research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097 Research

in
Phenomenology

brill.com/rp

Heideggers Breakdown: Health and Healing Under

the Care of Dr. V.E. von Gebsattel

Andrew J. Mitchell
Emory University
[email protected]

Abstract

In 1946 Heidegger suffered a mental breakdown and received treatment by Dr. Viktor
Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel. I explore the themes of health and help in Heideggers
work before and after his treatment. I begin with Heideggers views on health while
Rector in 193334 (1) and his abandonment of these views by wars end (2). A short
while later, Heideggers breakdown occurs and the treatment under Gebsattel
begins (3). Soon after his treatment, Heidegger lauds what he terms a broken-down
thinking, and I examine his contribution to a 1958 Festschrift for Gebsattel to better
articulate such a thinking (4). Lastly, I take up Heideggers remarks on the role of the
medical profession in a technological age from a 1962 speech (5). In presenting this
material, I hope to shed new light on a little known aspect of Heideggers career and
biography and to situate philosophically his relationship with Dr. Gebsattel.

Keywords

mental health Heidegger Gebsattel medicine healing psychiatry

Philosophizing about a breakdown is separated by a chasm from a
broken-down thinking. If this should fortunately come to a person, what
would occur is no misfortune. To him would come the sole gift that could
come to thinking from being.
Letter on Humanism (1946)

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 6|doi 10.1163/15691640-12341329
Heidegger s Breakdown 71

At the end of the Second World War, Heidegger was brought before a commis-
sion of university professors assembled by the French authorities then occu-
pying Germany for the purpose of establishing political accountability during
the war. This de-nazification committee would make recommendations to the
authorities for the punitive treatment, if any, of the German faculty brought
under review. This was in the midst of the Nuremberg trials, which ran from
November 1945 to October 1946 and the French military government was capable
of quite drastic measures in some instances. Indeed, Hugo Ott reports that prior
to Heideggers case the committee had even ordered university professors to be
detained under concentration camp conditions.1 The hyperbole of this claim
aside, Heideggers appearance before the committee in July of 1946 was certainly
a cause for concern. Heidegger was the rector of Freiburg University during the
volatile years of 19331934, a position he greeted enthusiastically as part of a spir-
itual mission for Germany. Along with the stresses of this trial, we should also
recall that Heidegger had only recently (end of November, 1944) had his life in
danger as a result of Hitlers lifting the restrictions for military enlistment that
placed a man of Heideggers age, fifty-six, on the battle lines of the Volkssturm
battalion.2 Fortunately for him, the troops averted battle and were turned back
before any engagement with the enemy could take place.3 Even without fighting,
the war and its aftermath took their toll on Heidegger and shortly after meeting
with the de-nazification committee Heidegger suffered a nervous breakdown.
This breakdown brings Heidegger into contact with Dr. Viktor Emil Freiherr
von Gebsattel (18831976), the Catholic, existentialist, anthropological psy-
choanalyst. And while that may seem an assemblage of all of Heideggers
btes noires in one, it is under Gebsattels care that Heidegger recovers from
his breakdown and begins a new phase of his career.4 Heideggers later work

1 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books,
1993), 322.
2 A letter to Elfride from two days after enlistment (11/25/44), however, shows him completely
unperturbed, requesting that she send a pair of slippers and some shoe cream. Mein liebes
Seelchen! Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride. 19151970, ed. Gertrud Heidegger
(Munich: Deutsche Verlags, 2005), 224. English translation: Letters to His Wife: 19151970, trans.
R.D.V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 179 (hereafter cited as MLS with German/
English pagination).
3 See Ott, Martin Heidegger, 298; Rdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil,
trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 33233.
4 It was also Gebsattels medical attestation that Heidegger cannot keep up with the full scope
of responsibilities of an ordinarius professor for health reasons which supported his petition
for a full pension in 1950. Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges,
ed. Hermann Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe vol. 16 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 442
(hereafter cited as GA 16). On Heideggers pension, see GA 16: 444, 46061.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

72 Mitchell

stems from this recovery, with his first publication after the war, the Letter on
Humanism, following shortly thereafter. Heideggers breakdown thus serves
as an occasion for us to reflect on the meaning of mental health for Heidegger,
a topic not normally associated with the philosopher, as well as that of medi-
cine more generally. Heideggers relation with Gebsattel is at the center of
these concerns and it forms the focus of what follows. To appreciate its impor-
tance, we shall approach it in light of Heideggers earlier views on health and
healing, which change drastically between the rise of National Socialism in
1933 and its end in 1945. Nevertheless, it is only in the encounter with Gebsattel
that Heidegger is able to put into practice the lessons of the war, particularly
those regarding what it means to heal and what it means to need help.
I begin with Heideggers views on health while Rector of Freiburg University
in 1933 and 1934, as well as his own move away from these views by wars
end, where a new conception of healing emerges. It is shortly after this that
Heideggers breakdown occurs and his treatment by Gebsattel begins. His
next publication mentions the good fortune of a broken-down or foun-
dering (scheiternden) thinking, but his private account of the breakdown
around this time still shows a reluctance to admit any vulnerability. In the
years that follow, however, that reluctance gives way, at least at a thematic
level, to Heideggers increasing awareness of the human need for help and out-
side assistance. As the issue of thinking comes to occupy him more and more
throughout the 1950s, he likewise comes to articulate a conception of thinking
that foregoes self-possession and self-assurance for an acknowledgement of
ineradicable darkness. Not coincidentally, these ideas are first published in
a 1958 Festschrift for none other than Gebsattel himself, under the title Basic
Principles of Thinking. I examine this essay in the hopes of developing a better
sense of what a broken-down and foundering thinking might entail. Lastly,
I conclude with a brief look at Heideggers remarks on the role of the medi-
cal profession in a technological age from his 1962 speech at the wedding of
his friend Theophil Reess son, Peter Rees, a radiologist. Here again Heidegger
affirms the importance of help. In presenting this material, I hope to shed new
light on a little known aspect of Heideggers career as well as his biography and
to situate his relationship with Dr. Gebsattel in the context of his thinking both
before and after the war and his ensuing treatment under him.

1 The Health of a People

Health first emerges as a repeated concern in Heideggers writings around

the time of his rectorate. In these years, he attributes prime importance

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 73

to the role and mission of the German people (Volk), with their fitness for
that mission the determining factor in his assessment of their health. The
crucial speech in this context is delivered in August 1933 on the occasion of
the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute for Pathological Anatomy at Freiburg
University. Here Heidegger voices his conception of health directly to the
medical profession.
Medicine, too, is a speculative science, the transcript of Heideggers
speech begins (GA 16: 150). Speculative sciences are those that are grounded
on ultimate principles and fundamental concepts that serve to stake out the
essence of the region of research in question. Such principles and concepts
can only be won through a final philosophical rumination on the whole of the
regions of science and their connection with the entirety [Allheit] of beings
(GA 16: 150). Through such a process, the region of a speculative science is
staked out. The speculative sciences are thus regional sciences, dealing with
particular sets of beings as determined by their fundamental concepts. But
these fundamental concepts can only be achieved by a thinking that would
locate them within a conception of beings as a whole. In short, the fundamen-
tal concepts of a speculative science are ontological.
In the case of medical science, then, the essence of the region of its
research is health. Medicine deals with beings determined in terms of health.
Accordingly, what medicine understands as sickness entirely depends on
what it conceives beforehand to be the essence of health (GA 16: 150). But in
keeping with the character of this regional ontology, healthy beings are only
what they are in relation to beings as a whole. And what Heidegger seems to
claims to these doctors is that the general determination and status of beings
as a whole is variable, though in specific ways: what is decisive and surprising
is that the essence of health is by no means defined with the same meaning
at all times and for all people (GA 16: 150, emphasis modified). Health varies
historically and health varies between peoples. The health of all peoples is
consequently not the same. To illustrate this, Heidegger contrasts the Greek,
Christian, and early modern senses of health. For the Greeks, health meant
being prepared and strong enough for action in the state. Without this, one was
not even sick, properly understood. The doctor would not go to whomever
could no longer satisfy the conditions of this activity, even in cases of sick-
ness (GA 16: 150). For Christians, given their conception of the world as den
of sin and iniquity, it was healthy to experience an excess of suffering and
worldly troubles. For Christians, then, earthly fortune and well-being, taken
for itself, is what is sick and unhealthy (GA 16: 151). And turning to the early
modern bourgeois world, health means the undisturbed placidity of physi-
cal well-being (GA 16: 151). Such a conception thus led to long periods where

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

74 Mitchell

medicine and the doctors art have been denigrated to mere techniques for the
setting aside and alleviating of conditions of sickness (GA 16: 151).
What this brief history of health shows is not simply that there have been
changes in the definition of health over time, but that the notion of health
has been different for different peoples. Indeed, for Heidegger part of what
makes a people a people, part of what results from a group taking the form
of a people, is that peoples determination and imposition of its own sense of
health: A people gives itself and its age the law for what counts as healthy and
sick, each people according to the inner greatness and breadth of its Dasein
(GA 16: 151). What then of the Germans today?
The talk now shifts to the contemporary situation of 1933 and the Germans
place within it. The National Socialist revolution has helped make the Germans
a people: The German people is now in the process of again finding its own
essence and of making itself worthy for its great destiny. Adolf Hitler, our great
leader and chancellor, has produced a new state through the National Socialist
revolution, by means of which the people should again secure a persistence
and steadiness of its history (GA 16: 151). The National Socialist state will take
its place alongside the Greek, the Christian, and the modern state as one of
the forms of a people that forged for itself its own conception of health. The
implication is clear, Hitler has created a new state, he will define a new health.
It is grounded in the persistence and steadiness of the people in the face of
overwhelming force.
In the months ahead, Heidegger goes some way towards sketching out the
nature of this health. The health of a people is tied to what he calls the life
urge or Lebensdrang, something shared among all living beings. A November
1934 lecture on The Contemporary Situation and the Future Task of German
Philosophy addresses the human privilege over against plants and animals.
These latter, Heidegger says, are darkly compelled and locked within their
surroundings, adding, to be sure, within this captivated inhibition [benomm-
enen Befangenheit] they each have their way of going about, of satisfying their
life urge [Lebensdranges], but they never encounter beings as beings (GA 16:
329). This life urge that even plants and animals seek to satisfy is nothing for-
eign to the human. On the contrary, it is operative in the highest exemplars of
the Volk, the sacrifices of war.
In a speech delivered in May 1934 at the 25 year reunion of his high school
graduation (25 Years After Our Commencement), Heidegger remarks on
the number of his classmates who died in the First World War, calling their
death the most beautiful death: The most beautiful deathbecause they
did not die it through a decline, falling away, or crumbling of the life urge

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 75

[Lebensdranges] [...] rather because this dying was a lavishing of oneself

[Sichverschwenden] from out of a still undeveloped fullness of the life forces
of youth (GA 16: 279). The life urge did not dissipate in these victims, but
was incalculably squandered, given up by them in the name of life itself. The
readiness to follow this life urge even into sacrifice if necessary designates the
health of a people.
The same reunion speech recalling the losses of the war now poses the ques-
tion of who it is that will be a match for these events, which people (Volk) it
will be: It is the question: which people will manage to raise the inner might
needed to remain a match for the great test that only now arises from these
events and becomes manifest.It is the question put to the peoples concerning
the originality of their folkish order, concerning the rank and genuineness of
their will for dominance in the state, concerning the exclusivity of their spiri-
tual world, concerning the health of their folkish life urge [der Gesundheit des
vlkischen Lebensdranges], concerning the force of resistance against historical
decay (GA 16: 281, emphasis modified). Health perseveres, health withstands.
For a people, health shows itself in the persistence and steadiness of its
history in the face of overwhelming force. Historical existence, however, as
Heidegger explains in the speech The German Student as Worker (1933),
actualizes itself in the becoming-state of a people [Staatwerdung des Volkes]
(GA 16: 200). The state is the bond that allows the people to be exposed to
all the great powers of human existence [menschlichen Seins] in the hopes
of enduring them. The state allows a people to be hard enough to withstand
them. More, the state is what imposes [durchsetzt] these forces on a peo-
ple in the first place, forces that act on every aspect of existence. For such a
people in such a state, nature itself is transformed. Nature becomes mani-
fest as the space of a people, as landscape and homeland, as ground and soil.
Nature becomes free as power and law of that concealed handing down of the
inheritance of essential tendencies and directions of drive [Triebrichtungen].
Nature becomes the standard-setting rule as health [Gesundheit] (GA 16: 200).
The nature in question is not just any nature, but given Heideggers predilec-
tions of the time, a craggy, mountainous nature, a nature of hardness. A May
1933 commemoration of Albert Leo Schlageter evinces this:

Students of Freiburg! German Students! On your travels and hikes when

you encounter the mountains, forests and valleys of the Black Forest, the
homeland of this hero, experience and know: The mountains are primi-
tive rock, granite, among which this young peasants son grew up. For a
long time they have produced the hardness of the will. (GA 16: 759)

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

76 Mitchell

Health is a determination of the peoples relation to the state. The state deter-
mines the life urge of the people. That life urge thrives in a hard nature. The
health of the state lies in the hardness of its people.

2 Waiting for Healing

If hardness characterized Heideggers conception of health in the early 1930s,

by the end of the war the tenor had changed; the hardness of resistance gives
way to the calm of relation. In 1945, two of Heideggers sons were detained
in prisoner of war camps. A dialogue unpublished at the time, the Evening
Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an
Older Man, gives Heidegger opportunity to reflect on what it means to heal.
Healing does not operate by appeasing the subject of its pains or woes. Healing
is not a reparation or restoration of the self to a prior undamaged state. Instead,
healing discloses the world.
The dialogue opens with discussion of the Heilsame, i.e., the salvific, the
wholesome, that which heals. The younger man describes a peculiar experi-
ence to his older companion:

younger man: As we were marching to our workplace this morning,

out of the rustling of the expansive forest [des weiten Waldes] I was sud-
denly overcome by something healing [etwas Heilsames]. Throughout
the entire day I meditated on wherein this something that heals [dieses
Heilende] could rest.5

From out of an expanse there is a sudden and overwhelming arrival of some-

thing healing. Life within the prison camp is described in the conversation
as narrow and confined, more precisely as an unwholesome [heillosen]
narrowness (GA 77: 206/133). But against this confinement, the breadth of
the expanse brings something healing. The expanse exposed the prisoner to the
possibility of being suddenly overcome by the healing. The older man wonders
what it is about such an expanse that could effect such a sudden change:

5 Martin Heidegger, Feldweg-Gesprche, ed. Ingrid Schler, Gesamtausgabe vol. 77 (Frankfurt

am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 205. English translation: Country Path Conversations,
trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 132 (hereafter cited as
GA 77 with German/English pagination).

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 77

older man: Perhaps it is what is inexhaustible [das Unerschpfliche] of

the self-veiling expanse [Weite] that abides in these forests of Russia. (GA
77: 205/132)

The expanse does not give itself wholly. There is something in reserve about
it, something inexhaustible, unerschpflich, something that cannot be drawn
out of it to be here all at once. The expanse does not give itself completely, it
veils itself, and in this withdrawal and veiling, it is nothing wholly present, in
neither a spatial nor a temporal sense. This non-present character will be cen-
tral to its healing role:

younger man: You probably mean that the capacious [das Gerumige],
which prevails in the expanse, brings to us something freeing. (GA 77:
205/132)

The younger man misunderstands the older mans claim. He interprets the
inexhaustible as spatial extension. The younger man could be said to mistake
the notion of withdrawal for a kind of bad infinity that would just extend ad
nauseam. Or he fails to think this expanse as anything other than a spatial
breadth. He does not acknowledge that we are not dealing with an inert meta-
physically determined space in this. The capacious could still be understood as
the merely spatial. The older man clarifies:

older man: I do not only mean the capacious in the expanse, but also
that this expanse leads us out and forth [uns hinaus und fort-fhrt]. (GA
77: 205/132)

There is an activity to the expanse. We are not simply in the expanse like
marbles in a bag. We are affected by it. We can only be ecstatic because the
expanse bears this character. It conducts us out beyond ourselves, forward
and all around. When something delimited exists, its limit transpires with the
world around it. The touch of the limit to what lies beyond it already tickles
it out past itself. As delimited, as finite, the expanse provides more beyond
our bounds, makes that more essential to us, and thus draws us through it as
now a part of us. We dissolve in that expanse. The hardness of the 1930s dissi-
pates here and with this begins the healing. The assumption that we would be
extractable from the world is what calls for healing. But we could not inextrica-
bly belong to any world (or expanse) were that expanse not to receive us, too.
Where the older man mentions the way we extend through the expanse,
the younger adds to this the way the expanse swings back and forth to us:

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

78 Mitchell

younger man: The capaciousness of the forests swings out into a con-
cealed distance, but at the same time swings back to us again, without
ending with us. (GA 77: 205/132)

We extend through a space that is itself on the move. Its concealment and
withdrawal sets it reverberating (the conversation will come to speak of echoes
on this basis). It swings out, but not without bearing a relation to us, one that
simultaneously pulls it back to us. But we are not the bounds of the expanse,
we are in it. It swings back past us, immersing us, without ending with us.
The older man draws a crucial conclusion from this, one important for our
concern with healing:

older man: It is almost as if, out of the open and yet veiled expanse,
something could never break in that sets itself in the way of our essence
and blocks its course. So nothing is encountered that bends our essence
back on itself and confines it to a narrowness by means of which it is
made rebellious in itself. (GA 77: 205/132)

An effect of mediation is such that nothing can happen to us that we are not
able to bear, that we do not in some sense invite. To be exposed is to invite
the world, in all its complexity and variety. Nothing can ever ultimately cap-
ture us or close us off from the world around us. However trapped we might
be, there is always a beyond. Heideggers readings of Hlderlin emphasize the
role of looking up (Aufschauen) for drawing us out of our confines, just as
the expanse brings something healing to the narrowness of the camp.6 We are
not encapsulated and thus ecstatic, we flow beyond ourselves, not circulat-
ing within ourselves like the reflective, self-present subject depicted herea
self-relation identified as rebellious (aufstndisch). Because we are so outside
ourselves and in this expanse that draws us out while retreating from us, we are
an invitation. We invite what comes, even what seems to break in or intrude
upon us.
This invitation stakes out a rather vulnerable position in the midst of things
and healing is tied to this. The invitation is never closed, the welcome is always
already offered. To be sure, it is not as though there is anything in particular
that is invited by this invitation. It is also not an invitation for anything to
simply come and be here, present-at-hand, and then to subsequently leave,
becoming equally absent. Rather, the invitation or the welcome of exposure

6 On the role of looking up, see my The Exposure of Grace: Dimensionality in Late Heidegger,
Research in Phenomenology 40: 3 (2010): 30930.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 79

is for an arriving, for a comingnothing that could complete its arrival or its
coming in the first place and simply be. For what we are dealing with here
is not something wholly present, neither prior to its departure or after its
presumed arrival. It is already leaving before arriving, we might even say. Our
existence in this regard is a letting come, which Heidegger terms a waiting.
And it is just the younger mans early morning experience of the expanse
that calls this to mind: Since early this morning I am now able to say to you:
Waiting is letting come [das Kommenlassen] (GA 77: 217/141). Only in a com-
portment like waiting, which is neither waiting for something nor for nothing,
are we in a position to let there be a coming. Indeed, if a human were capable
of this, pure waiting would be like the echo of pure coming (GA 77: 227/147),
it would reverberate through us, attuning us, we are like a string instrument
of the most ancient provenance, in whose sound the primordial play of the
world resounds (GA 77: 227/148). The expanse revealed this interconnection
and resonance. It brought the healing in question. Yesterday, the young man
admits, he would not have been able to explain himself. The older man sur-
mises the reason, saying: Because early this morning that which heals [das
Heilende] was first granted to you, that which is beginning to heal you andas
I now experienceme as well, by letting us become those who wait (GA 77:
226/146).
To heal is to become one who waits, to immerse oneself in the expanse, to
be open to the sudden arriving of what comes, to invite this. What comes is
what heals and there would be no coming of this sort without the medium that
supports it, the expanse, nor without those who wait, the ones who are heal-
ing. Waiting is our entry to the expanse and our addressability by what comes:

younger man: What else could that which heals be, other than that
which lets our essence wait [i.e., that which comes]. In waiting, the
human-being becomes gathered in attentiveness to that in which he
belongs [i.e., the expanse], yet without letting himself get carried away
into and absorbed in it. (GA 77: 226/147)

To heal is to wait in the expanse, and to evade the temptation to be absorbed in

it. It is not to be outside the expanse, nor completely taken into it. What heals
heals by soothing, but never removing, the pain (GA 77: 230/150).
Healing is not a restoration to a lost integrity, but an acceptance that healing
never comes, or is only ever coming, is an infinite task at the heart of finitude
(to call it asymptotic is to privilege completion too much). Instead of trying to
restore oneself to go it alone, to heal is to let oneself be borne by the world. To
heal is to open.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

80 Mitchell

3 Breakdown and the Encounter with Gebsattel

It was not long after the composition of this conversation that Heidegger would
have opportunity to put these ideas of healing to the test, some six or seven
months later, on the event of his own mental collapse. In what has become the
official story of Heideggers breakdown, Petzet relates what Heidegger said to
him in a conversation from November, 1947:

When in December 1945 I was brought totally unprepared before the

settlement committee and was confronted with the twenty-three ques-
tions of the inquisitorial hearing, and when I subsequently collapsed
[darauf zusammenbrach], the dean of the medical school, Beringer (who
saw through the whole farce and the intentions of the accusers), came
to me and simply drove me away to Gebsattel in Badenweiler. And what
did he do? He hiked for the first time with me through the snow-covered
winter forest upon the Blauen [one of the highest mountains in the
Schwarzwald]. Other than that, he did nothing [Sonst tat er nicht]. But
as a human being he helped me, so that three weeks later I was again
healthy and returned home.7

Heidegger was taken to the sanatorium of Dr. Viktor Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel
in Badenweiler, tucked in the Black Forest, about 25 miles south of Freiburg
im Breisgau. Gebsattel was no ordinary psychiatrist, but a self-described
medical anthropologist and a devout Catholic with a peculiar conception of
Christianity influenced in part by Kierkegaard (whose The Sickness Unto Death
he frequently cites). As the eldest member of a circle of existential/anthro-
pological psychologists coming to prominence at this time (Erwin Straus,
Eugne Minkowski, and Ludwig Binswanger among them) Gebsattel was
considered by them the most intuitive of the group.8 He had met Rodin and
Matisse while in France, Freud while at the third International Psychoanalytic
Congress, and had befriended the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who contemplated
undergoing analysis with him. During the Nazi years, Gebsattel had also used
his Badenweiler clinic to hide Jews.

7 Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger: 19291976, trans.
Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 46. For the
German, see Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen. Begegnungen mit Martin
Heidegger 1929 bis 1976 (Frankfurt: Societts Verlag, 1983), 52.
8 See the chapter on Gebsattel in Herbert Spiegelbergs Phenomenology in Psychology and
Psychiatry: An Historical Introduction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 249.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 81

Heideggers rancor at the committee is clear, but so too is his reticence to

confess to any psychical debilitation. Heidegger insists that Gebsattel only
walked with him and beyond that did nothing, but the situation is not as
simple as it appears, especially when we consider Gebsattels views of psycho-
therapy. As early as 1925, in his essay On the Personal Factor of the Healing
Process, Gebsattel conceived the doctors effect upon the patient in this way:
This effect is primarily not a deed [primr keine Tat], no action [Tun] of the
doctor, however conceived.9 For Gebsattel, the doctor, on the one hand, holds
himself back, setting aside a direct effect, emphasizing the necessity of a deci-
sion for oneself [Selbstentscheidung], and, on the other hand, is demanding
through his silent waiting, and thus announces through his comportment
what he understands by being a human and being a person.10 The doctor does
nothing in order to empower the patient to come to his or her own decision to
be themselves.11
If these ideas seem reminiscent of Heideggers own views on authentic rela-
tions to others in Being and Time or his later notion of Gelassenheit we must
bear in mind that Gebsattels essay predates Being and Time and that he wrote
his own tract on Gelassenheit entitled Von der christlichen Gelassenheit (On
Christian Releasement) in 1940.12 There is much in Gebsattels work that reso-
nates with Heideggers interests, and Beringer could not have chosen a better
doctor for Heideggers treatment.
Gebsattels treatment provides Heidegger his first serious contact with psy-
chiatry and psycho-analysis; it will not be his last. One of the initial formula-
tions of the fourfold will be delivered at a sanatorium in Bhlerhhe in 1950,
directed by Dr. Gerhard Strooman. Even more significantly, it is only shortly
after this treatment in 1947 that Heideggers lifelong correspondence with the
Swiss psychoanalyst Medard Boss begins, occasioning a decade of collaborative

9 Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Prolegomena einer medizinischen Anthropologie: Ausgewhlte

Aufstze (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1954), 270.
10 Gebsattel, Prolegomena, 271.
11 Something Heidegger himself could have recognized given a comment of his own from
1941 on the way that thinking helps being to its essence: This helping effects no result,
but instead is help as simple being-there [Da-sein]. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung
des Denkens, ed. Hermann Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1983), 33.
12 Christian releasement is a magnanimous openness of mind [gromtige Aufgeschlossen-
heit des Gemtes], a spiritual readiness to accept everything as it comes, even pain, even
disappointment, and above all: death. Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Von der christlichen
Gelassenheit (Wrzburg: Werkbund Verlag, 1940), 5.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

82 Mitchell

seminars with Boss on issues in existential psychiatry.13 Such a turn to psychia-

try, the psychological, and the psychoanalytic (existential or otherwise), would
be unimaginable for the vitriolic Heidegger of the thirties. For any consider-
ation of Heideggers post-war thinking, discussion of Gebsattel, who helped
him through the aftermath of that war, is unavoidable. Gebsattel is the author
of numerous essays on releasement, death, humanism, and other topics of
Heideggerian interest, but for our purposes his most important work lies in
his commitment to medical treatment as a phenomenology of distress (Not).
Gebsattels phenomenology of distress discerns three stages of the doctor-
patient relationship necessary for any true help or cure. The first stage is that
of elementary sympathetic communication, which precedes any explicit
therapeutic treatment by the doctor.14 It is the appeal of one human being to
another from out of distress. Distress is always such an appeal to the otheran
aspect of Gebsattels phenomenology that only emerges in full after his initial
meeting with Heidegger. Distress takes the form of a call: Proper to the dis-
tress of a fellow human is its call character [Rufcharakter].15 The elementary-
sympathetic stage of the relationship, then, is the immediate involvement of
the sympathizer [des Mitfhlenden] through the call of fellow-human distress
[mitmenschlichen Not].16 Here doctor and patient encounter each other prior
to this institutional division. In this primordial situation, Gebsattel notes, they
encounter each other as simply fellow humans [als bloen Mitmenschen].17 It
is an encounter in the primordial situation of being-with [der Ursituation des
Mitseins].18 Such a call precedes all medical action. In fact, the doctor first con-
stitutes him/herself as such only in responding to this call. Medical treatment

13 On the Heidegger/Boss relation, see William J. Richardson, Heidegger Among the

Doctors, in John Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993), 4963, as well as the essays collected in Manfred Riedel, Harald
Seubert, and Hanspeter Padrutt, eds., Zwischen Philosophie, Medizin und Psychologie:
Heidegger im Dialog mit Medard Boss (Kln: Bhlau, 2003).
14 Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Das christliche Berufsethos des Arztes, in Josef Ammer et al.,
Anruf und Zeugnis der Liebe: Beitrge zur Situation der Caritasarbeit (Regensburg: Habbel
Verlag, 1948), 133.
15 Gebsattel, Berfusethos, 123, cf. another essay from 1948, Das Ethos des Arztes: Ein
Gesprch, Wort und Wahrheit 3 no.9 (1948): 659.
16 Ibid.,133. For a later presentation of the three stages of treatment, see also Vom Sinn des
rztliche Handeln (1963), in Imago Hominis: Beitrge zu einer personalen Anthropologie
(Schweinfurt: Verlag Neues Forum, 1964), 5875. English translation: The Meaning of
Medical Practice, trans. Jos V. M. Welie, Theoretical Medicine 16 no.1 (March 1995): 5972.
17 Gebsattel, Ethos des Arztes, 659.
18 Gebsattel, Berufsethos, 123.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 83

is a response: Thus the answer to which the one hearing the distress call sees
himself compelled is called help. By nature, therefore, help is a responsive
treatment [Antworthandlung].19
The second stage of treatment is the actual application of scientific medi-
cal knowledge to the patient, the diagnostic-therapeutic stage.20 Here the
patient is treated as an instance or case of some particular ailment or disease.
This objectification of the patient is necessary for the successful treatment of
the individual, the aim of which is his/her restoration to a thriving position
within a community of fellow humans. But if the sufferer is treated as only a
case, then their alienation from the human community is reinforced. Gebsattel
believes that medical ethics should provide the doctor with an understand-
ing of the humans existence as essentially a being-with. This should prevent
the doctor from viewing the sufferer as only a case, at which point the doctor
assumes a position of utter authority and control. Such self-mastery makes
criminals out of doctors21 and is easily swayed to propagandistic purposes, as
Gebsattel never tires of repeating. His thinking on this point is directed against
the Nazi doctors who made of the doctors scalpel an instrument of death.22
In his 1953 essay On the Significance of Medical Treatment he agrees with
the statement of Viktor von Weizscker that in Nuremberg the spirit of sci-
entific medicine was brought to trial.23 Gebsattel elsewhere views this as the
culmination in nihilism of an increasing process of de-Christianization across
western history.
Considering the dimensions of being-sick that he has delineated, Gebsattel
avers nothing less than that a revision of the image of the human that has
hitherto dominated medical thinking is required.24 This new understanding
of the human no longer thinks the human as a self-contained ego, but sees
the human as a creature of limits. This is nowhere more emphasized than in
Gebsattels foreword to his collection of essays Christianity and Humanism,
written in 1947 and his first publication subsequent to treating Heidegger
at Badenweiler: The human is only to be understood from its limits. Only
from there is he to be determined in his authenticity and his concealment.25

19 Gebsattel, Ethos, 660.

20 Ibid., 661.
21 Ibid., 655.
22 A repeated concern of Gebsattels, see Berufsethos, 126.
23 Cited in Gebsattels Vom Sinn des rztliche Handeln, 60.
24 Gebsattel, Berufsethos, 121.
25 Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Christentum und Humanismus: Wege des menschlichen
Selbstverstndnises (Stuttgart: Klett, 1947), 5.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

84 Mitchell

Gebsattels treatment does not seek the elimination of this concealment, nor
the making available of the entirety of the patient to the medical gaze. To do so
would be to reassert the medical control that Gebsattel constantly challenges
from ethical grounds. Gebsattels ethics is a respect for limits.
Further, human delimitation is understood both from below in
regards to animals and from above in regards to the divine; the human is
exposed to both. The fundamental error of perspective in all biologically ori-
ented anthropologies is that they only understand the human from below, as
distinct from the animal. They do not understand the human as an existence in
exposure to a higher limit as well. Christianity, grounded in such an exposure,
is consequently an attack on a humanity trapped in a forgetfulness of being
[Seinsvergessenheit].26 A proper understanding of this two-fold exposure
would thus view the human as essentially endangered: This life is constantly
exposed to one threat or another, which means: the human ever lives in the
mode of being attacked and of danger. Endangerment and threat is proper to
the way of being of the human.27 This openness is what makes possible rela-
tions with our fellow humans in the first place.
The third stage of Gebsattels treatment is the most important one and the
one that is omitted in the typical therapeutic practice of the day. It is the stage
of being a person, where the sufferer is restored from being a case to being a
fellow human existing with others.28 It is also the stage where, in the words of
one commentator, we run up against considerable unclarity in Von Gebsattels
writings.29 Once the Heideggerian context is properly appreciated, however,
this unclarity begins to fall away. What Gebsattel proposes is that the ultimate
stage of medical practice is the recognition on the part of the sufferer that exis-
tence is a being-with-others, that the sufferer come to understand him/herself
in terms of his/her limits. To do so is to see oneself as co-participant in the
world outside. We meet one another through this world and it is this world that
Gebsattel identifies with Christ. The doctor and the convalescent form a part-
nership of neighbors in a super-ethical change of heart, the existential isola-
tion of the fellow-human Dasein pole, of the sound and the sick, is led over into
a partnership of intimates [von Nchsten] in the Corpus mysticum of a bond
in Christ between the helpers and those in need of help.30 The acceptance of

26 Gebsattel, Christentum und Humanismus, 13.

27 Gebsattel, Berufsethos, 12728.
28 Gebsattel, Ethos, 663.
29 Jos V.M. Welie, Viktor Emil von Gebsattel on the Doctor-Patient Relationship, Theoretical
Medicine 16: 1 (March 1995): 4849.
30 Gebsattel, Berufsethos, 133.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 85

Christ for Gebsattel is the acceptance of ones existence as exposed and vul-
nerable. Christ forms the medium for Gebsattel through which we meet one
another. Exposedness opens onto Christ.
But it also renders the patient susceptible to the imposition of a doctors
will, be that will objectifying or otherwise. Such a situation feeds the egoism
of the doctor who becomes the sole agent before the patient, the miracle
worker beyond the human community. The doctors ethos seeks to prohibit
such egoistic impositions: Not in what he does, but in what he is; not in what
he undertakes, but what he allows and permits, does the Ethos of the human
show itself at its purest.31 Its effect is one of letting be, occasioning an alert-
ness against every type of overstepping of limits. As guardian of the limits
[Hter der Grenzen] the Ethos of the doctor forms his treatment and trans-
forms the half-blind will to help into a clear-sighted virtue.32
Heideggers encounter with a psychoanalyst who could put some of his
insights into practice (the predominance of the call as well as the emphasis
on limits only grow in importance after his treatment with Heidegger), who
suffered the nihilism of the age and could see the prevailing failure to recognize
our own distress, and who understood Christianity ultimately as a matter of
Mitsein, all this could appeal to Heidegger. Heideggers letters of the time show
the effect that Gebsattel had upon him, giving the lie to the standard account
reported by Petzet and confirming Hugo Otts contention that Heideggers
stay with Gebsattel lasted three to six months, not three weeks as Heidegger
reported: Heideggers sojourn in Badenweiler lasted from February to the end
of May 1946. After that time, the psychotherapeutic treatment continued with
Gebsasttel.33 Not only this, Gebsattels treatment also had Heidegger on a glu-
cose (Traubenzucker) cure which extended beyond his time at Badenweiler, as
his letters to Elfride reveal.34 Gebsattel was not doing nothing.

31 Gebsattel, Ethos, 666.

32 Ibid.
33 Hugo Ott, Biographical Bases for Heideggers Mentality of Disunity, in Tom Rockmore
and Joseph Margolis, eds. The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992), 95. The published letters from Heidegger to his wife
Elfride from this time bear this out.
34 The glucose injections that Heidegger received as treatment were relatively
frequent and Heidegger praises their effect: Every second day I receive a glucose
injection [Traubenzuckerspritze], which has a beneficial effect on ones overall state
[Gesamtbefinden] (2/17/46; MLS 240/192, translation modified). Gebsattel does all he can
to keep the treatment goingVon G. has once again tried to obtain glucose especially for
me, so the treatment lasts as long as possible (3/10/46; MLS 243/194)and is reluctant
for Heidegger to break them off, even after nearly two months of injections: G. thinks

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

86 Mitchell

It is at the time of his convalescence that Heidegger is first contacted by

the Swiss psychoanalyst Medard Boss. Boss writes Heidegger in 1947 ask-
ing for help in thinking [denkerische Hilfe].35 In his response (Aug. 3, 1947),
Heidegger seeks Boss help in turn, asking for a small box of chocolates to
help along his work. In this brief exchange, there is an acknowledgment of
mutual need and simple calls for help from the two. Heideggers next letter
to Boss, September 1, 1947, already speaks of Gebsattel. Heidegger has been
engaging with him in questions of philosophical anthropology: Perhaps you
know that von Gebsattel, with whom I recently discussed many questions
concerning the philosophical foundation of psychotherapy and anthropology,
is director of a sanatorium in Badenweiler and at the same time is commis-
sioned with lectures at the Beringer Clinic which have been very well received
(ZS 300/238). Gebsattel is mentioned again around Christmas in their next
exchange. Boss book The Meaning and Content of the Sexual Perversions: A
Dasein-Analytic Contribution to the Psychopathology of the Phenomenon of Love
(1947) is published36 and Heidegger is impressed enough by it to say that I
will give a copy to Professor von Gebsattel. You know how difficult it is to get
books. Therefore, with your permission, I would like to give a second copy as a
gift to this physician acquaintance of mine who is interested in anthropologi-
cal questions (ZS 300/238, translation modified). No quotation marks around
anthropological, no detraction of his part played in their discussions of the
philosophical foundation of psychotherapy and anthropology.
In the letters to his wife at this time, Heideggers enthusiasm for Gebsattel
is stronger yet: It was a good decision to come here, he writes in his first let-
ter from Badenweiler of February 17, 1946, for along with the distance from
everything connected with Freiburg, it is the pleasant humanity and sponta-
neous friendliness of H.v.G. that helps me greatly (MLS 241/192). He describes
Gebsattel as someone who is greatly experienced, comes from philosophy and
remains with it, despite a theological basic orientation that is never narrow.
He knows my concerns [Sachen] very precisely (MLS 241/192, translation

I should on no account break off prematurely... he also wants to prolong the glucose
treatment until then [April 8] as a reserve for the scarce times to come (3/15/46; MLS
246/196).
35 Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare: ProtokolleZwiegesprcheBriefe, ed. Medard
Boss, 3rd edition (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2006), xi. English translation: Zollikon
Seminars: ProtocolsConversationsLetters, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), xvi, translation modified (hereafter cited
as ZS with German/English pagination).
36 Medard Boss, Sinn und Gehalt der sexuellen Perversionen: Ein daseinsanalytischer Beitrag
zur Psychopathologie des Phnomens der Liebe (Bern: Hans Huber, 1947).

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 87

modified). Heideggers description of his manner accords with Gebsattels

views of the doctor-patient relation. Gebsattel sees things, Heidegger says,
in his way immediately and at the same time as an observer; beyond this
he himself takes a properly critical position to psychology and its analyses.
Philosophy itself and what I think and say and search for is far too essential
and central for him to assume the role that here is an interesting case to
tackle. So I think there will be still more very forceful and clarifying days that I
will spend here (MLS 242/193, translation modified). Summing up his feelings
toward Gebsattel, Heidegger writes Elfride, what is proper to my thinking [das
Eigentliche meines Denkens] he sees quite pointedly (MLS 241/192, translation
modified).
Gebsattels assistance is not to be dismissed as merely external support or
as incidental to Heideggers life as a thinker. Quite to the contrary, it is an assis-
tance with his thinking: Since yesterday I again have the distinct feeling that I
am again entering into thinking and will go to work with new power and new
experiences (2/17/46; MLS 240/192, translation modified). Thinking is some-
thing that Heidegger must enter into, nothing simply at his command (it is a
responding and a wanting to hear, he will state in other contexts). Gebsattel
allows Heidegger to enter into the proper medium for thinking: With growing
inner clarity, every day here is more fruitful, even for thinking. Being together
with G. is very beneficial; in a beautiful way, he helps me grow into the atmo-
sphere for thinking that I require (3/15/46, MLS 245/195, translation modified).
Gebsattel accompanies Heidegger, not just on the ski slopes, but in his matters
of thought.
During his treatment by Gebsattel, Heidegger speaks of beyng itself as that
which heals. Health would consist in taking up a dwelling in exposure to
beyng. As he explains to Elfride: For a long time, we no longer exist in order
to make philosophy and culturebut instead to find the location where,
by dwelling, the human will be met again by beyng as what heals [vom Seyn
als dem Heilen] and where the un-hale [Unheil] will not fall away into a mere
meaninglessness that one passes through once the war is over (3/20/46; MLS
247/197, translation modified).37 Healing does not happen simply through
the cessation of the hostilities of war, one does not simply pass through to
a healed condition. Notably, this claim seems to fly in the face of Heideggers
later account of his treatment to Petzet where Gebsattel did nothing and three
weeks later Heidegger returned home (passed through) healed. Quite to the

37 For a fuller elaboration of the role of the Heil and Unheil in Heideggers thinking at this
time, see my The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2015),14b. The Hale.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

88 Mitchell

contrary, healing requires dwelling and dwelling is the taking up of a habitual

residence exposed to beyng. It is the exposure to beyng that heals, for awaiting
or dwelling before beyng allows one to surpass the narrow confines of the ego
(not to mention philosophy and culture).
Gebsattel accompanies Heidegger at the level of thought, even if, as
Heidegger confides to Elfride: Of my authentic things, I speak to no one;
even G. knows nothing thereof (5/8/46; MLS 250/199, translation modified).
Be these authentic things what they may, this bit of non-disclosure does not
compromise the effect of Gebsattel. On the contrary, it serves as further tes-
tament to Gebsattels own releasement or letting be, his renunciation of
medical domination, interruption of the will to know, and respect for human
limitation.

After Heideggers treatment by Gebsattel, we find noteworthy shifts in his

thinking, at least in terms of emphasis. My argument is not that Heideggers
nervous collapse provoked a revolution in his thinking, but that the break-
down gave him a chance to put the theory into practice, so to speak. His earlier
work on healing as well as Gebsattels own phenomenology of distress would
seem to have provided Heidegger with the best possible context for doing so.
To be sure, Heideggers willingness to discuss anthropology and psychotherapy
speaks to a new openness on his part, something we might construe as attest-
ing to a willingness to be healed. And yet, as we have seen, Heideggers own
obstinacy would not allow him to admit all that Gebsattel had done for him.
At least this is how it seemed in 1947, when he recounted his experience with
Gebsattel to H. W. Petzet.

4 Broken-Down Thinking: The Festschrift for Gebsattel

We began with Heideggers striking claim from the Letter on Humanism,

that philosophizing about a breakdown is worlds away from a broken-
down thinking.38 Heideggers Letter was a response to questions posed by

38 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 3rd Edition,

Gesamtausgabe vol. 9 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 343. English translation:
Pathmarks. ed. William McNeill, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, David Farrell Krell, and William
McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 261, translation modified. The
claim may be a jab at Jaspers, who indeed writes about foundering (das Scheitern),
as in his three volume Philosophie (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1932), which culminates
with a discussion of being foundering (Sein im Scheitern). In his popular 1951 radio

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 89

Jean Beaufret in a letter from November 10, 1946, six months after Heideggers
treatment under Gebsattel. Heideggers term here is Scheitern, a word that
names foundering, something going awry and coming to naught, the miscar-
rying of an action, failure in this sense.39 Heidegger would not have us think
about such failure, he would have thinking itself fail and break. But what is such
a failed, foundering, broken-down thinking?
In the decade after the war, Heideggers focus increasingly turned to the
nature and status of thinking. With the restoration of his teaching privileges,
Heidegger lectured again at Freiburg University on three separate occasions
between 1951 and 1957, each time taking thinking as his theme. The 195152
course on What Is Called Thinking? marked his return to teaching after the
lifting of the teaching ban and presented a sense of thinking as response
to a call. The second course from 1956 addressed a cornerstone of logical
thought, The Principle of Reason, contrasting Leibniz and Angelus Silesius on
the matter. The third and final engagement was the 1957 five-lecture cycle Basic
Principles of Thinking, a somewhat broader survey of the terrain staked out
thus far, taking as its departure the most basic axioms of logical thoughtthe
principles of identity, contradiction, and the excluded middleand going on
to show their emergence from a far richer sense of logos as saying.
In 1958 the journal Jahrbuch fr Psychologie und Psychotherapie dedicated a
special issue to the work of Gebsattel. This Festschrift for the doctor featured
articles on his work by leading psychologists and psychoanalystis like Ludwig
Binswanger, Erwin Straus, Eugne Minkowski, and Viktor Frankl, among
others. It also featured a contribution from Heidegger, Basic Principles of
Thinking, a slight reworking of the opening lecture of the eponymous 1957 lec-
ture cycle. Considering this essay from the culmination of Heideggers explo-
rations into thinking as a contribution in honor of Gebsattel, the man who
helped Heidegger back from his own nervous collapse, allows us to read it with
an eye toward what it has to say regarding a thinking that is capable of break-
ing down, indeed, a thinking that requires this.

lectures, Jaspers remarks: Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure [Scheitern]:
whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end
or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether
he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honestly, in silence before
the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he
will become. Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ralph
Manheim, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 23.
39 For a discussion of scheitern in Being and Time, see David Farrell Krell, Shattering: Toward
a Politics of Daimonic Life Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 14:215:1 (1991): 15562.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

90 Mitchell

Heideggers essay is an exploration of the limits of thinking, particularly

what we might call its historical limits. Thinking has its own history and it
is at a particular time that it comes to itself. Beginning from the problem of
how thinking could ever account for its own laws of thought and get behind
itself, as it were, Heidegger focuses on the particular historical moment
when thinking was indeed able to grasp itself in full, in the reflexive and dialec-
tical thinking of German Idealism. Heidegger seeks to tease out this reflective
character of thinking beyond any dialectical constraints.
But if we are to say that thinking is historical, is historically delimited, then
it behooves us to come to a proper understanding of history. For Heidegger, his-
tory is a matter of exposure. The typical understanding of history views every-
thing in terms of the present (Gegenwart), on the basis of this present, the
past is calculated. For it, the future is planned (GA 79: 83/78). Heidegger does
not think history in terms of this fixed present. He objects that such a concep-
tion prevents us from experiencing to what extent authentic history is con-
stantly an impending [Gegen-wart] in an essential sense (GA 79: 83/79). With
the insertion of this hyphen into the term Gegenwart, the stakes all change:
By present [Gegenwart] here we do not mean what is directly present-at-hand
in the momentary now. The impending [Gegen-wart] is what waits toward us
[uns entgegenwartet], waits for whether and how we expose ourselves to it or,
contrarily, close ourselves off from it (GA 79: 83/79). The present is no longer
construed as static, but as inclined towards us, approaching us, as impending,
as awaiting a response; the present comes to us. We are exposed to this coming
present. To be exposed is to be a surface of arrival.
Heideggers conception of history here is not a matter of distinct ecstases
with a privileging of the future (Zukunft). Indeed, if the future is what comes
to us (kunft zu), then all of time is futural because all of time comes to us.
The impending present is in this sense likewise the future: That which waits
toward us also comes to us; it is the future [Zu-kunft], rightly thought. It per-
vades what is impending as an imposition [Zumutung] that approaches the
Da-sein of the human, seeming [anmutet] to him in one way or another, so
that he would surmise [vermute] the future in its claim. Only in the air of such
surmising does questioning thrive (GA 79: 83/79). The arriving character of
history prohibits any complete comprehension of it. Something must be held
back if there is to be the stretch of a sending that comes to us and is arriving.
We cannot get behind what is held back so as to contain what is sent com-
pletely or somehow comprehend it. As such, it is an imposition (Zumutung)
upon us, it claims us without providing us with complete information upon
which to base our decisions in response to it. We do not have a clear vision

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 91

of how things stand, but only a partial conception of how they seem to us
(Anmutung). We are left to surmise and make conjectures (Vermutung) at the
base of our decisions. This highly problematic character of things makes our
existence questionable at root. There would be no questions were everything
given; questioning thrives on withholding and withdrawal.
But it is not only the futural that imposes itself upon us in the impending
present, the past does so as well, or rather, what has-been (das Gewesene):
Authentic history is an impending. What impends is the future as the imposi-
tion of the inceptuali.e., of what is already enduring, essencing [Wesenden]
as well as its concealed gathering. Impending is also the concernfully approach-
ing claim of what has-been [des Gewesenen] (GA 79: 84/79). If all temporal
dimensions come to us, then all temporal dimensions are gathered to us, too.
The impending present is just as much what has-been as futural. The essence
of history, Heidegger says is the arrival [Ankunft] of what has-been. It is this,
what is already-essencing, and only this that comes to us (GA 79: 84/7980).
The present, future, and past are all thought in terms of an inclined, impend-
ing, arrival. The present is not the basis of this historical temporality, but nei-
ther is the future granted a privileged role in this. Rather, all these sheets of
history are equally arriving. We are not eruptions into a neutral and empty
time, rather we are exposed to history.
This idea of exposure and receptivity is important not only because think-
ing itself has a history, but because thinking itself is likewise a matter of expo-
sure. As Heidegger explains in regard to the thinking that gave rise to atomic
energy: Such thoughts are not first fabricated by our mortal thinking; rather
the latter is constantly only claimed by a thought, either to correspond to it or
to renounce it. It is not we, the humans, who come upon these thoughts; the
thoughts come to us mortals whose essence is set upon thinking as its ground
(GA 79: 89/85). The human has been defined and understood in terms of its
ability to think, but this ability is not any internal power endemic to the human
as such, rather it is a matter of exposure. The human does not think if this
means the human would originate the thought and be its sole source. Rather
the human is thought to, if this be allowed in a transitive sense. Thoughts
are thought to the human and the reception of these is thinking. To rethink
thinking in this way, as Heidegger does, entails a rethinking of what it means
to be human. Heidegger is by no means ignorant of this: But who thinks these
thoughts that visit us?we directly ask this question since it immediately
imposes itself upon us. Uswho are we who so immediately propose our-
selves? How will we even enter into such thoughts, without being experienced
in the basic principles of thinking? (GA 79: 8990/85). Who we are must be

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

92 Mitchell

rethought on the basis of this new understanding of thinking. Thoughts come

to us and we must enter into them, only then is there thinking. Thinking is a
mark of human finitude and limitation.
It is here that we come across a thinking that could be said to founder
or be called broken-down. It is a thinking deprived of the assurances that
would stem from the complete presence of itself to itself, a thinking that would
not have itself (that other aspect of the zon logon echon). If thinking is
the reception or entrance into thoughts that come to us and if what comes to
us can only reach us by simultaneously holding itself back, then thinking can
never be assured of anything, not even that it is thinking.40 Otherwise put, there
is a darkness endemic to thinking itself, a prohibitive darkness upon which
thought founders. Darkness is the breakdown of thought.
If thoughts come to us, then where they come from, their Her-kunft or prov-
enance, is withheld from us. Heidegger is clear about this: No science reaches
that point where the place of origin [Herkunft] for the basic principles of think-
ing could perhaps be discussed (GA 79: 9293/88). Science, and metaphysical
thought in general, does not reach this place because to concede its existence
would be to relinquish control. A broken-down thinking does not reach it,
either, but what it does do is acknowledge this darkness against which think-
ing fails:

[T]he provenance [Herkunft] of the basic principles of thinking, the

place of the thinking that posits these propositions, the essence of
the place named here and of its location, all of this remains veiled in the
dark for us. This darkness is perhaps in play for all thinking at all times.
Humans cannot set it aside. Rather they must learn to acknowledge the
dark as something unavoidable and to keep at bay those prejudices that
would destroy the lofty reign of the dark. (GA 79: 93/88)

The darkness of where thinking would come from, its provenance (the Herkunft
that accords with the historical imposition that comes to us, Zukunft, and is

40 Thus Heideggers repeated reservations that function like refrains in both The Thing
(1949)When we say earth then we already think, in case we are thinking, the other
three along with it (GA 79: 17/16, emphasis modified)and in What Is Called Thinking?
(1951)most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking. Martin Heidegger, Was
Heit Denken?, ed. Paola-Ludovika Coriando, Gesamtausgabe vol. 8 (Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann, 2002), 6. English translation by J. Glenn Gray: What is Called Thinking?,
trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 4.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 93

arriving to us, Ankunft), prevents us from even concluding with certainty that
this would be in play at all times (perhaps it is). Thinking must be learned
and what must be learned about it is its impossibility, or rather, the impossi-
bility of thinking with the certainty of comprehension. Otherwise put, think-
ing must battle back those prejudices that would deny thought its darkness,
even when these prejudices present themselves as the greatest bulwark against
prejudice itself, as is the case with the not accidentally named Enlightenment.
But thought would not fail if this darkness were simply an absence of cer-
tainty. One can be just as certain of absence as one can of presence. It is not
the absence of light that subverts thinking, it is the healing of the rift (opposi-
tion) between presence and absence that does so. Heidegger remarks: Thus
the dark remains distinct from the pitch-black as the mere and utter absence
of light. The dark however is the secret of the light. The dark keeps the light
to itself. The latter belongs to the former. Thus the dark has its own limpidity
(GA 79: 9293/88). Opposition and antagonism grant metaphysical thought its
certainty, to abandon these is to founder. But if thoughts extend to us and reach
us only because something is held back, and if that provenance is held back in
darkness, then that darkness is not opposed to what appears from out of it, is
not opposed to the light, but instead is what allows the light to reach us and
be the light we know and welcome. The light is so tied to its provenance as to
belong to it. That dark provenance then cannot be without the light just as
the light requires the dark to reach us. Heidegger puts it so: Mortal thinking
must let itself down into the dark depths of the well if it is to see the stars by
day (GA 79: 93/89). If there is to be thinking, we must enter into thought. To
enter into thought is to meet the thoughts that arrive to us. But thoughts only
arrive if they come from somewhere and they only do this when we do not
eradicate their provenance in the dark. To think is to be met by darkness and
to let there be dark. Otherwise put, thinking is a guarding: It remains more dif-
ficult to guard the limpidity of the dark than to procure a brightness that only
wants to shine as such. What only wants to shine, does not illuminate (GA 79:
93/89). The enlightened thinking that would bring everything into the light
culminates in a brightness brighter than a thousand suns, the brightness of
the atomic bomb (see GA 79: 93/88).
The thinking that gave birth to the atomic bomb, scientific rationalism,
presents itself as the only true thinking and cites on its behalf its amazing suc-
cess. Such a thinking is self-assured and successful and for this reason it comes
to dominate all other forms of thought, in our age everywhere upon the earth
a uniform manner of thinking achieves world dominance (GA 79: 94/89).
Nevertheless, because thought comes to us, there can always be another

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

94 Mitchell

dispensation of thought. This is the hope of darkness. There is no the think-

ing; thinking as such, without further ado, is nowhere to be found (GA 79:
94/89). There is no normalcy for thought; acknowledging this is health.
Heideggers essay for Gebsattel concludes with a concern for other ways of
thinking. To understand the dispensationally dark character of thinking is to
welcome other ways of thought, ways that might appear foreign: Only if we
are sufficiently experienced in our thinking, in the essential expanse of it, are
we capable of recognizing another thinking as foreign and of listening to it in
its productive strangeness as foreign (GA 79: 95/91, translation modified). In
this rejection of a normalcy for thought, and this advocacy of foreign ways of
thought that might harbor productive prospects for thoughtful existence, can
we not perhaps detect a nod toward Gebsattel himself?

5 Conclusion: The Saving Power of Medicine

In 1962, Peter Rees, the son of Heideggers deceased friend Theophil Rees and
godson of Elfride, was married.41 Like his father, Peter Rees was a radiologist
and Heidegger took the occasion of his wedding address to return to the topic
of the medical profession. What motivated Heideggers friend Theophil, also a
radiologist, is still present in his son Peter, namely: the salvation of medicine
[die Rettung des Arzttums] within the technological world of modern industrial
society (GA 16: 585). As great as this task may be, it is part of a broader task
responding to our contemporary world-distress (Weltnot), namely to save the
essence and definition of the human in a world in which all human relations
are threatened from within (GA 16: 585). Heidegger enumerates these threats
to humans with a special poignancy for contemporary medical practitioners:

[T]hat they are stuck in institutions;

that they suffer a loss of all forces of growth through the organization;
that they are blinded by unbridled information;
that the human still obtains everything second or third hand and quickly
uses up what is so attained. (GA 16: 586)

To save medicine is thus to respond from within medicine to these challenges

from technological society.

41 Heidegger spoke at both the fiftieth (1939) and sixtieth (1949) birthday celebrations of
Theophil Rees. See GA 16: 35255, 43537.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 95

But what is the target of such a technological arrangement of society?

Nothing less than what we could call the dark essence of things. Heideggers
wedding wish for the couple is in part that you remain awake for the saving
power [das Rettende], ready and able to savor everywhere the secret sense
of things (GA 16: 587). Salvation and the secret of things go hand in hand.
It is the same secret of things that Heidegger described in the 1955 lecture
Releasement (Gelassenheit), likewise in connection with modern technology:
That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait
of what we call the secret. I call the comportment which enables us to keep
open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the secret.42
Savoring the secret sense of things means letting there be something beyond
the simply given. Or, more precisely, it means understanding the givenness of
things as commensurate with a withholding. This withholding or withdrawal
provides the counterbalance to their reaching us, makes possible the exten-
sion of their reach to us. Because this withholding is essential to givenness,
but nothing that presents itself as such, it is paradigmatic of the inexpressible.
Heideggers wish for the couple is thus that the openness for the inexpressible
stand as a star above your life (GA 16: 587). What cannot be expressed is what
does not show itself apart from traces, i.e. that which withdraws. Just as the
expanse that healed did so by never becoming completely present, so too is
the inexpressible withdrawn from presence. Heidegger wishes the couple this
healing experience.
Lastly, Heideggers wish includes that you be allowed to risk looking toward
[entgegenzublicken] the saving power within the worlds distress (GA 16: 587).
To acknowledge the inexpressible and dark essence of things even in the midst
of industrial society is to see the saving power within the worlds distress. What
saves is nothing supernatural, but the things right here around us. Salvation is
found in a comportment to things that lets them be what they are, i.e. not simply
what they are, i.e. nothing self-present and available. Salvation is the granting
to things their secret. Or rather, it is a glancing toward this (entgegenblicken).
But how does one get to this point? One cannot reach this state of savoring
the essence of things or, in the language of the Basic Principles of Thinking,
this state of guarding the darkness, on ones own. Heidegger asks this directly:

But we will just as soon ask, can the human then save himself [sich selbst
retten]?

42 GA 16: 528. English Translation: Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and
E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 55, translation modified.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

96 Mitchell

This he cannot doand indeed for the simple reason that the human
only is himself, in that he listens to the claim that determines his essence.
Thus the contemporary human needs from somewhere else the help
that will help him to himself. (GA 16: 586)

Heideggers words for the doctor are an acknowledgement of the importance

of help. The human cannot take itself as self-sufficient or self-enclosed if there
is to be salvation. The doctor should work towards providing this help, even a
radiologist in the midst of an institutionally, organizationally, technologically
determined profession. Gebsattel taught Heidegger the necessity of help.

Examining Heideggers breakdown and subsequent rehabilitation under the

care of Gebsattel has allowed us to reflect on the nature of health and healing
from a Heideggerian perspective. Heidegger said that to philosophize about a
breakdown is separated by an abyss from a broken-down thinking. And we can
say the same about healing: To theorize and write about healing is separated by
an abyss from ones own healing (if healing ever is something of ones own).
Heidegger did the former towards the end of the Second World War, but it was
not until after his treatment with Gebsattel that he was prepared for the latter.
When Heidegger tells Petzet that he suffered a breakdown, the German
term is Zusammenbruch, which literally names a breaking together, a mutual
breaking apart. He was altogether broken, we might say. But every reader of
Heidegger knows that only what is separated can be related. Heidegger con-
tributed the first of his lectures on the Basic Principles of Thinking to the
Gebsattel Festschrift. The third of these lectures is The Principle of Identity,
and here Heidegger thematizes identity itself as nothing self-same, but emerg-
ing from relations of difference. Identity is broken apart, it must be for there
to be relation.
Without this breakage, there is only the self-same ego. And for both
Heidegger and Gebsattel this egoism is the only sickness. Even after his treat-
ment with Gebsattel, Heideggers vitriolic response to Petzet shows his own
arrogance and egoism. The lesson had not yet been learned, he was not yet
ready for the admission. But healing does not happen all at once; healing takes
time. And healing of the mind, the healing of a mental breakdown, takes a spe-
cial kind of time, the time of thinking. By the time of the Gebsattel Festschrift
Heidegger had achieved this. Heideggers historical conception of thought in
Basic Principles of Thinking provides us with a model of a thinking that is
not simply over and done with its past, but one that is able to reconcile itself
to what has-been, a thinking no longer in denial of the past or construed as
independent of it. It likewise argues against the idea that there would be only

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097

Heidegger s Breakdown 97

one way of thinking: Thinking as such, without further ado, is nowhere to be

found (GA 79: 94/89). Restrictive ideas of mental normalcy are here set aside.
The answer to what needs healing is not a wounded person or sufferer. A
breakdown can be a gift of thought. What needs healing is metaphysics. But
we cannot do this alone. We cannot heal metaphysics as metaphysical subjects.
The healing of metaphysics requires doing away with both isolated subjects
and encapsulated objects. It requires an openness to help and a keeping of the
secret of things. The two gestures are ultimately the same. To heal our own dis-
tress, to help and be helped by others, is ultimately to heal the worlds distress
as well. The Heidegger-Gebsattel relation is uniquely instructive for this.43

43 I am grateful to Pamela M. Ironside, former director of the Institute for Hermeneutic

Phenomenology, and the always perceptive students of the Institute for the opportunity
to present some of this material in a workshop on Body, Space, and the Sense of Being-
With, in June 2010.

research in phenomenology 46 (2016) 7097