20 / MARK A. WRATHALL
another history, the carrying out [of the questioning] must be original” (GA65:10; see also the twofold articulation of the task at the end of §52, GA65:112). On the performative side, then, asking the question of being means putting ourselves into question with respect to who we are, thereby provoking a self-transformation.
Heidegger’s decades-long effort to “say ‘adaptation’” (see, e.g., GA65:6 and GA14:30) accordingly plays two distinct roles corresponding to the two different kinds of question Heidegger asks. First, it helps us to understand how it is that, since “the first inception,” there has been a series of epochs of being, of different worlds. Second, by getting “adapted to adaptation” we become capable of inhabiting the world in a new way. On Heidegger’s account, there is a sense in which adaptation has been operative in generating Western thought and history, without anyone knowing it or experiencing it as such. Thus, there is a possibility of our having a new and different history, provided that we can transform ourselves and prepare ourselves for an experience of ontological adaptation. “What we call ‘ad-aptation’ in the most rigorous sense of the word,” Heidegger explains, “allows human beings and being to belong together.” He elaborates: “we will only be allowed to appropriately inquire and conjecture into who we humans genuinely are and what being genuinely is, when thinking has entered into that realm where aptness (Eignung), appropriation (Vereignung), property (Eigentum), and authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) prevail – namely, into ad-aptation” (GA79:126).
Throughout his career, Heidegger was convinced that being could not be accounted for in either causal or logical terms. Instead, he developed a relationalist ontology, according to which what something is, is (at least in large part) a function of the manifold relations it bears to other things. Each particular “CLEARING” gives priority to some types of relationship and allows other kinds of relationship to withdraw into irrelevance or insignificance. What things are in the most basic, ontological sense, then, is a function of the “open space of the clearing” within which they manifest themselves. The law of adaptation (Ereignis) holds that the determinative relations – the relations that define the essence of something – are relationships of mutual adaptation. What an entity is, in other words, is a function of that for which it is apt (eignet) or suitable (geeignet), so that everything becomes what it is through entering into a kind of “dance” (Reigen) in which it gets into sync with others (see GA7:181ff./PLT 178ff. on the “dance of adaptating,” der Reigen des Ereignens). The open space of salient relations “is never the effect of a cause nor the consequence of a reason” (GA12:247/OWL 127). It is, instead, “produced” or “brought forth” by adaptation (see GA12:246–47/OWL 126–27). Thus Heidegger’s thesis also involves the thought that the underlying tendency toward adaptation governs the world: “adaptation” names “the gentleness of the highest rule, which does not require POWER or the ‘struggle,’ but rather requires the most original setting of one thing against another” (GA69:9). It is “the force-less prevailing” (GA69:9).
Adaptation thus can have the sense of both a condition of suitedness or aptness or fittingness, and a process that leads toward that condition of aptness. In the latter sense, Heidegger argues that adaptation is the prevailing tendency that governs the history of being. World-historical epochs change through a process of disrupting, reorienting, and then consolidating the constitutive relational networks that allow entities to be what they are. This process of world disclosure can only succeed if the initial leap into a new sensibility can draw human practices to it in such a way that they can become fitted and suited to the emerging network of constituent relations: “the transformation of entities and therewith the grounding of the truth of adaptation