Heidegger, in the 1946 essay Letter on Humanism, famously remarks that the tragic dramas of Sophocles are in some sense superior to the philosophical ethics of Aristotle in their ability to “preserve” the site of human dwelling in language. This chapter first offers a reading of Aristotle’s Ethics, suggesting in what sense they might be deficient, from Heidegger’s perspective. Next, Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in the 1942 lecture course Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” provides our focus, and we find there a poetization of the site of human dwelling, as opened up by a play between homeliness and unhomeliness, familiar order and uncanniness, presencing and absencing. Thirdly and finally, we ask precisely how Sophocles’ poetizing manages to preserve this dynamic play and, moving beyond Heidegger, we suggest that Antigone herself, as she moves through the plot of Sophocles’ play, eventually and dramatically models how humans properly inhabit this site as such, in her questioning way of thinking and in her hesitating way of taking action.

When Martin Heidegger famously rose in 1946 to pay tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke on the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death, it was hardly by accident that he framed his interpretation of Rilke’s work by quoting Friedrich Hölderlin’s now canonical question (‘Wherefore poets…’) regarding the task of poetry in the time called the present, lines that also enabled Heidegger to voice his own distress at the state in which postwar Germany found itself and, more obliquely, the extent of his own involvement in the events of the previous decade and a half. During these postwar years, there were arguably few more attentive or perceptive readers of Heidegger’s writings on poetry than the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot, whose own opposition to National Socialism was from the outset forceful and unyielding. This chapter examines Blanchot’s borrowings from Heidegger (as deployed in Blanchot’s account of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé), his rigorous and probing criticisms of Heidegger’s thinking, and contrasts with that of Heidegger Blanchot’s own significantly divergent interpretation of the work of Hölderlin and Rilke.

After a brief overview of Heidegger’s motivations and interest in engaging Greek tragedy understood as a downgoing in the realm of shadows, this chapter addresses three shadow figures that mark Greek tragedy as an experience of the uncanny – Oedipus, Antigone, and Medea. Whereas Heidegger addresses the first two figures at length, there is no mention of Medea in his works. By focusing on the notion of passion for being (originally advanced by Heidegger’s reading of Oedipus), this chapter explores relations of homeliness and unhomeliness, internal and external enmity, family and polis, citizen and foreigner/stranger, love and resistance, trust and betrayal of trust in Heidegger’s reading of tragedy. Ultimately, the chapter points to Medea’s (absent) character as a needed figure to maintain Heidegger’s relation to tragedy open to the possibility of a politically and existentially non-totalizing way of thinking aligned with Heidegger’s initial ambitions when returning to Greek tragedy as a theme for philosophy.

The thinking of place is a crucial preoccupation in Heidegger’s late thinking, especially sustained by an ongoing frequentation of poetry and its posture towards language. The question of Ort is illuminated in Heidegger’s discussion of Georg Trakl, notably in two essays: “Die Sprache,” presented in a first lecture version on October 7, 1950; and “Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht,” first presented on October 4, 1952 under the title “Georg Trakl: Eine Erörterung seines Gedichtes” and published the following year with the same title (Merkur 61, 226–258). In this study I trace a few moments of Heidegger’s meditation on place in these two texts. Issues ranging from estrangement to belonging, from rhythm to the quiet unity preceding all difference, from body to politics, from pain and evil to their transfiguration, are encountered along these paths.

Chapter 4 presents the epoch of technē, which is marked by the play of the fickleness of nature, luck (tuchē) and the fragility of early human stratagems. Technē is both a means of controlling the world, as well as one of violence. Indicated by humble and pre-scientific inventions such as the almanack, they allow little gains to be wrest from an otherwise unforgiving surround by knowing when to sow or harvest in accordance with the almanack’s alignment of experiential, mythical and cosmological clues. The epoch of technē is characterized by an intimacy between humans and their surroundings, the term planning itself finding its roots in the way in which seedlings are pushed into the ground by a farmer’s foot. But there is also violence; both imposed on the human body, whose shape is bent and twisted, ground down and severed by the acts of labour and the growing numbers of devices that extend human reach; as well upon nature, which becomes a place in need of taming and cultivating; cutting, slicing, ploughing, killing and using.

Chapter 6 reaches the end of our foray into Heidegger’s analysis of technology. The chapter examines Sloan’s memoirs of General Motors and identifies a cybernetic fantasy of control in the ghost-written account, laid bare by the increasing inability of technological systems to reveal anything; and where humans are not even the ordinary fabricators anymore, the earth merely becomes a globe, that is gridded and dug over. The invention of the radio that for Heidegger heralded an epoch of the nearness of the distant and the gigantic, soon eclipsed any real nearness to being and to the world (and so also the possibility of pluralistic appearances in spaces such as the polis), was itself soon itself eclipsed by technologies no longer need to bring ‘any-thing’ near, where things and pictures and meaning and desires and ends are giving way to patterns and correlations; the cycles of the Gestell become one continual switching (there ‘is’ nothing as such to extract, unlock, store etc.., save for information).

Chapter 5 details the emergence of machinery and organizational order through industrialization. No longer mere prostheses that allow humans to reach further, lift higher, hit harder or handle materials that would slice or burn skin, machine complexes and industrial installations no longer rely on the human body’s provision of labour force, but can instead conjure immeasurable forces from nature itself. Heidegger’s notion of the Gestell (enframing) characterizes these changes in terms of a gradual displacement of the human. No longer in control (or even in the picture), existence becomes wrapped up in continuously unfolding cycles of unlocking new resources, extracting, storing, distributing and switching over, in which whatever is made is always and only ‘there’ in potential service to what is to come: everything is a means for further progress, and progress is nothing more than the tightening and quickening of cycles of unlocking extracting, storing, distributing and switching. What is lost in this technological condition is the intimacy of the human being with their world; the care and concern that might be had for things understood as things in and of themselves, not merely input or output variables (and this includes fellow humans and the self).

Chapter 3 plays out a philosophical engagement with organization and technology following Martin Heidegger’s well-known association of industrialization with technological enframing in which the question of self-knowing had been thoroughly and perhaps irredeemably concealed. Were it possible to ask such a question, then Heidegger identifies an essential un-at-homeness to the being (Dasein) able to question its condition of being, its ‘thereness’, thereby setting in play an uncanny condition of being able, in principle (qua being human), to dis-conceal one’s essence, and yet continually falling short of ever doing so. It is this uneasy revealing that sets the scene for our investigation of the self in its environment. It is because of his essentialized association of technology, industrialization and the concealing of being that Heidegger equates the possibility of its being unconcealed with a political movement that pushes back at the global order, and restores a more archaic, human-centred version. The profound and horrific irony being that it was in totalitarian national socialism that he found such a movement, an enduring affiliation that has been unmoored in detail in his Black Notebooks.

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

The Conclusion locates Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant among contemporary Anglophone interpretations. The author shows that Heidegger’s interpretation is legible within the broader landscape of Anglophone Kant scholarship by charting its position on Kant’s metaphysics, discursivity, conceptualism, idealism, and historicism. It is concluded that Heidegger offers us a live option for interpreting Kant.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

Chapter 1 argues that Heidegger, like many reconstructive interpreters, takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant’s most plausible line of response to it, consulting the claims in Kant’s text alongside Heidegger’s own beliefs. Because Heidegger seeks to attribute true claims to Kant, his method of interpretation resembles that of Davidson and Gadamer. However, Heidegger improves on their method, because he recognizes the methodological role of disagreement in coming to agree with some author, thereby making room for differences in view between interpreter and text. He argues that we should expect great thinkers to struggle with their subject matter, offering competing strands of argument as they attempt to work out their view. The interpreter, therefore, must isolate the most promising strand of argument, differentiating it from less compelling arguments. Accordingly, Heidegger offers a two-strand interpretation of Kant that differentiates an insightful line of argumentation prioritizing imagination from a less promising line prioritizing understanding. Further, Heidegger offers a theory of error explaining why Kant struggles with his subject matter: Kant retreats to his less compelling argument due to the anxiety he experiences in uncovering the fundamental structure of the human being.

The Introduction provides a basic account of Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant, and the major philosophical themes that feature in his interpretation. These themes include fundamental ontology, human finitude, receptivity, and time. The Introduction also introduces the main sources under consideration: Heidegger’s 1927–1928 lecture series on Kant, and his 1929 Kant book. Finally, an overview of the chapters in the book is provided.

This chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction and Schematism. In Heidegger’s view, these two sections inquire into the source of the categories that human understanding possesses a priori. Heidegger’s reading of both sections exhibits a characteristic move of his interpretive method, where he sees an innovative line of argument prioritizing the imagination emerge from a more traditional setup. The reconstruction also reveals some variety in how one can apply Heidegger’s interpretive method to the different parts of a text. Heidegger suggests that the traditional strand of argument is more prominent in the Metaphysical Deduction; while Kant attempts to derive the categories from the atemporal logic of the understanding, his references to the faculty of imagination at certain critical junctures reveal the breakdown of those attempts. By contrast, the emerging, innovative line of argument is more prominent in the Schematism, which quickly surpasses its traditional framing in order to offer a phenomenologically compelling account of how the categories, as ways of interpreting time (as constant, unidirectional, and so forth), inform our perceptual experience.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant with that of the German Idealists. The German Idealists attempt to unify Kant’s faculty psychology by uncovering a “common root” that is the source of sensibility and understanding, where the common root is a homogenous capacity that nevertheless can generate the other faculties. Insofar as these interpretations rely on telling a causal story, where one faculty causes others to arise, they return to a pre-critical position that Kant would reject; on Kant’s critical philosophy, we are precluded from extending categories like causality to our faculties for cognition, since such faculties do not appear sensibly in our experience. The chapter argues that, while Heidegger also seeks a common root, he avoids this problem by insisting that the common root is heterogenous. His common root – the imagination – is a unification of three basic capacities, rather than a single, deeper capacity that causes the others. Thus, Heidegger does not seek a foundation for metaphysics that is beyond the bounds of what Kant thinks we can know; he works with the cognitive capacities that Kant already identifies, but seeks to explain more fully the structural interrelationships between those capacities.

This chapter is concerned with the moral significance of boredom. Boredom is a problematic mood state that is causally correlated with several troublesome behaviors. While omnipresent in schools, boredom is seldom addressed explicitly. Schools do, however, offer a latent curriculum vis-à-vis boredom. Confronted with boredom, students are conditioned to do one of two things: first, escape boring circumstances, as much as possible, or second, resign themselves to boredom as an inevitable part of life. Both responses are problematic and avoid meaningful reflection on and engagement with this troubling mood state. In the chapter, I explore the nature of boredom (both situational and existential). I then turn to Albert Borgmann’s notion of a focal practice as a promising antidote to boredom. In Borgmann’s phenomenology of focal practices, I find resources for a pedagogy that begins to constructively address the perilous mood state of boredom.

This chapter explores a significant thesis that emerges in Heidegger’s reading of Kant: the linear, unidirectional form of time that Kant outlines is dependent on another model of time – the human temporality comprising three interlaced temporal capacities. The chapter argues that developing this thesis represents the central philosophical payoff of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation; Heidegger goes to Kant to develop his own account of temporal idealism. Heidegger concurs with Kant that the form of time is relative to the human standpoint, but offers a deeper account of where that form of time comes from – i.e., how it derives from the very structure of the human being. While Being and Time attempts to trace the characteristics of linear time back to the human being’s temporality, Heidegger’s account of time in the Kant interpretation elaborates how temporality produces linear time. Specifically, Heidegger outlines the process of self-affection, in which the interaction between the human being’s three temporal capacities actualizes another model of time by interpreting the time that we ourselves are. This argumentative approach foregrounds a gap between the temporality of the human being and the interpretation of time upon which we arrive, suggesting that time could be otherwise interpreted.