ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, Heidegger tried to understand the fundamental possibilities of man’s relation to things, and then to rethink what “things” themselves are. Both trains of thought are essential to understanding the broadest question of fetishism as a relation to things. The chapter covers four essential steps in Heidegger on the thing. The first is from Being and Time: Heidegger discusses fetishism as a possible way to understand the question of man’s relation to things in a surprisingly traditional way, repeating the basic assumptions of metaphysical thinking about fetishism. The second is from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. There, Heidegger “deconstructs” The Critique of Pure Reason, using Kant’s transcendental imagination as a lever for thinking about how mind is related to things, and how this relation demands new thinking about intuition and reason, time and space. The title of this book comes in part from Heidegger’s understanding of the “iridescence” of imagination. The third is from What is a Thing? in which Heidegger continues to think about Kant on mind and thing, formulating another new conception of the relation to things. Finally, there is a discussion of Heidegger’s late thinking, centering on his essay “The Thing.” In that essay, Heidegger integrates his non-metaphysical understanding of “the thing” with his new understanding of “the fourfold,” which itself is related to his thinking about time as auto-affective and four-dimensional.
