The term die Kehre – “the turn” – has an over-determined and complex history in Heidegger's work and has led to major misunderstandings of his project. As Heidegger clearly says in Contributions to Philosophy (GA 65 = CP), the turn is simply the bond between Dasein and Sein. Therefore, the turn in its basic and proper sense is the central topic of Heidegger's thought. It is not, as many think, the 1930s shift in Heidegger's approach to his central topic. The Kehre in its basic and proper sense never “took place”, least of all in Heidegger's thinking.

I shall distinguish three meanings of “the turn”: (i) the basic and proper sense – the bond between Dasein and Sein; (ii) the 1930s shift in how Heidegger treated that bond; and (iii) the act of resolve as a transformation in one's relation to that bond.

Because the turn is Heidegger's central topic, explaining it entails reviewing the core of Heidegger's thought. This chapter will attempt to do that within a new key, one that translates Heidegger's technical terms out of an ontological and into a phenomenological register. That re-translation is the necessary prologue to understanding what the Kehre is and is not.

Some conventions: in referring to “the turn” (not “the turning”!) in this chapter, I shall favour the German word Kehre, which Heidegger interprets as the “reciprocity” (Gegenschwung) of Dasein's need of Sein and Sein's need of Dasein.

THE END OF A CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHER

It was just before Christmas Eve - Monday, December 23, 1918 - when the young Mrs. Heidegger, eight months pregnant, decided to brave Freiburg's bitterly cold weather, travel across town, and break the bad news to Father Krebs. Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of her husband, the philosophy lecturer Martin Heidegger. In fact, Krebs had officiated at the Heideggers' Catholic wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on March 21, 1917.

At the time of that wedding, Father Krebs had already been skeptical. It was a confessionally “mixed” marriage - Elfride Petri was a Lutheran, Martin Heidegger a Catholic - and even though the bride had solemnly declared her intention to convert to Catholicism and raise her children in the Roman faith, Father Krebs had had his doubts. Therefore, he was not entirely surprised when, a year and a half later, the 24-year-old mother-to-be sat across from him in his office and poured out her feelings:

Karl Rahner's accomplishment consisted in putting Catholic philosophy and theology on a transcendental footing. The undertaking spanned some fifty years, from his matriculation in philosophy at Freiburg University in 1934 to his death at Innsbruck in 1984. From beginning to end, the driving force behind the project was the seriousness with which Rahner regarded the transcendental turn in modern philosophy.

THE PROGRAM

Rahner’s program unfolded in two stages, the first philosophical and the second theological. (Only the former is the focus of this essay.) The first stage occupied him from 1934 to about 1941 and found expression in two works, Geist in Welt (1939) and Hürer des Wortes (1941). The first of those two texts marshaled central elements of the work of Kant, Rousselot, Mare´chal, and Heidegger for the goal of reformulating Thomism – its epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and metaphysics – as transcendental philosophy. In the second stage, which occupied him from the 1940s onward, Rahner used the transcendental Thomism of the first stage as the basis for rewriting Catholic doctrine as transcendental theology.

[109] The knowledge that comes from the sciences usually is expressed in propositions and is laid before us in the form of conclusions that we can grasp and put to use. But the “doctrine” of a thinker is that which, within what is said, remains unsaid, that to which we are exposed so that we might expend ourselves on it.

In order to experience and to know for the future what a thinker left unsaid, whatever that might be, we have to consider what he said. To properly satisfy this demand would entail examining all of Plato's “dialogues” in their interrelationship. Since this is impossible, we must let a different path guide us to the unsaid in Plato's thinking.

What remains unsaid in Plato's thinking is a change in what determines the essence of truth. The fact that this change does take place, what it consists in, and what gets grounded through this transformation of the essence of truth – all of that can be clarified by an interpretation of the “allegory of the cave.”

The “allegory of the cave” is presented at the beginning of the seventh book of the “dialogue” on the essence of the πόλιζ (Republic, VII, 514 a2 to 517 a7). The “allegory” tells a story. The tale unfolds in the conversation between Socrates and Glaucon. Socrates presents the story, Glaucon shows his awakening astonishment.

THE END OF A CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHER

It was just before Christinas Eve - Monday, December 23, 1918 - when the young Mrs. Heidegger, eight months pregnant, decided to brave Freiburg's bitterly cold weather, travel across town, and break the bad news to Father Krebs. Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of her husband, the philosophy lecturer Martin Heidegger. In fact, Krebs had officiated at the Heideggers' Catholic wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on March 21, 1917.

At the time of that wedding Father Krebs had already been skeptical. It was a confessionally “mixed” marriage - Elfride Petri was a Lutheran, Martin Heidegger a Catholic - and even though the bride had solemnly declared her intention to convert to Catholicism and raise her children in the Roman faith, Father Krebs had had his doubts. Therefore, he was not entirely surprised when, a year and a half later, the 24-year-old mother-to-be sat across from him in his office and poured out her feelings: