Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World [Paperback]

Jeff Malpas (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 026263368X | ISBN-13: 978-0262633680 | Publication Date: August 29, 2008

This groundbreaking inquiry into the centrality of place in Martin Heidegger's thinking offers not only an illuminating reading of Heidegger's thought but a detailed investigation into the way in which the concept of place relates to core philosophical issues. In Heidegger's Topology, Jeff Malpas argues that an engagement with place, explicit in Heidegger's later work, informs Heidegger's thought as a whole. What guides Heidegger's thinking, Malpas writes, is a conception of philosophy's starting point: our finding ourselves already "there," situated in the world, in "place." Heidegger's concepts of being and place, he argues, are inextricably bound together.Malpas follows the development of Heidegger's topology through three stages: the early period of the 1910s and 1920s, through Being and Time, centered on the "meaning of being"; the middle period of the 1930s into the 1940s, centered on the "truth of being"; and the late period from the mid-1940s on, when the "place of being" comes to the fore. (Malpas also challenges the widely repeated arguments that link Heidegger's notions of place and belonging to his entanglement with Nazism.) The significance of Heidegger as a thinker of place, Malpas claims, lies not only in Heidegger's own investigations but also in the way that spatial and topographic thinking has flowed from Heidegger's work into that of other key thinkers of the past 60 years.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In Heidegger's Topology, Malpas argues convincingly that, throughout Heidegger's fifty-three-year philosophical career, his central focus was realizing more and more profoundly that human being is always and already human being situated in place. He effectively demonstrates how this 'emplacement' became, for Heidegger, the central answer to the question of how anything, including human being, can exist and be the thing it is. In carefully explicating the shifting conceptual meaning of place and emplacement in Heidegger's writings, Malpas provides an important philosophical addition to the growing body of academic and applied research in 'place studies.'"--David Seamon, Department of Architecture, Kansas State University, and editor, *Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology*

"Malpas's work opens up new ways to read Heidegger (considered for too long the philosopher of time) by underscoring the centrality of place and its many implications for understanding our world, our environment, and ourselves." John Panteleimon Manoussakis Journal of the History of Philosophy

"What marks the possibility of a genuine philosophical adventure is when a body of work is illuminated in ways that are not simply original but also generative of new work. Such would be a description of Malpas' approach to Heidegger. Putting to one side the usual pieties that surround Heidegger's work and giving priority to topology and place, Malpas will make any reader of Heidegger think again. What emerges is a Heidegger whose work forms an integral part of a philosophical geography. As such, terms such as 'life', 'mortality' and the 'environment'--words with a real exigency--come to acquire genuine philosophical force. This is a book that combines a passionate commitment to scholarship with an insistence on demonstrating the relevance of philosophy in a dramatically new way."--Andrew Benjamin, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology, Sydney

About the Author

Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topology. He is a coeditor of Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (MIT Press, 2002) and two volumes of essays honoring Hubert L. Dreyfus, Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity and Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2000).

Product Details

• Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (August 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026263368X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262633680
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Place as a silver thread through Heidegger, April 9, 2009

By 

Marcos Guillermo Guntin (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (Paperback)

We may or may not agree in principle, but Malpas' take on the vast material he takes into consideration (all three main periods of the Heideggerian "Denkweg") is at least a unique contrasting point for anyone either generally or specifically interested in the subject.

Perhaps the book's most challenging assertion at first sight is that of the relative relegation to which the subject of time, and hence Being and Time itself as a major work by Heidegger, is to be confined from a more synoptic standpoint, in favor of other subjects such as truth, event, coming to presence and, naturally, place.

The stress of Malpas' interpretation falls on later works such as The Contributions to Philosophy, which would thus be new contestants for the status of Hauptwerk. As a consequence of this stress comes another of the major challenges faced by this book: that of reinstating the late Heidegger to philosophical respectability, a status that had been arguably out of the question, to the very least, among the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical community. In attempting this, Malpas shows no shyness to appeal to authors such as Davidson and Wittgenstein, or to cognitive science.

Finally, it should be said that "Heidegger's Topology", as a major contemporary interpretation of Heidegger's work, can be paired to that of Herman Philipse. Like Philipse's, it covers most of Heidegger's works available to the public, putting forward broad organizing criteria which excede the merely exegetic, without neglecting a detailed work on source text. Also like Philpse's, it is a book written by someone with a clear command of both main Western philosophical traditions of the XX century. Unlike Philipse's, however, its theses cannot be made boil down to an overtly unilateral stance that favors one tradition over the other. By doing so, it succeeds in constituting a veritable work in much-awaited crossover philosophy.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Being" is a revealing way of seeing; it is world disclosive, January 7, 2009

By 

Michael A Neulander "Political Philosophy" (VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World (Paperback)

I read this book for a graduate seminar on philosophy. Jeff Malpas' book helps to illuminate one of the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time," which deconstructs phenomenology. Heidegger's kind of phenomenology has to do with the idea of phenomenon, which means something that appears and shows itself. His criticism of traditional philosophy is that it gets started with categories, concepts, and notions, departing from the way human comprehension of this world first shows itself. This is Aristotelian and Aristotle is an enormous influence on Heidegger.

Yet, there is something very radical going on here, and that is the idea of "being" is connected to meaning and negativity. In the history of philosophy, being has a positive concept, something that "is" thus, the opposite of being is none being. Heidegger wants to show how the meaning of being is distorted by this understanding of being as a purely positive concept, as a "thing" a full present entity. For Example, he also very much critiques in modern art, the modern conception of objectivity, the world is transformed into an object independent of art, of its significance, its meaning, or interest in it. This was due in large part because of modern science, and its strong sense of objectification converting nature into a set of mere objects, time, and space that are measurable and analyzable through scientific means. Meaning, importance, and significance for Heidegger equals value; science and nature have none of this as pure objects. Therefore, anything of meaning, and of significance would be transferred into the subject it would be simply the human estimation, nature itself has no meaning or significance in that respect.

Heidegger critiques this scientific model. As he says in his phenomenology, "Well how is it that human existence first understands itself? Here he is talking about things that are very ordinary and complex. We are in a world that has significance, it is meaningful to us, it matters to us, it fits into our interests in such a way that we are absorbed into its significance. So, when we come across the world, first and foremost it is not a mere object that is standing apart from us or our mind, but rather it has significant elements of our environment that fit into our lives. Some things are significant, or they are useful, or dangerous, or satisfying, etc. What Heidegger wants to say in his phenomenology is we have to pay attention to this way of being. Therefore, first and foremost he says "being" matters, it matters to us. "Being" is a significance, it is not just a bare object or a bare fact. Heidegger doesn't accept this idea of subject on one side and object on the other side, that means that when humans have their understanding of the world, it is not just a human projection, it is not just a human construction. It is a revealing way of seeing; it is world disclosive. The meaning of the world wouldn't happen without us, because we are the ones that find it meaningful. Therefore, it is most important to understand that for Heidegger there is no object subject distinction. The term he uses to illustrate his idea is "Dasien" which means "human existence," Heidegger chooses it because he doesn't want to deal with the subject, or mind or consciousness, he wants to use a word that does not subjectivefy things. He uses "Dasien" as "humans being there" in this world and not just staying apart from it.

Humans are a being in the world, a term he uses is, "we dwell" in the world, we don't come across it as some bare thing in the world we "dwell" in it. Therefore, "meaningfulness" is a primary notion of being. Secondly, the meaning of "being" is connected with the notion of negativity. This is the notion of "being" moving toward death, and anxiety. Thus, the way that humans understand being is in part because of opposite of non-being and death is a perfect example of that. Humans are distinct because we understand that we are mortal, that we die. We are aware of death even when we are not in danger, which means we understand being and our world. Heidegger made a lot out of the fact that the Greeks understood this, that they were mortals, and that was no accident he thought. That death is a primary aspect of what it means to be human. If you are aware of death as he says, then you can be aware of the meaning of life. The meaning of life comes to us because we understand that we are finite, that we are mortal and not in control.

Another way to understand Heidegger is a wonderful analysis of the idea that the word "being" has become a noun in philosophy, like first things of beings, or things that are. Yet Heidegger says in the Greek language and other western languages this idea of "being" grammatically in language is derived from a verb, the primary verb "to be." Moreover, as a verb it is tensed which means it has to do with time. All verbs are tensed, even Aristotle said, "That is the difference between a verb and a noun." The difference between a verb and a noun, a verb is something that has to do with time, not just action, but time. That is why all verbs are tensed as future, and past. The very fact that time is another perfect indication of negativity, because time is ever changing, ever moving, and when we are in the present, the past is time of negativity it is no longer. When we are in the present, the future is kind of negative it is not yet. Yet we understand these negatives as meaningful, that is why we can get upset about the past that it is not happening anymore, and why we can become excited about the future even though it hasn't happened yet, they have meaning to us.

Another important feature of Heidegger's book is where he takes on the notion of skepticism. Skepticism is a classic problem in philosophy, it is really fostered by Descartes and Hume, and it has to do with the subject/object division. Skeptics argue that the mind is on one side of the fence, the outside world is on the other side, and the mind is something that comes across the world and just processes it, according to its categories of thinking, this is a very common modern construction of skepticism. If this skeptical construct were true, then it is very possible for someone to ask the question; "well how do we know that our minds that are on this side of the fence can ever really know that it is accurately talking about what is on the other side of the fence? If it is separated like this, how can we be sure that what we think about is actually the case? Heidegger is not talking here about ordinary skepticism, like wonder or "I am not sure" kind of skepticism; but what Heidegger argues against is the kind of radical skepticism, which asks, can we be sure of any of our knowledge. This idea plays on two objects, the subject object divide if we are on this side of the subject how can we ever know we are accurately talking about something. Secondly, is the certainty because the skeptic is someone who says well, "I really want to find with 100% certainty, and if I can find any reason for doubt then I am not going to commit. Heidegger says this is a classic philosophical problem that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Because, no existing human self could ever radically call into question its environment and this world. It doesn't make any sense. You can call into question this or that aspect of it, but never the whole thing and never to say; "well it's possible that what humans say about the world may not have anything to do with the world." Even Descartes and Hume knew this was perverse, but they said this is what philosophy has to do. Radical skepticism is perverse to Heidegger. Skeptics like Descartes and Hume if right why are they writing to an audience. The very practice of skepticism undermines the idea of skepticism. Heidegger says, "Well if our practices betray the project of skepticism, which even Hume admits, he says I would go mad." You can't live as a radical skeptic. This skepticism can apply to things like morals and beauty values and artistic things, because they don't satisfy strict standards of knowledge and certainty.

To reiterate, it is important to know that Heidegger primarily wants to say that the meaning of being, is something that humans are involved with in a significant meaningful way, and it can't be either subjective or objective, those two ideas he says are polarizations that both account for how the world matters to us. The fact that it matters to us means it can't be a pure objective thing. Secondly, the fact that what matters to us is our world not just our opinions and our inner dispositions mean it can't be just a subjective thing. We are absorbed in the world; we are caught up in it. Heidegger's phenomenology wants to give voice to these notions rather than start with the modern categories of subjectivity and objectivity.

I recommend this work for anyone interested in philosophy, epistemology, and ontology.