Heidegger’s “On the Basic Disposition of Knowledge”: Curiosity, Thaumazein, Terror, and Withdrawal

The focus of this paper is Heidegger’s lecture “On the Basic Disposition of Knowledge” (summer semester 1939), first published in 2020 in GA 80.2 and still largely unexplored in Heidegger scholarship. In this text, Heidegger problematizes the scientific disposition as a lack of mindfulness (Besinnungslosigkeit). This lack of mindfulness is, in turn, characterized as a disturbance and forgetting of the original disposition that, in Plato and Aristotle, is named in Greek thaumazein. In the advanced form of occidental knowledge, shaped by techne, the remembrance of wonder at beings (Erstaunen) is no longer possible. Instead, the abandonment of Being (Seinsverlassenheit) becomes accessible only through another disposition: terror (Entsetzen). The paper argues that these distinctions between basic dispositions (curiositas, thaumazein, and terror) can be understood only by focusing on Heidegger’s concept of withdrawal (Entzug). In Heidegger’s words, one must take it seriously that Being withdraws from beings. On this basis, curiosity blocks the experience of withdrawal, thaumazein names the beginning of philosophy but cannot be repeated today, and it is terror that discloses the abandonment of Being. To place this claim in context, the paper offers a short sketch of Heidegger’s critique of curiositas, based on his Augustinian reception in the Natorp report (“Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”) and in Being and Time (§ 36). It then draws on his account of thaumazein in Basic Questions of Philosophy (GA 45) and finally briefly turns to Contributions to Philosophy, where Heidegger develops the disposition of the other beginning in three stages: shock (Erschrecken), restraint (Verhaltenheit), and diffidence (Scheu).