[T]hrown-open or appropriated ex-sistence, as the clearing, is responsible for all forms of the meaningful presence (the being) of things. Es gibt Sein because Ereignis gibt Sein, that is: The reason why there is “being” (the meaningful presence of something) at all is that the appropriation of ex-sistence to its proprium as the clearing makes that possible.
James Bahoh, Larry Berger, Robert Bernasconi, Peg Birmingham, Scott Campbell, Richard Capobianco, Daniel Dahlstrom, Sean Driscoll, Jessica S. Elkayam, Jesús Adrián Escudero, Gregory Fried, Wayne Froman, Jennifer Gammage, Matthew Girson, Rico Gutschmidt, Peter Hanly, Rebecca Longtin Hansen, Lawrence Hatab, Julia Ireland, Khafiz Kerimov, Theodore Kisiel, Adam Knowles, María del Rosario Acosta López, Brendan Mahoney, Eduardo Mendieta, Andrew J. Mitchell, Ian Moore, David Nowell-Smith, David Pettigrew, Richard Polt, Jeffrey Powell, François Raffoul, Joel Reynolds, Karen Robertson Elizabeth Rottenberg, John Sallis, Thomas Sheehan, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Dennis Skocz, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Kate Withy, David Wood
[W]e can say that Enframing does not primarily concern the content [Gehalt] of phenomena called human-technology relations, but concerns a relation [Bezug] that we already enact [Vollzug] in encountering these phenomena. Understood on this ontological level, Enframing means a reciprocal setting-upon [stellen] of being and thinking with regard to function, which is technical inasmuch as utility marks the main trait of the horizon toward which all experiential correlations are oriented.
In the entire scope of what is classified fundamentally, everything exists without conscious linguistic naming or self-conscious, reflective consideration; instead every thing is known in terms of its use, its purpose, its teleology – everything appears in terms of how it will matter for us.
Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens (Vortrag in der Akademie der Wissenschaften und Künste in Athen 4. April 1967), GA 80
Translated by
[W]hat is the reason for this discussion of cybernetics, futurology and industrial society? Have we not, in so doing, strayed too far away from the question of the provenance of art? Indeed, it would appear so — and is, yet, not the case.
Heidegger's concept of work in Being and Time prevents access to being, while the concept of work in the thirties provides exactly access to being.
Snow White is still struggling with the fallenness of following a role assigned to her by society or the “they-self” and has not reached the point of making an authentic choice of her own future.
Am Ende stiller Hüttentage 12 September 1931, GA 16, translated by Timothy Lavenz.
Of course Faye may be subjectively convinced that the claims he makes are both exact and true. But philosophy demands more than mere assertion of strongly held convictions without evidence to support them. And above all, philosophy demands intellectual honesty in advancing one’s claims—and in retracting them after one has been shown in considerable detail why those claims are unsupported and unsupportable.
[I]t seems that it is being that is “between” man and things. It founds their ontological kinship. Being is not therefore limited only to a man, but being embraces also other beings making them “appropriate for themselves.”
Heidegger and Shiva agree, then, that modern science and technology together constitute a reductive and violent assault that limits knowledge. Where they part ways, further analysis does not uncover disagreement, but shows that each has something to contribute to the thinking of the other.
[Updated]
According to Heidegger's own statements (which of course do not have to be taken as the final source of evidence), from 1937 on, at the time of writing the Contributions to Philosophy - From Enowning , the word 'propriation' or 'enowning' assumes a position as principal word in his thinking. The essence of technology is also thought through in the 1940s under the aura of propriation. In an unusual text from the fifties, Identity and Difference, [...] Heidegger talks of a twisting of the set-up into propriation, of the "sudden flash of propriation" within the set-up. In this text there is a sort of toggle relationship between the most extreme consummation of metaphysics and the twisting of metaphysics into propriation, a 'getting-over-metaphysics', in which humans would "lose" their determination of essence which metaphysics has "lent" them.
The task therefore becomes not one of specifying a primordial level of temporal existential projection, but of developing a reflection that may somehow do justice to the enigmatic giving—the Es gibt—in which both time and being are given to man. This attempt eventually culminates in the account of Ereignis as an event of truth, as αλήθΕΐα. However, it is also an attempt for which a whole range of "historical" concepts are activated: being is here designated as "history," as "sending," and as "happening" (Geschichte, Geschick, Geschehen).
From
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz
Lecture course summer semester 1932 (GA 35).
Heidegger‟s retrospective commentary on his reconceptualization of the work of art underscores clearly the need to understand the setting-into-the-work of truth as Ereignis, specifically because the truth of being transpires solely as event. While the double, true and false, etymology of Ereignis that links it to manifestation and propriation is well known, the publication of the so-called private manuscripts, including the most recent volumes 73 through 76, makes clear the significant degree to which Heidegger inflects the valence of the term Ereignis through the prism of singularity (Einzigkeit).
Shared, meaningful contexts consistently invite the presence of others without demonstrating that this very openness functions by perpetuating an attitude towards others that is characterized by a blindness to particularity and contingency. An appropriate response to others would involve a sensitivity to their implicit participation in our projects by way of our shared contexts.
This is surely one of the vanities of philosophy – that philosophy can guide politics, that it can provide the ground for political decision. If, however, we take the recognition of the failing character of thinking as lying at the heart of philosophy, as perhaps it ought, then perhaps the proper and only role for philosophy in relation to politics can be one, not of decision, but precisely of constant questioning
The oddest part of Heidegger's account of Dasein is the body. He admits its kinship with animals yet denies that it is an animal body. He thinks the meaning of the body comes from openness to being; handicraft, gesturing, dancing, etc. are what they are due to openness to being.
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Heidegger also came to grasp autochthony as the name for an understanding of history as a destiny [Geschichte als ein Geschick] to which we primordially belong and through which we are appropriated by the gift-giving power of being (what he would term Ereignis).
Heidegger proceeds to assign an ontological status to the relation between people and state: that is, what it means for a particular people to be must be established through its state. While he leaves open the question of what a people in general is, he claims that the state is not just ‘grounded in the Being of the people’ but is the Being of the people
From
Translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland
Lecture course winter semester 1934-35 (GA 39).
In improvising from latent possibilities, those that are dormant in Greek mythology may be as relevant for Heidegger's thinking of Ereignis as is the violence he does to Greek etymologies. Heidegger doesn't posit some “golden age” in which aletheia, for example, was actually experienced as unconcealment, but that interpretation can be exchanged for our usual understanding of truth in such a way that adequatio gives way to an improvised having-been where a latent possibility becomes an actualizable potential.
This can be couched in the following terms: philosophy is all right, but in this intellectual marriage demanded by Wheeler, it is science the one with preeminence when it comes to the postulation of existing objects. Escaping the Cartesian mindset does not impose on us an obligation of forsaking the grounds of a scientifically informed philosophy. We are, after all, Muggles, and must abide by nonmagical methods and by the constraints they impose.
Heidegger’s reflection on the essence of technology cannot claim to be already an alternative way of bringing forth, but is primarily concerned about the right way to come into the hermeneutic circle, to move in the circular course of the challenging of man and nature in the technological age and at the same time to hold back in order to experience the essence of technology.
From Yale University Press
A new edition of
Translated by
Heidegger’s account of his fundamental concept, the Ereignis, the opening of the Open (Sheehan, 2001: p. 5; Wheeler, 2011: § 3.1, 3.2.) provides a far better model of Wittgenstein’s point in Z608 [p. 608 of Wittgenstein’s Zettel]. The paper argues, first, that Z608 is not making a sudden inexplicable venture into verboten neural theorizing, but is describing something akin to Heidegger’s Ereignis, and, second, that comparing Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s respective views illuminates them both.
[T]he turn consists in grounding our understanding of Being in a realist manner. For this purpose Heidegger introduces the concept of destiny (Geschick), which simply means that we each find ourselves in what is ultimately a completely groundless and thus arbitrary understanding of Being, which is simply there. The event (Ereignis) has no source, no agent – this is Heidegger’s interpretation of the death of God.
Ereignis is much more than an event: it is a fact, that which is always already done (factum). Appropriation is that which “is already operative in our case, even before we were.” What is more, it is the fact, the “Urfaktum” or “thing itself,” without which there are no other facts, events, or happenings in the human realm.
From Bloomsbury Academic
A new book of essays
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With contributions from François Raffoul, Eric S. Nelson, Ted Kisiel, Dermot Moran, Thomas Sheehan, Richard Polt, Robert Bernasconi, Françoise Dastur, Alfred Denker, Sean Kirkland, Holger Zaborowski, Emilia Angelova, Frank Schalow, Peter Trawny, Ullrich Haase, Leslie MacAvoy, Peter Gordon, Peg Birmingham, Andrew Feenberg, Scott Campbell, P. Christopher Smith, Dennis Schmidt, Gregory Schufreider, Gregory Fried, William McNeill, Andrew Mitchell, Lee Braver, Andrew Bowie, Anne O'Byrne, Kevin Aho, Daniela Vallega-Neu, John McCumber, Gregory Schufreider, Iain Thomson, Ben Vedder, Patricia Glazebrook, John Russon, Kirsten Jacobson, Hans Ruin, Daniel Dahlstrom, Wayne Froman, Iain Macdonald, Jill Stauffer, Leonard Lawlor, Janae Sholtz, Leslie MacAvoy, Tina Chanter, Robert D. Stolorow, Bret Davis, and Alejandro Vallega.
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In general, Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit is interpreted as ‘indifference’ to ethical duties, as a quietism that withdraws from the world. What these authors fail to see, is that Heidegger does not embrace quietism, but puts into question this whole distinction between active and passive.
The Event, in contrast to the Framework, is thus in noway a ‘violent’ mode of revealing, but allows things to come forth in theirdifference and unity, in their distance and their nearness. Unlike the Framework,the Event allows the fourfold to appear in terms of the mirroring interplay, the‘round-dance’, of the elements that are brought to appearance within it.
[P]osthumanist theory is both inspired by Heidegger and pushes off from him. In other words, what links the various posthumanisms is a common, Heideggerian-inspired attempt to overcome the logic of binary oppositions of humanistic anthropocentrism that departs from Heidegger’s insistence that doing so requires and must emanate from a primordial inquiry into the question of the meaning of being.
Ereignis would be Being as the revelation of Being to itself qua the thinking of Being by human beings (i.e. the region of itself which is clear to itself). Heidegger’s rendering of Being as Ereignis is antihumanistic inasmuch as it configures human beings as the place of Being qua event, but not as the conceptual/ethical centre of the universe and/or history. Simply put, Being in itself transcends human beings.
According to Heidegger, memory, in its original sense, is not just a thinking or recalling of past events as we are used to taking it. Moreover, it is a thinking and at the same time a thanking of past, future and now, a meditative state of heeding that which is gathered and compressed in the living present.
For both, philosophical investigation is a way of bringing what we already prereflectively understand into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of our context-embeddedness and of our finitude.
And it’s that strange combination of esoteric, almost mystical texts (like “Die Kehre”) with scathingly direct political texts (like “Das Gestell”) that makes Einblick in das, was ist (along with, say, “Überwindung der Metaphysik” and “Zur Seinsfrage”) among the most important (and most neglected) of Martin Heidegger’s post- Kehre texts. And also among the most difficult to translate.
From Philosophy Today, Fall 2013
The word Ereignis, which becomes the keyword of Heidegger‘s thinking from the mid-1930s on, is here appropriated from Hölderlin‘s hymn "Mnemosyne," which speaks of the sich ereignen, the "coming to pass," of the true
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A new book of essays
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With contributions from Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Walter Brogan, William McNeill, Richard Polt, John Sallis, Krzysztof Ziarek, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Robert Bernasconi, Dennis J. Schmidt, Jeffrey L. Powell, David Farrell Krell, Françoise Dastur, Peter Hanly and Christopher Fynsk.
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But there is a Heideggerian supplement to the abground not found in Bohr: the event of lighting-up or dis-closure, an appearance of the everyday world. Heidegger problematizes “world,” rather than taking it for granted.
What Heidegger seems to want to teach us is not either how to become philosophers or how to be with one another in a concrete manner but, rather, how to remain in dialogue with ourselves while being with others or how to become philosophers in the company of others.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein on metaphysics and ontotheology.
Richard Capobianco on Heidegger on Hölderlin on 'Nature's Gleaming'.
Heidegger and 'The Greek Experience' of Nature-Physis-Being.
From
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz
Das Ereignis, Heidegger's notebook from 1941-2 (GA 71).
In situating where and how works of art, carry, disclose, or open up truth, we come to recognise that the work of art posits the question of man. As Heidegger submits: "Being needs man and is not without man."
Though Heidegger never escapes the Kantian correlation between thought and world, both composing half of any situation we can talk about, he would not treat the orange as simply an enduring core within the visible realm. For Heidegger there is always withdrawal (Entzug) behind all presence, and the name of what withdraws is Being.
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Clarifying phenomenology by looking at the phenomenon of life.
Heidegger derives his main point about the temporality, the “subjectivity” of the pure subject in Kant: it is not some fixed (innate) a priori transcendental unity, contained in a consciousness. Rather, it is the open temporality of relating to being that “affects our concepts and representations”.
Let us also acknowledge that one cannot read Heidegger without a kind of drunkenness, that particular drunkenness which German philosophical wines of the best vintage give.
[B]eing, time and space need human being for their eventuation. Hence, modern science's postulation of and insistence on the 'objective reality' of space and time is an illusion insofar as there is (i.e. It gives) objectivity only for subjectivity, and human being cast as subjectivity is only one particular historical casting of human being that still holds sway in our own epoch.
It is only ‘properly speaking’ (eigentlich) that dao can be said to refer to Weg. This means that only when interpreted in the particular manner, or thought in its proper nature as Heidegger may ascribe to it, can dao come into relation with Weg. Weg is the standard against which dao is measured. The same consideration applies to the relation between Ereignis and dao.
From
New directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for “the life of understanding” and “the understanding of life.”
The Collegium Phaenomenologicum will convene for its thirty-eighth annual session in the Umbrian town of Città di Castello from July 8–26, 2013.
Bret Davis, Dennis Schmidt, Daniela Vallega-Neu
From
Translated by Andrew Mitchell
The transition from B&T and Heidegger's later thinking in plain language.
The Blind Brain Theory actually possesses the resources to reinterpret a number of the early Heidegger’s central insights, thrownness and ecstatic temporality among them. The focus here, however, is the Ontological Difference, and the kind of hermeneutic logic Heidegger developed in an attempt to mind the distinction between being and beings, and so avoid the theoretical sin of reification.
From
The new translation
Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu
The transition from B&T and Heidegger's later thinking in plain language.
Heidegger’s tool‐analysis holds good for even the most stupefied forms of inanimate causation. But this means that the linguistic turn and all other forms of the philosophy of human access are shattered by Heidegger in a single blow. The relation between humans and the world is now merely a subset of the general relations between one withdrawn object and another.
In Heidegger’s view, the danger of technology, including biotechnology, is not that something might go terribly wrong, but, quite the contrary, that everything will actually function smoothly.
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Heidegger suggests that for modern eyes, the “political” is the way in which history is accomplished, and as such is itself unquestioned. The failure to question the “political” belongs with its totality. The totality of the political is not simply based on the arbitrary wilfulness of dictators, but in the metaphysical essence of modern actuality in general.
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The common threads in both thinkers and how to understand them together.
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[T]here is an incipient distinction between ‘place’ and ‘location’ in Heidegger's late work. Heidegger articulates a relationship between the opening that allows an event of appropriation (Ereignis), which defines an epoch in the history of Being, and the dwelling of mortals in place (Ort), or among places, in which language plays a mediating role as the way in which Being speaks mortals.
Huebner’s critique of learning in social efficiency ideology is linked directly to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Cartesian world of objects, for if we are perceiving the classroom in such impoverished terms, focusing only on the objective features of the things we deal with, their present-at-hand attributes, their abiding presence, educators are missing the fact that things and people always reveal themselves in a larger context, within a context of meaningful relations, which cannot be reduced to the knowledge of things available to us by way of thematizing the world.
Heidegger shows that pathos is not an incidental concept or a mere “byproduct” of other concepts, such as substance (οὐσία) or being (to einai). Instead, Heidegger pulls pathos out of the (traditional) shadows and shows its intricate connection with the groundbreaking concepts of being, movement, disposition, embodiment, and logos.
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The place of topology in Heidegger's thinking.
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[A]rt opens and readies Dasein for its authentic communal and historical Being . . . in the “work-being” of the great work of art as the Ereignis, the lighting and clearing event of truth’s happening (aletheia), the temporal event of appropriation of the historical destining of Being, which is facilitated by Dasein’s participation in and preservation of the great work of art.
Droysen defined history as the constant increase of the ethical world, an assumption Heidegger did not share and which, in his view, lacked any proof.
In order to avoid the epistemological preconceptions built into the traditional terminology of thinghood and to overcome the temptation to discuss entities as pieces of inert matter, Heidegger introduces a set of new concepts, the most important of which are the concepts of dealing (Umgang), concern (Besorgen), and equipment (Zeug) .
What Heidegger misses in his description of the Hegelian "experience" as the path of despair (Verzweiflung) is the proper abyss of this process: it is not only the natural consciousness that is shattered, but also the transcendental standard, measure, or framing ground against which natural consciousness experiences its inadequacy and failure - as Hegel put it, if what we thought to be true fails the measure of truth, this measure itself has to be abandoned.
[D]espite Heidegger’s rejection of resistance as an argument for the self-existence of the external world, Dilthey’s notion of resistance is appropriated and transformed in Heidegger’s thinking of life’s phenomenality and facticity.
Returning to the Greek beginnings of philosophy in a manner more radically than Hegel's provides one way out of the encapsulation of the mind within the subject which consequently has to communicate with the world through re-presentations in its consciousness. Heidegger practises precisely such a return to Parmenides in some of his late and latest writings, which will be tapped here to consider whether, in comparison to Kant, Parmenides was in his right mind.
Digital ontology concerns our understanding of Being. We believe that we understand something in its being when we are able to re-make digitally. Within the digital casting of Being we look at humans as they are online instead of embracing the digital within the "life-world" (Husserl).
In the Ister lectures, Heidegger presents poetry as the primary linguistic means for allowing beings to emerge into appearance—not for purposes of usefulness or manipulation, but simply to let beings be. This includes the realization that what it means to be German remains rooted in the ground of what it once meant to be Greek. These issues of autochthony, for the poet and his people, allow Heidegger to revisit related concepts from Sophocles' Antigone.
School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on
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Heidegger’s project is to get back to the original question of Being that was asked by the Greeks and to ask it in a more primordial way, which means that he must begin his investigation of Being in a “pre-theoretical” way. The traditional theoretical approach to the question of Being, according to Heidegger, regards the thinker and the object of its thought as being indifferently detached from one another.
Heidegger writes that any experience, object, emotion or event can be understood within its context. Because There-being has a world and is its world, all innerworldly beings, all that exists for There-being, is in that world - in a particular way. Because There-being has the ability to understand any person or event as a sign, as meaning something, within the context of the referentiality of all persons and some things.
How does the god enter philosophy? he explains, “leads back to the question, What is the origin of the ontotheological essential constitution of metaphysics?” [...] God’s entering—or perhaps we ought to say his being dragged—into the ambit of human thinking is the determining event in the Western metaphysical tradition.
The very supposition that there is (or even could be) a single meaning of being in general is something that the later Heidegger argues we should transcend as part of the ontotheological legacy of Western metaphysics—along with the very idea of a creator God who stands outside the secular world, implicitly unifying the meaning of exis- tence (that is, both the meaning of the universe and of our own lives) from his God’s eye perspective or “view from nowhere”.
From
A new translation
Translated by Phillip Jacques Braunstein
Heidegger's last public university lecture before the end of World War II.
Human beings can only make music through being attuned to and listening to the quivering that grants attunements. That is, it is the originary quivering that enables human beings to be musical, thus being used by propriation (Ereignis) to allow music itself to make way to music.
Making the implicit lead understanding of being for the ancient Greeks as standing presence explicit allows Heidegger to break with the metaphysical casting of human being, in order to recast it as exposed ex-sistence (standing-out) in the temporal clearing of truth, the Da. Truth is now not a property of statements, but the disclosedness of beings to Dasein in the clearing.
[S]ince there can be non-symbolic, non-linguistic worlds, what Heidegger calls 'world' in Being and Time is not identical with any recognizable sense of 'language', including Heidegger's own later use of that term.