Heidegger’s Lectern, 1919

In Safrinski’s Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, a passage from a 1919 lecture “The Idea of Philosophy and the Worldview Problem” is translated into English.

In the passage, Heidegger talks about his lectern. Paraphrasing: we see lecterns, not brown surfaces intersecting at right angles, not even boxes. “There is no founding connection in the pure experience; it is not as if I first saw brown intersecting surfaces, which subsequently present themselves to me as a box, then as a speaker’s desk, and next as an academic speaker’s desk, a lectern, as if, in a matter of speaking, I were sticking the lectern element on a box like a label.”

Moreover, the lectern is seen in the context of an immediate environment. “Living in an environment, it means to me everywhere and always, it is all of this world, it is worlding.”

Heidegger continues: If a Senegalese man who did not have experience with lecterns wandered into the hall, he would not know what to make of it. It would be a wooden box, or “brown intersecting surfaces”.

The suggestion is that worlding is social and bound to language.

GA 56/57, 71–72 translated on page 94 of Safrinski. I want to read the original text.