Category: Heidegger

Heidegger links the phy– of physis to the pha– of phainesthai (a coming to light) in order to think the ‘first’ beginning of philosophy, to open up aletheia, the element that allowed the Greeks to think without revealing itself to them as the origin of their thinking. Is this not to yield to the temptation of an etymology, a kind of philology which would somehow supplant the demands of philosophy? A demand which is maintained, in Heidegger, when philosophy itself is supposed to safeguard the null ground, das Nichtige grund?

Authority of etymology: the privilege of words and roots of words, a journey upstream to the secret roots to which words are filiated. A dream of a ‘natural’ element of thinking – a secret law which binds our thinking. The sense that in the ‘root’ of a word would lie its proper meaning, and that language itself is the play of such dried up roots which have forgotten their original enrootedness in a natural language. The sense of an ancient day which would have bequeathed to us everything we can or should think: the ‘first’ beginning in accordance with which we, ‘Europe’, the ‘West’ were destined. Of the day from which was first sent those great words according to whose presence the vitality of language can be measured. Of a becoming of language bound to an origin but also to a certain notion of history, of destiny, and to the inner homogeneity of an eschatology.

Beginning and end are linked. History as a kind of regress. The first beginning – the pre-Socratics is bound to our condition at the end of this history. Language is a straying that strays along one parth. Remember, too, Heidegger dreams also of the ‘other’ beginning – of what he calls the Ereignis.

Objection: how else can one construct a genealogy of those concepts which are closest and most commanding (think of Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the words good and bad)? How else might we understand what we are given to think? Besides, etymology, philology, is only one weapon in the philosopher’s armoury.

Counter-objection: the sanctification of language is a great risk – too great as long as one does not retain a kind of scepticism towards language. Scepticism towards the idea of origin as original presence. Scepticism as it would maintain, instead, the immemorial that is at play within language. What does this mean? Renounce the power of words, of a saying whose trace can only be discovered through etymology. Powerless words: no longer confirming the unity of a synthetic language. Strange diachrony that would allow the word to happen in two times – on the one hand, the word of history, whose origin one might trace, which lends itself to philology, to etymology, and on the other, the word which falls outside history, whose origin cannot be traced to an originary presence (even an originary relation between presence and absence, detectable only after the fact, as in Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks). To what, then, can one trace it? Scepticism: a distrust in the language which one is nevertheless obliged to trust: limitless suspicion of those who would build the house of being on the shifting sands of language.

It is hard to summarise the arguments of the secret writings currently being published in division 3 of Heidegger’s collected works; they demand a transformation of our vocabulary, of the familiar modes of argument and exposition. Fortunately, Daniela Vallega-Neu provides an impressively lucid introduction to the Contributions, in which she foregrounds what she calls its ‘poietic’ character, drawing thereby on the Greek word, poiesis, bringing forth.

‘The language of the Contributions is poietic in a twofold sense: it enables the event of being to appear as it appears in thinking and – in turn – it enables language and thinking to appear as events of be-ing [Seyn]’ (3). This is beautifully put. First of all, this is a text on the way, in passage – thinking is occurring in this text as we read it; the Contributions performs what it would think. Text as enactment, as shelter: the ‘how’ of this text is bound up with the ‘what’ of its topic. The event in question happens as a movement of language and, thereby, indicates the way in which this movement of language and thinking might happen elsewhere, outside of the Contributions.

Vallega-Neu notes, ‘Contributions to Philosophy is more a site of struggle than a systematic book that presents a step-by-step development of thoughts. This does not mean that it is without rigour or shape. But the shape arises in and as a struggle of rigorous thinking in which one can perceive an attempt to give shape to emerging thoughts, thoughts that, at their inceptual stage, echo their ungraspable source’ (4). Yes indeed – and what its author struggles against is our language, the same language the philosophy would attempt to clarify. This means he struggles, too, against the failure [Versagen] of his first magnum opus, Being and Time. But how did it fail, and why would a poietic thinking be necessary?

Perhaps this struggle might be understood in terms of witnessing.

Attestation, witnessing – how does philosophy, as it were, take account of that which is most important? What is it that points the way to philosophical reflection? In Being and Time, it depends upon the existentiell phenomenon of wanting-to-have-a-conscience. To recall, Dasein experiences its wanting-to-have-a-conscience in response to the call of conscience. The one who is called is Dasein is the everyday ‘they-self’ [Man selbst] lost in idle chatter and aimless curiosity. The call erupts silently, which is to say, by cutting through chatter, summoning Dasein back to its own proper self [das eigene Selbst] and to the possibilities (and impossibilities) that belong to it.

Who calls? The call is indefinite – the calling comes from me, in a sense, which is to say, from my finite and unique self. But it manifests as ‘Dasein in its uncanniness, primordially thrown being-in-the-world, as not-at-home, the naked “that” in the nothingness of the world’ (255). Authenticity is a way for Dasein to take over the fact that it is the not-ground, of its nothingness [der nichtige Grund seiner Nichtigkeit].

What does this mean? There are various ways of understanding the significance of nothingness. First of all, the fact that Dasein must assume those possibilities into which it is thrown, taking over this ‘ground’ for itself. Secondly, that Dasein, in choosing to actualise certain possibilities leaves others unactualised. Thirdly, the fact that Dasein will die – that it is always thrown towards death which is the ‘absolute nothingness of Dasein’ (BT 283). However, from an existential perspective, Dasein can take over this fact by establishing the right kind of relationship to being-towards-death.

To grasp what this has to do with the question of the meaning of being, it is necessary to understand the resoluteness through which authentic existence becomes possible in relation to what, for Heidegger, is the temporal meaning [Sinn] of care [Sorge]. Vallega-Neu’s elaboration of this point is superb. First of all, she quotes Heidegger on meaning: it is ‘that in which the intelligibility of something keeps itself, without coming into view explicitly and thematically. Meaning signifies that upon which [woraufhin] the primary project is projected, that in terms of which something can be conceived in its possibility as what it is’ (BT 298). She comments: ‘It follows that, as the meaning of care, temporality is that upon which Dasein is projected. Heidegger again: to expose that upon which a project is projected […] means to disclose what makes what is projected possible (298). Vallega-Neu: ‘In other words, that upon which Dasein is projected (temporality) is the condition of possibility of the being of Dasein. The primary projection of which Heidegger speaks, the projection that first allows something to mean something, is the pre-theoretical understanding of being. In this projection the meaning not only of the being of Dasein but of all being of beings is disclosed’ (19).

What about the Contributions? In what sense does it renew the struggle with language that is already ongoing in Being and Time?

This is, as Vallega-Neu makes clear, a poietic text; it performs what it advocates and thereby, if I can put it this way, provides a shelter for Seyn, being, in its pages. What does this mean? The ‘what’ of the text cannot be separated from the ‘how’ of its textual performance: rather than set out, in a manner which still resembles transcendental philosophy, the way in which being is as it were disclosed and the question of the meaning of being becomes possible, the Contributions would be an event of that disclosure itself. It is what Heidegger might call in the language of Being and Time, the existentiell attestation to the disclosure of being. It calls us because it is able to provide a shelter for what is now called the truth of being.

With the Contributions, the question of being in its truth must be retrieved, must be won anew, insofar as being withdraws when we focus only on beings and do not attend to the way in which they (those beings) belong to the disclosure of being. Once again Da-sein is the locus of this disclosure. But Da-sein is now hyphenated because it is not simply the topic of an existential analytic, but that which we must become (‘human being has become too feeble for Da-sein’ (6)). It names the opening of a site – a place in which sheltering occurs. In one sense, this is what Heidegger was trying to indicate in Being and Time. It is still a question of thinking the disclosure that occurs in this site – of thinking Dasein in its abyssal ground. In another, the Contributions is such a site, answering to the difficulty and the strangeness of this task – of thinking a Selfhood [Selbstheit] that is not the self [Sich], nor in any simple sense, the ‘I’ or the ‘you’. Selfhood, here, is given as the ground of the belongingness to being, once again, der nichtige Grund.

I cannot resist quoting Vallega-Neu again: ‘selfhood names an aspect of be-ing’s occurrence as enowning, namely the “owning-to” through which humans find their “own”, their “self”’. As the trajectory and domain of the “owning-to”, selfhood is also ‘the ground of belongingness to be-ing, which selfhood includes in itself the (inabiding) owning-over-to [Über-eignung]’ (223). This means that selfhood names an aspect of be-ing’s occurrence as Ereignis, namely the “owning-to” through which humans find their “own”, their “self” (85). Selfhood is grounded in ‘ownhood’ [Eigentum] as she puts it – ‘the reigning of the owning [Eignung] in enowning’.

But what is the existentiell attestation to such belongingness? How does it as it were disclose itself? In an experience of reading, of response that would bring us into Da-sein. Through a call, certainly – but one which resonates in the pages of the Contributions itself. In the penultimate section of his book, Heidegger writes of those who are able to open the sites where the sheltering of be-ing might occur, in which Da-sein becomes historical. These are die Untergehenden, those who go under. Then come the ‘allied ones’ who respond to those who go under in their own poetry, thinking, artistic creation and other practices. Finally, Heidegger looks towards the Volk, the people to come who would follow the ‘allied ones’. Doubtless the Contributions would be a work which witnesses the truth of being; it would open a space, a Da-sein that we, its readers, must try and sustain. Heidegger and Hölderlin are the ones who go under. The Contributions, responding to Hölderlin, is as I have said, a poietic text, but whom does it bring forth? The allied ones. But who are they?