Thinking About Being in Front of Heidegger’s Hut

If Heidegger had been born not in Meßkirch, adjacent to the Black Forest and near Germany’s borders with Switzerland and France, but in a coastal town—and specifically in a Catholic coastal town—and if, instead of the small mountain hut on the edge of the village of Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, which he had built in 1922; where he wrote the majority of his works; where he occasionally hosted colleagues, friends, and students; but where he mostly stayed either with his wife or alone, took long walks along its trails, and sometimes went skiing—if instead of that, he had built a fisherman’s hut by the sea and reflected on Being there as he did in that little mountain hut, would he have spoken of the same Being?

This question came to mind while reading Journey to Heidegger’s Hut (Heidegger’in Kulübesine Yolculuk), İbrahim Kalın’s book about his 2019 visit to Heidegger’s hut in Todtnauberg—a visit whose introduction, as those interested will already know, was partially published earlier. In particular, it arose while reading the sections that explore the relationship between Being and representation, summarized as follows: “What we describe with words and concepts”—and of course, this includes the word or concept Being—“is not Being itself, but its representation in language and thought” (42).

If Heidegger had been born in a fishing village and had built either a fisherman’s shelter right on the shoreline or a small hut atop a hill overlooking the sea, would the writings he produced about the hut (especially his essay translated into English as Why Do I Stay in the Province?—originally titled Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?, in which he famously refers to the hut as “my world of work”), and would works such as Heidegger’s Hut (Heidegger’in Kulübesi) by Adam Sharr (translated into Turkish by Engin Yurt and published by Dergâh Yayınları in 2016), along with other similar texts listed in that book’s bibliography—would they still be the same? If, likewise, İbrahim Kalın had written a book titled Journey to Heidegger’s Shelter (Heidegger’in Barınağına Yolculuk), would he have talked about the same things?

Both Heidegger and Kalın—as well as others who have written about the hut—are nearly unanimous in their view that Heidegger’s perspective on rural life shaped his thinking about Being. Moreover, as Kalın discusses in detail in a separate section titled Can Philosophy Be Done in the Village? (Köyde felsefe yapılır mı?), Heidegger believed that the “labor of the farmer” and the “labor of the philosopher” arise from the same source. When he writes, “On a harsh winter night, when a fierce snowstorm rages over the hut and blankets everything, that is the perfect time for philosophy,” he refers to both forms of labor: the labor of a farmer’s child risking danger while pulling a sled loaded with heavy logs down a hill; or a shepherd lost in thought while driving a flock of sheep uphill; or a couple preparing countless wooden beams to repair their roof. According to Heidegger, all these—along with the philosopher’s labor—originate from the same “simple and fundamental” principle.

In saying so, Heidegger emphasizes not only rural life but also the peasants themselves, and he insists that, unlike city dwellers who find climbing mountains or wandering in the countryside merely “stimulating,” he regards them through a different lens. However, had Heidegger been born not in a town in the Black Forest but, say, on the Baltic coast—in a (certainly Catholic) fishing village near Königsberg—could he have viewed sailors with the same gaze he cast upon farmers?

These questions—asked in various forms but especially with attention to the context of “representation”—may, at first glance, seem to elicit more or less the same answer. After all, the fisherman too labors: when he takes his boat out to sea, struggles to keep the rudder steady against rough waves, casts his net to catch fish, and then hauls back a net heavier than before, now laden with fish (and perhaps with miscellaneous debris thrown into the sea).

Moreover, if Heidegger’s hut had been located on the shore of a fishing village, his shelter might have been shaken to its foundations not by a snowstorm, but by a harsher storm accompanied by the violent roar of waves crashing onto the roof. In that case, Heidegger might have deemed that stormy moment the perfect time for philosophy.

Another path could be taken. One might, for instance, follow Carl Schmitt in asserting that human beings are land-bound creatures—that life tied to the land (roughly speaking, territoriality) is conducive to drawing boundaries and establishing broad domains within a land-based legal framework, whereas the sea resists such delineation, and must therefore be regarded as open space. Despite this distinction, Schmitt draws attention to the relationship between “land” and “sea” by arguing that the English, once “shepherds of sheep,” transformed into “children of the sea,” thereby displacing land-based law with the logic of the open sea and undermining nomos.

Within this framework, one might also note that Heidegger—although he reflected deeply on “rivers” (especially through poems like Hölderlin’s The Ister)—never truly contemplated the “sea,” except perhaps in a few indirect allusions to the Aegean through Hölderlin. This opens the possibility of situating the issue within a broader contrast between the mentalities of land peoples and those of island peoples—such as the British and, following in their wake, the Americans—who sought to establish a new world order based on the logic of the open sea.

However, even this claim cannot obscure the fact that, during the period when the British were still “shepherds of sheep,” London itself was a “fishing village” (and, according to one account, may one day become a “fishing village” again). As Derrida puts it—when analyzing the term Geschlecht and its derivatives (which encompass meanings such as “sexuality, race, species, gender, sex, lineage, family, generation, or community”) in Address to the German Nation, where Fichte advocates both a deeply rooted nationalism and an equally profound humanistic cosmopolitanism—this leads us to the central question at hand.

That question is not about comparing Heidegger’s “philosophical nationalism” with the “philosophical nationalisms” of others, nor is it about whether every form of nationalism, even when philosophically articulated, inherently involves a need to envision a homeland. Rather, the real question is: How is Being to be thought? And more importantly: How is Being to be represented?

On the other hand, as Hölderlin emphasizes repeatedly in his Hymn “The Ister” (p. 30), Heidegger’s conception of the “river” as a “setting out on a journey” is not due to any poetic or non-poetic association with the image of a journey. The river is a journey in itself. For example, while Christian thought treats the journey as an image of a path extending from birth to death—one confined to a temporary “worldly realm” —the journey that is the river itself determines the path by which human beings come to be at home in this world [place, earth, soil].

“The journey that is the river reigns supreme,” Heidegger writes, “and does so in a very fundamental way, calling for the attainment of the ‘ground’ of being at home in the world [place, earth, soil].”

In this sense, it is not possible to speak of the “journey” of the sea. Unlike the river, the sea is not bound to the land by a tie of belonging; it is entirely open. And this “openness” cannot be conceived as the kind of openness in which Being might be encountered. The openness of the sea is uniform, monotonous.

It is likewise impossible to establish a relationship between the sea and human existence in terms of Being. The river—which is both itself and a journey, much like human existence—finds its openness in the ground over which it flows, if it seeks it, and thereby reaches its destination.

Strangely, in Heidegger, the idea of the “river” ends before the river ever flows into the sea, before the “river” finds union in the “sea.” For this reason, the openness of the “sea” would likely appear uncanny to Heidegger—vast, boundless, horizonless, endless, and monotonous. Heidegger’s well-known concept of the Abgrund—often translated as “abyss”—can easily turn into a maelstrom when placed in the context of the sea.

Keeping these in mind, if we return to the example of the farmer and the fisherman, another problem emerges: in the case of the farmer, it may be possible to consider the “seed” as representing something—for instance, the wheat it will yield, or in the trees surrounding Heidegger’s hut, the “root” as representing a specific tree species (whether pine or fir). Perhaps.

But for the fisherman, such a representational relationship is highly problematic. What, for example, represents the fisherman’s primary material, or the “root” of the sea around him? A fisherman is someone who catches fish, and his “labor” is directed toward fishing. To do this, he casts a net into the sea and hauls fish back into the boat using the same net. Simply put, he pulls in more than he casts into the sea.

Neither the net he casts nor the fish he retrieves from the sea contains any equivalent “seed” or “root” (or, let’s say, “essence”). He merely transfers fish (or, say, an old shoe discarded into the sea) into his boat via the net he casts. And this is precisely why the concept of “representation” is problematic from the fisherman’s perspective: in each transfer, you always retrieve more than you cast.

So how, then, would a fisherman conceive of Being? Since he cannot think of it by seeking the essence in the manifestation of what is rooted in a “seed” or “root,” he would probably conceive of it through the act of transfer itself—via the net, whether it brings in fish or an old shoe. Probably. Not as something essential, but as something conveyed. In short, no representational relationship can be established between the net cast into the sea and the net pulled back out.

Therefore, had Heidegger been born in a fishing village, he might still have described his shelter as his “world of work.” However, in describing the experience of seclusion lived in that hut, he would not have been able to say—unlike the kind of solitude one may experience in the city—that “seclusion, experienced in a cabin on a mountaintop, does not isolate us but rather has its own unique and essential power: to project our entire existence into the vast proximity of the peace of all things” (Wesen; presence).

He would not have been able to make the analogy he expresses in the same essay: “To bring something into the logic of language is like the resistance of majestic fir trees to the storm.” For fir trees do not grow in the sea or on the shoreline.

A fishing line cast into the sea might pull up an old boot tossed in long ago, perhaps a bottle containing a message slipped in by a dreamy lover or a castaway stranded on an island, or more likely today, a plastic bag, a soda can, or other kinds of waste. But the sea swallows everything—even the Titanic. Moreover, it even transforms the waters of the river that flows into it into itself.

With these reflections in mind, when one turns to İbrahim Kalın’s Journey to Heidegger’s Hut (Heidegger’in Kulübesine Yolculuk), the meaning behind the somewhat mischievous move of transforming Heidegger’s hut into a fisherman’s shelter—through the figures of the farmer and the fisherman—becomes clearer.

First and foremost, such a mischievous approach to Heidegger does not imply distancing him from his own thinking. When I was still an undergraduate student—in the second semester of the 1992/1993 academic year—I took a philosophy course in which we read Heidegger’s Being and Time with Charles P. Bigger. Initially a faithful historian of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, Bigger, much like in Tarancı’s poem, changed paths “halfway through the road” and turned toward continental philosophy, eventually blending both traditions. He would often regard many of Heidegger’s concepts and sentences with a mischievous eye—even reading a sentence and then chuckling quietly to himself.

At first, this attitude struck me as strange, but I later came to understand that this manner (if I may call it “impishness”) did not stem from mischief for its own sake; rather, it was an effort to connect with whatever lay behind those concepts or sentences by considering them together with the aspects that exceeded their surface meanings.

Of course, the value of such closeness—whether positive or negative—depends on the attitude of the one who engages in mischief. Still, one might say this: even in philosophical thought—indeed, especially in philosophical thought—mischief can be more helpful in grasping the scope of a concept or proposition than simply submitting to its authority.

Therefore, transforming Heidegger’s mountaintop hut in the Black Forest into a fisherman’s shelter by the sea cannot be dismissed as a mere thought experiment, nor as a polemical reframing of the issue by dragging it into an eccentric context. Heidegger was not a man of the sea, and this fact shaped his thinking about Being—and even molded the sentences he used to express that thought.

(I should note here that what I’m discussing differs from Luce Irigaray’s psychoanalytic reading in Nietzsche’s Lover of the Sea, in which she interprets Nietzsche—one of the thinkers Heidegger engaged with most intensely—as someone who feared “water” precisely because it is fluid and feminine. I trust this distinction will become clear later in the essay.)

This relationship between Heidegger and the sea can offer an entry point for evaluating İbrahim Kalın’s book Journey to Heidegger’s Hut (Heidegger’in Kulübesine Yolculuk). If we proceed from the assumption that Heidegger’s thinking on Being would have differed—at least in terms of “representation”—had he written his works not in a mountain hut but in a shelter on the coast of a fishing village, then one might imagine the book not as Journey to Heidegger’s Hut, but rather as Journey to Heidegger’s Shelter (Heidegger’in Barınağına Yolculuk).

Perhaps in that case, certain parts of the book—such as the information provided about the hut or the autobiographical sections describing the journey—would have been different. But still, Kalın would have said more or less the same things about Being. And it is precisely this feature that makes Journey to Heidegger’s Hut such an interesting book.

To elaborate on this point, we might need to add a third hut to the fisherman’s shelter we’ve already placed beside Heidegger’s mountain hut. If, in his book Journey to Heidegger’s Hut (Heidegger’in Kulübesine Yolculuk), İbrahim Kalın had approached the hut Heidegger visited on the edge of the village of Todtnauberg from a hut located somewhere in the highlands of Erzurum—one next to a spring where he might also sing folk songs like the magnificent one that begins, “Hani yaylam, hani senin ezelin” (“Where is the plateau, where is your eternity?”)—then perhaps we would be having a different conversation entirely.

However, Kalın does not recount his visit to Heidegger’s hut—which he presents in detail, accompanied by various photographs—simply as a reflection on Heidegger’s concept of Being. Of course, when the place being visited is Heidegger’s hut, his notion of Being may serve as a starting point—or rather, as an occasion. It must be emphasized: Heidegger’s concept of Being is not the origin point, but rather a means of thinking about Being.

As Kalın puts it: “We need to be neighbors to Being in order to think, and we need to think in order to be neighbors to Being.” Here, thinking arises not as a mental activity per se, but as the result of the idea that an experience lived in the countryside, in the midst of a storm, or under harsh natural conditions, may constitute the perfect moment for philosophy.

In this sense, being adjacent to Being—in the sense of attaining its openness—and thinking about Being—in the sense of becoming attuned to it—mutually complete one another. Still, because these complementary acts contain a certain circularity, Kalın regards the question of “where to begin” as important, but not insurmountable. To activate this circularity, he suggests, it is enough to “enter the circle from somewhere” (p. 39).

This is precisely why Journey to Heidegger’s Hut does not imagine a third hut in the Erzurum highlands but instead enters Heidegger’s concept of Being “from somewhere” in order to reflect directly on Being itself. This, in turn, means stepping beyond the Heideggerian framework. Heidegger and his hut become a kind of “residence” visited not to memorialize his life or philosophy, but to contemplate the general concept of Being—and to observe how, in Heidegger’s thought, the hut and its surroundings offer or present an “openness” toward Being.

However, this “residence” does not place Heidegger “in a harsh relationship with existence,” as Sharr claims in Heidegger’s Hut (p. 109). The hut is not Heidegger’s monastery. Nor is it the tomb of a saint or a holy figure. For this reason, Kalın’s departure from Heidegger’s specific conception of Being is meaningful.

On the one hand, it prevents Kalın from becoming a representative who contemplates Heidegger from Türkiye and, by doing so, acts as Heidegger’s agent in Türkiye. On the other hand, it opens the door to the question: What other ways are there to think about and observe Being?

To think about Heidegger’s hut not by evaluating “only its importance in Heidegger’s life and thought,” but rather by investigating “its place within the great circle of Being” is, in itself, to “take a step toward the realm of being, meaning, and truth” (p. 52).

That is why the book is titled Journey (Yolculuk); it is a journey that thinks through the concept of Being by way of Heidegger. It is a journey of a different kind than the one Heidegger described as a “river.”

However, when we consider the consequences of using Heidegger and his hut as a means to think about and observe Being, a key issue emerges within the Heideggerian context: once the “truth of Being” is defined as “too vast, deep, dynamic, fluid, and full of vitality to fit into fixed molds” (p. 41), and when such a definition begins to raise questions about its relationship with the concept of Being in Western thought, two possibilities arise.

The first is the risk of falling into a form of traditionalization, which Derrida explores in the opening of his seminar on “philosophical nationalisms,” titled Onto-theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis). This traditionalization does not consist solely in attributing well-established and deep-rooted national philosophical traditions to themselves—such as “British analytic philosophy,” “German romantic philosophy,” or “French post-structuralism.”

Rather, it also includes examples like the claim in Richard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work that there exists a “hidden” relationship between Heidegger’s thought and Asian philosophy—an idea not mentioned by Derrida in that particular text. Or like Marlène Zarader’s The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, which proposes an as-yet-unexamined relationship of “indebtedness” between Heidegger’s thought and the Hebrew tradition. Or the claim that Derrida himself dwells on most closely: the connection drawn between “post-structuralism” or “deconstruction” and “Zen thought.”

All of these examples suggest that there are thinkers who, in every national context, seek to revive the philosophical fabric of their homeland, establish an authentic tradition, and reexamine the corpus and national heritage.

However, when we affirm that Kalın is not speaking from a hypothetical hut on a plateau in Palandöken, Erzurum, we are also stating that this possibility does not apply to him. Kalın does not attempt to revive, invent, or produce an indigenous (yerli) concept of Being through Heidegger.

When we consider the consequences of using Heidegger and his hut as a means to think about and observe Being—and when we define the “truth of Being” as “too vast, expansive, deep, dynamic, fluid, and full of vitality to fit into fixed molds”—a second possibility emerges within the Heideggerian context. This is the very possibility that, at the beginning of this essay, was explored somewhat mischievously through the suggestion of an alternative hut for Heidegger: not on a mountaintop, but rather a fisherman’s hut on the seashore.

Kalın, who visits Heidegger and his hut as a kind of occasion to free them from the representational entanglement in which they are immersed, ends up defining Being in terms so vast, expansive, deep, dynamic, fluid, and alive that his thinking ends up projecting Heidegger—whose thought never quite manages to cross the “river,” let alone bring it to the sea—not merely into a fisherman’s shelter by the shore, but into the very heart of a “shoreless ocean.”

Whether Heidegger could withstand such a test remains a mystery. However, as we will consider in the next essay—while reflecting on the idea of counting prayer beads in front of Heidegger’s hut—it is indeed possible to make certain observations on the matter.