Spengler’s Letters for his full-on craziness and Fascist beliefs outlined), and it beggars belief that a real philosopher would be able to embrace that non-sense.

The one paragraph that the editors thought highlighted Heidegger’s bonafides as a non-Nazi criticizes the youth in Germany for creating excesses in modern politics, Heidegger therefore is blaming the youthful Germans for Hitler. I found that ironic when that thought is juxtaposed with today, because it is the old-white-people and their deplorable old-Christianist cohorts (85% of white Christian evangelicals voted for Trump) that make up the base of MAGA hat morons. It takes an old deplorable fart to make today’s Fascism, I suspect it did too in Heidegger’s Germany and I know it does in today’s Russia (2022), and perhaps Heidegger was confusing the actual creation of the Nazis with what he wanted them to be.

Heidegger will say forgetfulness of being starts from the inception of metaphysics which lost its path after Heraclites (Nietzsche says that and this book’s theme basically does too). Nietzsche thinks all philosophy went downhill after we never got to cross over that ever-changing river, and Heidegger does too.

Heidegger will say that Hegel’s absolute knowledge ends the relevance of metaphysics while Nietzsche’s body (that’s the word used in this book) and his return-of-the-eternal-same negates being’s truth, or that be-ing is not being. Be-ing is Heidegger’s neologism for that place between the subjective and the objective and becomes more allusive the more we try to recognize it, and Heidegger refers to it as the ontological difference in some of his other books.

Between the earth and world, and, man and God there is the place of the clearing that creates the be-ing that comes from the sway of the un-concealing of the presence-ing of the present.

The ab-ground gets lost in the history of the knowing of being through its forgetfulness and our loss of the attunement which gets narrowed as we get further away from the truth of being since the being of beings is how we get at our mindfulness of the forgetfulness of being. There is no ground, there is the ab-ground and that is the space between man and God, and, earth and world, and are the openings that leads to our ultimate forgetfulness of being. Heidegger strives to rediscover the essence of being by going back to its beginning while trying to discard the baggage of today.

Heidegger’s doctorate was on Duns Scotus, his frustration for his understanding of the revealing of being qua being comes about through his awareness of the synchronic contingency within the metaphysical understanding of being through history. Read The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus by Jaczyn for amplifications, or if you are really bored read Heidegger’s doctorate Die Kategorien-Und Bedeutungslehre Des Duns Scotus. Another note, Heidegger often appeals to Thomas Aquinas indirectly within his discourses, but he does not seem to embrace William of Ockham. I just recently read the book Hegel or Spinoza by Macherey that pointed out that Hegel appealed to Spinoza without attribution and sometimes Heidegger would quote from Hegel, but it really was Spinoza’s thoughts that were getting transmitted.

I would say, William of Ockham takes beingness out of the world while Heidegger is trying to keep it in, and Heidegger ignores the context, contrast, relations and relativity of the situation since that swallows the essence of being and he forces himself to return the universalness of beingness back to the attunement of our ownmost dasein while forgetting the particular and the general and hypothesizing a universal.

Heidegger thinks that if we can rediscover the forgetfulness of being, we can get at the universal beingness he wants, rather than the particular to the general without the nominalism that Ockham will argue is all that we have only allowing for an exception for the Trinity and a few other theological certainties.

At best we get a fuzzy clarification when we reconcile Heidegger’s ontological difference and as we momentarily forget that which is outside of us and that is within us by using the sway from the clearing that gets unconcealed from its historical unfolding.

Heidegger in this book never gets at the personnel nature of being (i.e., consciousness or self-awareness), he is looking at the whole history of Metaphysics and how we got off the rails within Occidental Philosophy (according to him). Hegel does the nature of being within us as well as the historical revealing of being throughout the history of philosophy as he discovers his own version of mindfulness within Phenomenology of Spirit.

Heidegger is still under the sway of Nietzsche and will make ‘will to power’ as well as ‘care’ from Being and Time his foundational lynchpins for his discourse. By doing that, he is making his ab-ground an illusion (a product of the appearance of reality) inasmuch as both ‘power’ and ‘care’ always are feelings that reside within us through an interpretation of things outside of us and Heidegger is sublimating his goal for getting at being as truth, or ‘why is there something rather than nothing’, the real theme that runs through out this book.

This book has a rambling nature to it and does float around off the main topic. Overall, I would have to rate this as a superior book if the Fascist slant is ignored and Heidegger’s not always staying focused on the topic. He’s clearly on the topic enough such that most readers will see this book as one of Heidegger’s best books.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is where Heidegger really starts to make sense. If you've read it, that may sound like a really counter-intuitive statement, as he's never more linguistically obscure, but if you just roll around with it for a while, pure genius, and never more relevant than now.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful stuff. Mindfulness, along with Contributions, is one of the bedrocks of Heidegger's late thought and hands-down among the most fascinating and difficult philosophical works I've grappled with. This volume is an insanely demanding read and the event horizon with regard to Heidegger's neologisms and technical terms. At this level, it's not hard to see why even serious philosophers dismiss his thought as impenetrable or just terrible poetry.

Despite all that, the deeper contours of Heidegger's ontological difference really come into focus here. He explores how Being unfolds historically as an event whereby Dasein's capacity for sense-making is appropriated by Being such that beings are disclosed, or unconcealed, through Dasein within these specific patterns of sense-making or intelligibility.

For the Big H, Being essentially occurs as a two-fold unity of presence and absence bound in time, whereby Dasein reveals beings within patterns of sense-making as alternative fields of intelligibility are necessarily concealed. Thus the foundational metaphysical riddle of "why is there something rather than nothing?" becomes an incorrect question that assumes a preeminence of beings as presence over the unfolding of Being: for Heidgger, the nothing is Being. Deep stuff and a guaranteed brain-bender for anyone willing to swim out past the breakers in the weird waters of Heidegger's phenomenology.

[TL · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Be-ing sways solely in the clearing which is be-ing itself. But this clearing remains sustainable only in a projecting-opening that throws itself unto the opening of this clearing and "owns itself over" to the openness of this opening and ventures to ground it. This grounding projecting-opening en-thinks the truth of be-ing and—however different and contrary this may seem—is thereby nonetheless en-owned only by be-ing itself.' (38-9)


'Because philosophy says be-ing and is, therefore, only as word in word, and because its word never merely means or designates what is to be said but precisely in saying is be-ing itself,

philosophy might hurriedly try to cross directly over into poetry as help in need and especially as receptacle. And yet this always remains an entanglement at the roots of what is of equal rank to philosophy and which on account of its ownmost sways by itself, and from time immemorial incessantly avoids the thinking of be-ing. For, the ownmost of poetry also grounds history but differently; poetry's "times" do not coincide with those of thinking.' (39)


This grounding projecting-opening en-thinks the truth of be-ing and—however different and contrary this may seem—is thereby nonetheless en-owned only by be-ing itself.' (38-9)

'Be-ing does not give away its swaying to beings, but fulfills this swaying as itself and thus lights itself up as the ab-ground, wherein, on the same plane, that which man calls beings may tower, may fall away and may linger.' (72)


'Whence comes the decision that is to be made between the preeminence of beings and the grounding of the truth of be-ing? It comes only from be-ing, out of the manner in which be-ing refuses and gifts itself. Be-ing itself is the en-owning of this decision and its "free play of time-space".

Be-ing is more originary than the mystery of the earth, more worlding than the inaugurated world, more swaying than god, and more grounding than man, and yet ""only"" the moment of the "in-between" for "beings in the whole".' (73)

[Tijmen Lansdaal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit clearer than the Beiträge, if you've read the Beiträge. Here he more often elaborates the point of his 'seynsgeschichtliches Denken', whereas the Beiträge is crucial as a more programmatic work. The two of these make an excellent pair to try and get a grasp on the 'later Heidegger' (but not quite the esoteric late-late Heidegger) and how it relates to 'early Heidegger' - I take the point to be still just the same thing honestly (don't care much for these distinctions).

[Ozifer Eris]

One of those short Heideggerian books i re-read once a year for several years. I even read it upside down and backwards. Don't ask, just read.

[Fnaught · Rating 5 out of 5]

As this is Heidegger, the fact that the structure is scrambled immensely benefits how this book is put together. One is incentivised to read the work directly and brutally. The idea of a connected mechanism that explains everything is absent. So, what does Heidegger mean by beingness, what by be-ing, what by ab-grund? It is this mode of poetic reading using which I have achieved my best success reading Heidegger. This, perhaps rather than Being and Time, is therefore the place I recommend to start from.

[Abol]

Truth as clearing, as uncoveredness, as Heidegger calls it as opposed to propositional truth. I found very alluring vision in this. So I bought the book after returning to it on the shelves of Borders, York. Marked it in my mind to read.

[Genjiro]

This, along with Metaphysics and Being and Time, is one of the most difficult books I've encountered by Heidegger.